The Beneficiaries of Transkeian ‘Independence’

Abstract

In a recent article, Heribert Adam argued that the ‘prevalent view of South Africa combines conceptual errors with false methodological emphasis and, often, wishful thinking’, and that the ‘popular perspective represents a gross over-simplification of a far more complex situation.’1The analysis to which he was objecting views South Africa as an outdated colonial society, in which white settlers enforce a racially defined domination upon an exploited mass of the black population, which is reduced to serving primarily as a source of cheap labour for white capital by an immense battery of totalitarian controls. Linked to this view - and now fuelled by the widespread riots during mid-1976 throughout African urban areas - is the assumption that substantive political change will necessarily come about by violent revolution, motivated by the growing determination of a burgeoning black population to force a redistribution of power and wealth. However, as Adam further pointed out, analysis of South Africa purely in terms of racial conflict leaves important questions unanswered, for there is need to explore how the differential distribution of wealth and resources - political and economic - originated, and how they are maintained.