First Step in the Transkei

The government of South Africa today is totally committed to the Bantustan policy. It hopes to secure for the Bantus a number of territories where they will eventually exercise self-rule. This is the positive counterpart of apartheid. It is a form of decolonization plus foreign aid to which the majority of the whites and many of the politically conscious Bantus are fully committed. The latter—that is, the politically hep Bantus—do not want a qualified suffrage that will keep them in a permanent minority situation, nor do they want one-man one-vote for the simple reason that they know that would soon lead to a Bantu majority in parliament, and even sooner to general civil war and massacre since the whites and the sizable Indian minority would never accept such a situation.

Instead, they favor the Transkei experiment: the creation of a semi-autonomous state in the traditional homeland of the Xhosas. The Transkei was officially launched last December 11 when the Xhosas (70 per cent of those eligible voted) elected the first all-Bantu parliament in South African history with Chief Kaiser Matanzima as Prime Minister. At the time much of the Western press pictured Matanzima as a black racist and a tool of the government in Pretoria, neither of which he is.

TM

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Thomas Molnar

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The government of South Africa today is totally committed to the Bantustan policy. It hopes to secure for the Bantus a number of territories where they will eventually exercise self-rule. This is the positive counterpart of apartheid. It is a form of decolonization plus foreign aid to which the majority of the whites and many of the politically conscious Bantus are fully committed. The latter—that is, the politically hep Bantus—do not want a qualified suffrage that will keep them in a permanent minority situation, nor do they want one-man one-vote for the simple reason that they know that would soon lead to a Bantu majority in parliament, and even sooner to general civil war and massacre since the whites and the sizable Indian minority would never accept such a situation.

Instead, they favor the Transkei experiment: the creation of a semi-autonomous state in the traditional homeland of the Xhosas. The Transkei was officially launched last December 11 when the Xhosas (70 per cent of those eligible voted) elected the first all-Bantu parliament in South African history with Chief Kaiser Matanzima as Prime Minister. At the time much of the Western press pictured Matanzima as a black racist and a tool of the government in Pretoria, neither of which he is.