MODULE 8:
THE REGIONAL QUESTION IN POST-APARTHEID SA
1. Geographically Uneven Development
Economic development is invariably geographically uneven and this unevenness is an important condition for the emergence of social tensions between people both within the same region and between different regions. South Africa is no exception. Across a number of indicators, and as shown in Table 8.1, there is considerable variation of an interregional kind, though note that we are using provinces as our geographical template here and different patterns would emerge at other scales.
Column 3 is an attempt to capture variations in income per capita. It takes a province’s share of the country’s gross national product and divides it by the same province’s share of the total population of South Africa. According to this the most developed province is Gauteng, focused on the major urban centers of Johannesburg and Pretoria – long the economic powerhouse of South Africa, going back to the days when it was known as the PWV (Pretoria / Witwatersrand / Vaal) region. The Western Cape, focused on Cape Town comes in a distant second. The most underdeveloped regions, on the other hand, are the Northern Province and the Eastern Cape. When we look at other indicators of development there are strong similarities in the patterns: with respect to the percent in poverty the Northern Province and Eastern Cape lead the way with Gauteng and the Western Cape recording the lowest levels. The same applies to the unemployment data: unemployment rates are highest in the Eastern Cape and the Northern Province and lowest in Gauteng and the Western Cape. Literacy patterns are similar. This general concordance allows the construction of a general indicator of development and this is shown in the final column of the table[1]. Again, Gauteng and the Western Cape lead the way with the Eastern Cape and the Northern Province bringing up the rear.
Figure 8.1: Uneven Development in South Africa at the Provincial Level
1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7% SA POP / % SA GNP / 2 / 1 / % in Poverty / % Adult Literacy / % Unempl / Develop-ment Score
Eastern Cape / 15.6 / 7.6 / 0.49 / 62 / 61 / 41.4 / -1.008
Free State / 6.6 / 6.2 / 0.93 / 45 / 62 / 26.1 / 0.032
Gauteng / 19.0 / 37.7 / 1.98 / 21 / 83 / 20.9 / 1.734
KwaZulu-Natal / 20.4 / 14.9 / 0.73 / 49 / 60 / 33.1 / -0.423
Mpumalanga / 6.9 / 8.2 / 1.19 / 43 / 57 / 33.4 / -0.170
Northwest / 7.9 / 5.5 / 0.70 / 41 / 57 / 32.8 / -0.380
Northern Cape / 1.9 / 2.1 / 1.11 / 46 / 67 / 27.2 / 0.214
Northern Province / 10.8 / 3.7 / 0.34 / 68 / 55 / 41.0 / -1.338
Western Cape / 10.9 / 14.1 / 1.30 / 18 / 76 / 17.5 / 1.338
So first, of all, what light can we shed on this particular patterning of uneven development? Why are the Eastern Cape and the Northern Province the least developed? And why do KwaZulu-Natal and the Northwest also exhibit rather anaemic levels? A map of the old homelands sheds some light on this (see Module 5, p.4). For these are the four provinces in which the areas occupied by the old homelands loom large: each of them has a relatively high proportion of its land surface taken up by what were at one time the reserves, were later defined as homelands and are now known as ‘the deep rural areas’. KwaZulu-Natal contains what was once the KwaZulu homeland. The Eastern Cape incorporated the old homelands of the Ciskei and the Transkei. The Northwest encompasses most of what was Boputhatswana, while the Northern Province includes a number of the old homelands including those of Venda and KwaNdebele.
That the areas that were once the homelands are a drag on relative development levels should not be surprising, since the homelands themselves were always the most economically backward areas of the country. The reasons for this are complex. The homelands were called upon to house increasing numbers of people engaged largely in subsistence agriculture or depending on wage remittances from migrant workers; high fertility levels contributed to this and very large numbers of people were added as a result of the government’s ‘resettlement’ policies. The pressure on the land became intense with considerable overgrazing and over-cultivation. Tendencies towards soil erosion and further deterioration of the resource base were intensified by deforestation resulting from the reliance on wood as the basic fuel for cooking and for heating.
