SOUTH AFRICA: The Birth of a New Non-State

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Pretoria carries on its grand plan for apartheid

A squadron of South African Impala jets thundered through the skies over the new Independence Stadium in Thohoyandou, as tribal dancers raised clouds of red dust with their rhythmic exhortations to ancestral spirits. At the stroke of midnight, South Africa's top-hatted President Marais Viljoen strode down a red carpet to announce a "great historic event, the birth of a new state." At his side stood Chief Patrick Mphephu, 54, a small, diffident man with a fifth-grade education, who was soon to become the Executive President of the Republic of Venda, a Delaware-sized region tucked in the northeast corner of South Africa. As Venda's new four-color flag fluttered in the breeze overhead, Mphephu told his fellow citizens, "We must be prepared to preserve and defend this newly won dream."

To most outside observers, that dream seemed more like a mirage. The mango-patch "republic" (pop. 480,000) is unlikely to win recognition from any nation apart from South Africa, Zimbabwe Rhodesia, and its fellow black homeland states of Transkei and BophuthaTswana, which obtained "independence" from Pretoria in 1976 and 1977. The fragility of Venda's new status was even reflected in its stage-prop capital, Thohoyandou ("head of the elephant"). Pretoria had hastily fitted out the town for the occasion with a cluster of government buildings, a hotel, a supermarket and the stadium.

Venda is the third member of that "constellation" of black states envisioned by the late Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd as the keystone to the edifice of apartheid. Enacted into law in 1959, the homelands plan calls for the establishment of ten purportedly independent black states divided along tribal lines and scattered across South Africa. When complete, the scheme would crowd all of the blacks, who make up more than 80% of the South African population, onto a mere 15% of the land. The rest of the country, including most of its mineral wealth and all of its industrial regions, would remain in the hands of 4.5 million whites.

Although the rest of the world has denounced the scheme and refused to recognize these "children of apartheid," Pretoria continues to push its homelands policy as the ultimate "solution to the racial problem in South Africa." Besides the three homelands that are now nominally independent, seven are in transitional stages on the road to autonomy. But that road is fraught with difficulties. Only three of the homelands, Ciskei, Qwaqwa and KaNgwane, are unitary territories; the rest are fragmented enclaves, surrounded by land reserved for whites. Only Transkei possesses a deep-water seaport. Apart from BophuthaTswana and Lebowa, which have rich mineral deposits, the rural homelands lack exploitable resources. Their inhabitants are engaged mainly in subsistence-level farming, while about half of the men are forced to migrate to South Africa in search of employment.