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The Legitimation Crisis of the South African State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Kogila Moodley
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Extract

On 21 March 1985, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the infamous Sharpevile incident, South African police, without provocation or warning, killed 20 unarmed black marchers at Langa in the Eastern Cape. Most were shot in the back. The outnumbered contingent of white and black police with two armoured vehicles, felt that the blacks, on their way to a funeral, would threaten the white township.

The repetition of this crudest form of state violence against politicised youngsters and workers, threatened by recession after two-and-a-half decades of anti-apartheid opposition, suggests that little has changed in the repression by a minority ré. The rulers command the guns and the subordinates are left wiht no alternative but to submit or perish.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 1986 , pp. 187 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

Page 189 note 1 In 1985, for the first time since the 1913 Land Act, the Government has acknowledged the right of specific blacks to live in a rural area that is outside both the ‘Homelands’ and designated townships. In the case of the threatened removal of Driefontain and Kwa-Ngema, the blacks were allowed not only to keep the farms they had acquired prior to 1913, but extra state-owned land was transferred to them as compensation for the areas that had been flooded by a new dam. Here fierce resistance, culminating in the killing in 1982 of Saul Mkhize, a community leader, successfully combined with moral pressure, resulting from the written undertaking by three Presidents to Stuurman Ngema to keep the land in perpetuity for his services to the Boer Republic.

Page 189 note 2 According to Gerrit Viljoen, the Minister in charge, those blacks who lost their South African citizenship when their ‘Homelands’ became ‘independent’ will be given the option as to whether or not they want to regain their previous status. The citizens of a ‘Homeland’ that might become independent in the future will be given the opportunity of acquiring double citizenship. Interview, Financial Mail (Johannesburg), 30 08 1985, p. 66.Google ScholarPubMed

Page 191 note 1 Peterson, William et al. , Concepts of Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 25.Google Scholar

Page 191 note 2 South African Broadcasting Corporation, 14 February 1985.Google Scholar

Page 193 note 1 Huntington, Samuel P., ‘Reform and Stability in a Modernizing, Multi-Ethnic Society’, in Politikon (Pretoria), 8, 2, 12 1981, p. 13.Google Scholar

Page 193 note 2 Banton, Michael, Racial and Ethnic Competition (Cambridge, 1983), p. 397.Google Scholar

Page 194 note 1 Terreblanche, Sampie, The Sunday Times (Johannesburg), 13 11 1983.Google Scholar

Page 195 note 1 Jan Lombard, in ibid.

Page 197 note 1 James, Wilmot G., ‘The South African State in Transition’, Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Boston, 6–10 December 1983, p. 15.Google Scholar

Page 198 note 1 See, for example, Gavin Relly, the Chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation, in Leadership SA (Capetown), 4, 3, 1985, p. 18.Google Scholar

Page 199 note 1 Ibid. p. 13.

Page 199 note 2 Yudelman, David, The Emergence of Modern South Africa (Westport, Conn. 1983).Google Scholar

Page 199 note 3 Schlemmer, Lawrence, Black Workers' Attitudes (Durban, 1984), p. 21.Google Scholar

Page 199 note 4 Dlamini, Chris, ‘Human Resources’, in Leadership SA, 1984December1985, p. 10.Google Scholar

Page 200 note 1 SA Foundation News (Johannesburg), 02 1985.Google Scholar

Page 200 note 2 Financial Mail, 18 January 1985.Google Scholar

Page 201 note 1 Lipton, Merle, Capitalism and Apartheid: South Africa, 1910December84 (Aldershot, 1985), p. 374. This important treatise against the neo-Marxist contention of collusion between capitalism and apartheid was unfortunately published too late to be fully included in this analysis.Google Scholar