In this context, however, we need to remember that people’s relation to natural resources is always mediated by, conditioned by, property relations. We should be careful, therefore, not to reduce development problems to pressure on the land and its subsequent deterioration as a productive resource. The tenurial status of land in these areas – whatever their status as reserves, homelands or now, deep rural areas – has always been a contested one. Historically land has been held by the tribe and distributed by tribal chiefs, with pasturage held in common. In short: no private property rights. From early on in South Africa’s history, this has been seen both by the white government, and more progressive elements in the black population, as an obstacle to agricultural revolution in the technical sense. Common pasturage creates the problems of the commons underlined by Garrett Hardin in his article ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. Whatever the criticisms that can be made of his logic as it applies to common resources in general, it does seem to have some applicability to conditions in the old reserves. Common pasturage provided zero incentive to improving the quality of the grass, for instance, or of the livestock for that matter, since any control of interbreeding with the livestock of others would necessarily be limited in its effectiveness. Likewise, without private property rights and the possibility of using land as collateral, any progressive farming elements in the reserves would have found it impossible to obtain credit from banks for the purchase of improved technologies in all their varied forms: fertilizer, new, high yielding seeds, machinery. Not only that, it was hard and remains hard, for individuals to put together land areas big enough to justify such expenditures. You can’t buy the property of your neighbor since it is not theirs to sell, though in qualification it must be added that people do ‘rent’ out the land allocated to them by the tribal chief to others.
The privatization of land in these areas would be an important step forward. It would unleash the energies of capitalist development. Increasing yields would, in theory at least, result in increasing farmer incomes. The development of agro-processing industries would help soak up some of the labor forced off the land by increasing yields. But there are important political obstacles. Not the least is the intense opposition of the tribal chiefs. The right to allocate land is something that they can turn to their own personal advantage and they do, extorting various levies in return, even though in customary law they should not. This is not to say that there is not some popular support for continuing with tribal tenure. In conditions of intense unemployment a scrap of land, rights to pasture animals on the commonage, may be seen as conditions of survival itself. If the South African economy as a whole was expanding in terms of its labor-absorption capacity, then those concerns would obviously be much weaker.
Geographically uneven development in South Africa has generated some tensions as a result of the movements of people that it has stimulated. The clearest case of this are the Coloreds of the Western and to a lesser degree, the Northern Cape. The movement of Africans from elsewhere in South Africa, particularly from the Eastern Cape which has long connections with the Cape Town area going back to colonial days, has historically been a concern for Coloreds on the grounds of labor market competition. This, recall, was the reason for the establishment of the Eiselen line during apartheid days. Under post-apartheid conditions, these concerns have been intensified. This is not just because of the considerable development gradient between the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape which is, indeed stimulating movement into the latter. For now it is not just a matter of jobs, but also of housing. Under apartheid and the Group Areas Act, housing in Colored areas could only be allocated to Coloreds. But with the abolition of the Act, that has changed and Coloreds have to compete increasingly with Africans for the same housing. As a result the abolition of apartheid has been seen in rather ambivalent terms by them and many have not been inclined to support the party supported by most Africans – the African National Congress or ANC – because it is seen as implementing policies which work to Colored disadvantage. Apart from supporting political parties opposed to the ANC, there has also been some inclination to form new political movements of their own; movements catering purely to Coloreds, that is. These include the Colored Resistance Movement which would exclude Africans from whole provinces and the National Liberation Front. The latter claims that if it got into power it would withhold houses and jobs from blacks in order to get them to leave. Both want a Colored homeland in the Cape provinces (Western and Northern), presumably so that they can implement policies of an exclusionary nature.
