Mazibuko Jara, The Con
Another outcome of the 1994 political settlement was the
break-up of South Africa into nine provinces largely coinciding with ethnic and
language boundaries. In my analysis, the creation of these provinces has
diluted the goal of building a united non-racial South Africa. As a result,
tendencies to provincialism, regionalism and ethnicity have been entrenched and
in the future they may become centripetal forces against national unity.
The creation of provinces may have removed bantustans, but
more significantly failed to move away from the social content of these spaces
(Mare 2003). These were spaces of extreme discrimination and inequality. It is
in these spaces that social reproduction is tenuous for the black working
class. It is in these same spaces that there has been extremely limited racial
and social integration because apartheid geographies have been reinforced by
post-apartheid spatial development patterns.
No wonder it then becomes easy for creeping racialisation to
become a national expression of provincialism, regionalism and ethnicity.
The compromises the ANC government made with traditional
leaders are another factor which can potentially reinforce the narrow and
chauvinistic rise of ethnic identities, cultural practices and undemocratic
rule by an unelected and parasitic elite.
This perpetuates the ‘subject’ status of rural people, thus
denying them their ‘citizenship’. How can rural ‘subjects’ be part of a
progressive twenty-first-century African nation? Surely it is only free
‘citizens’ who can be such?
Indeed the Freedom Charter recognised the cultural diversity
of South Africans but this did not imply that cultural identities are eternally
frozen categories and that the expression of different identities must
ultimately serve to foster national unity (Carrim 1996).
The African Renaissance project and the invoking of African
identity has had the effect of freezing these categories as if they were in
some timeless pre-colonial Africa which has not even reached the stage of
evolving into an oppressed black nation.
Even worse is the establishment of forums of traditional
leaders in the cosmopolitan and largely urbanised African constituency of the
Western Cape. This can have the effect of further ethnicisation of communities,
thus threatening broader integration.
When it comes to how rural areas of the former bantustans
are governed in the post-apartheid period, the ideology of segregation
continues. Tradition, custom and welfare are now instruments to govern rural
areas and are used to perpetuate the logic of segregation and second-class
citizenship for the people who live in these rural areas.
They remain citizens of the bantustans and not of a
democratic South Africa. No matter what their personal preferences, they must
still pay their dues and loyalty to unelected and ethnic-based tribal rulers.
Full citizenship, rights, democracy and development are not what drive state
policy in rural areas.
It is useful to remember that the 1996 Constitution
established wall- to-wall elected municipalities across every inch of South
African territory. This new local government mandate was a break with the
colonial and apartheid periods where local government in the former homelands
combined and concentrated administrative, judicial and executive power in a
single state functionary, the tribal authority.
It is completely forgotten today that the overwhelming
majority of traditional leaders were perverted and co-opted as instruments of
colonial and apartheid rule. This was through a process of conferring statutory
powers upon them: traditional leaders were conferred with statutory powers over
Africans in ‘black areas’.
These powers and the statutory structures within which they
were exercised formed the building blocks of the homeland system. The new
constitutional framework dismantled the homeland system and removed
governmental powers given to tribal chiefs. However, what the 1996 Constitution
provided for was reversed in subsequent, post-1996 laws – the Communal Land
Rights Act, Act 11 of 2004 (CLARA) and the Traditional Leadership and
Governance Framework Act, Act 41 of 2003 (Framework Act).
The Framework Act allows all former tribal authorities to
continue in the post-apartheid period under their new identity as traditional
councils. In other words, the Framework Act does not discontinue the previously
hated tribal authorities that were established by the apartheid-era Bantu
Authorities Act, Act 68 of 1951.
This entrenches apartheid-era tribal boundaries and author-
ities in virtually all rural areas in the former apartheid homelands, even in
areas where there were no longer chiefs.
The Framework Act essentially refashions the old tribal
authorities as ‘traditional councils’ without much transforma- tion of their
content, purpose, functions and powers. It gives traditional councils the very
kinds of unaccountable governance powers tribal authorities had under the 1951
Bantu Authorities Act. These powers contributed to various abuses and
ultimately led to the loss of legitimacy of tribal authorities in many areas.
The Framework Act seeks to locate traditional leaders as the
primary institutions of power in rural areas. The Framework Act also enables
government to devolve governance powers and responsibilities to traditional
coun- cils in fourteen areas of responsibility, including land administration;
natural resource management; registration of births, deaths and customary
marriages; justice; safety and security; and economic development. In practice,
the powers are exercised on such a large scale that it renders the traditional
councils an impermissible fourth sphere of government.
The preservation of tribal boundaries and authorities makes
post-apartheid South African citizenship and the depth of rural democracy
dependent on geography. People living in former homelands are made tribal
subjects under a separate legal regime and form of governance from other South
Africans. They become insulated from the reach of the laws applying to other
South Africans and are subject to customary law as defined and interpreted by
tribal chiefs.
The consensual nature of customary law is now also
undermined when it is applied within fixed jurisdictional boundaries derived
from the Bantu Authorities Act, as is done in the Framework Act. With the
Framework Act, traditional leaders have begun to circumscribe the power and
agency of the majority of rural dwellers, features which are an essential part
for the development of consensual customary law. This is inconsistent with
undoing the legacy of apartheid laws.
The anti-bantustan revolts that exploded during the 1980s
were struggles to be part of a united South Africa and a rejection of the
ethnic identities that were perverted, frozen and imposed by apartheid.
The post-apartheid legal framework on traditional leaders
betrays those struggles and attempts to impose a map of neatly delineated
separate ‘tribes’ on the 17 to 22 million South Africans living in former
homeland areas. Current attacks on ‘outsiders’, whether labelled foreigners,
AmaMfengu, ‘Pedis’ or ‘Shangaans’, illustrate the direction things could take.
To justify this slide, the state has used a discourse laden
with phrases such as the ‘recognition and promotion of the institution of
traditional leadership’, ‘status, role and place’ and ‘institutionalising
traditional leadership’.
Absent from state discourse are ‘rural democratisation’,
‘democratic transformation of rural social relations’, ‘empowering
communities’, ‘self- agency and self-empowerment of rural communities’,
‘sustained social mobilisation of rural communities’, ‘people-driven rural
development’, ‘detribalising the former bantustan countryside’ and so on.
To conclude this section, it is useful to refer to ANC
president Jacob Zuma’s role in emboldening tribalised identities. In his
political fight to become ANC president, Zuma combined the use of victimhood
with the strategic deployment of ethnic appeals. In KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma was
central in rolling back the Inkatha Freedom Party (a Zulu nationalist movement
implicated in apartheid rule and violence).
He did not do this on the basis of organising a working
class movement into a solid democratic popular support base, using the slow and
painstaking methods of persuasion (Horn 2008). He led a group in the ANC that
courted the Zulu king (King Zwelithini) and other important cultural symbols
(such as the popular Shembe church) as quick-fix personalities to bring with
them all their subjects/believers as voters (Horn 2008).
Such an appearance has a powerful effect on locals who are
searching for identity and popular welfare in light of growing immiseration.
After his June 2005 dismissal as the deputy president of
South Africa, Zuma continued to publicly court the Zulu king and other Zulu
cultural symbols. He went beyond Zulu ethnicity to actually cultivate and
entrench ethnic identity and symbols of other cultural groups.