Not that the emergence of region-specific political movements should be seen exclusively in terms of tensions of a specifically inter-regional nature. The Inkatha Freedom Party or IFP, for example, finds almost all its votes in KwaZulu-Natal. This is due to its association with, first, Zulu nationalism, and second, with the perpetuation of so-called ‘traditional’ institutions. The old Zulu homeland has been the epicenter of resistance to the dissolution of the old tribal authorities and the power of the chiefs to allocate land. The party expresses the desires of the chiefs in this way and relies on the chiefs in turn to deliver the votes that keep it in power: ‘deliver the votes’ not just by keeping the ANC out of the tribal authorities by means of the threat of violence, but also allocating favors – land, licenses to trade, licenses to build houses – in exchange for an understanding to vote for the IFP. As we saw in Module 6, the Inkatha Freedom Party was a major force pushing for a more decentralizing South African constitution; this was because it saw the delegation of powers to the provinces as a means of preserving their power base since it would have a majority of the votes in the new province of KwaZulu-Natal.
The other thing to note in this discussion of the relation between regions and party political preference is to be careful not to reduce the latter to region. The concerns of Coloreds are felt by them wherever they are found in South Africa. The same goes for Indians. Both are affected by the affirmative action policies of universities (e.g. quotas for admission to more lucrative fields like medicine) and by those of, for example, banks, many of which now give preference to speakers of tribal dialects (not spoken by Coloreds or by Indians). Note also that although they are, like the Coloreds, geographically concentrated (in the Durban area and to a lesser extent in KwaZulu-Natal) there is no Indian movement analogous to the Colored Resistance Movement or the National Liberation front. There are specifically Indian movements such as Rajbansi’s Minority Coalition, but they lack the territorializing concerns, the exclusionary goals, of their Colored counterparts.
Figures 8.1 to 8.3 show just what the relations are between support for the different political parties and the different regions of South Africa. As can be seen, there is considerable localization of support bases. The ANC tends to do best in the most African parts of South Africa, as one might expect: i.e. the east and the north-northeast (Figure 8.1). The IFP has its heartland in KwaZulu-Natal (Figure 8.2). The major opposition party to the ANC, to the extent that there is one – the Democratic Alliance – is strongest in the Western and Northern Capes; precisely those areas where the African presence is relatively weakest and the Colored one, and to a lesser degree the white one, most elevated. Some of what explains these maps has to do with conditions in specific regions (e.g. the IFP) and the possibility of using space to achieve political ends by exclusion (e.g. the Coloreds and the Western Cape). But even holding region constant, there would be a considerable relation between the old race groups and party political preference; in other words, Indians everywhere, Coloreds everywhere, would be inclined to vote for the Democratic Alliance; while Africans everywhere would be inclined to vote for the ANC.
Nevertheless, region is a matter of concern to the government, primarily in connection with its economic development policies. Under the various apartheid regimes these had a strong regional component. As we saw in Module 3, industrial decentralization policies were initiated in the ‘60s as a weapon of influx control: move employment out of areas like the PWV and the Cape Town area
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Figure 8.1
Figure 8.2
Figure 8.3
into locations closer, or eventually, in, the homelands. These continued, in fact were funded on an increasingly lavish scale, well into the ‘eighties. Quite how effective they were is debated. Some claim that about 15% of employment was moved out of the major metropolitan areas into places like Newcastle, Ladysmith (KWZN), Brits (NW), or points in the homelands like Dimbaza (EC), Hammarsdale (KWZN), or Botlashebo (FS). Other commentators are more skeptical. The severe withdrawal symptoms in some places subsequent to the abolition of these policies in the early nineties suggests that in some instances they may well have been important. Over the period 1991-93, for example, industrial employment decreased in the former Ciskei and Transkei homelands by a massive 47% (Van Zuydam). There may have been other factors at work, however. Homeland administrations, for example, were typically militantly anti-union and labor law, welfare legislation, was explicitly designed to make them attractive to investors. All that has gone and conditions of labor law have been homogenized throughout South Africa and as I will later suggest, not necessarily with beneficial implications for smaller towns and the more backward regions.