The foundations of apartheid are not shaken by people sitting together on park benches, or eating together in multiracial restaurants, or playing together in 'international' sports. But they would be shaken by the absence from the 'white areas' of those blacks whose labour is needed there and by the presence in those areas of blacks who are 'superfluous'. The resettlement policy is the cornerstone of the whole edifice of apartheid. The Surplus People Project has amply demonstrated this and it is to be hoped that as a result there will be not only an increased concern for the victims of that policy but also a concerted attack on the cause of the problem.
Between 1913 and 1989 some four million South Africans were forcibly removed from their homes to enforce residential segregation along racial lines. This study records and interprets the memories of some of the Capetonians who were relocated as a result of the infamous Group Areas Act. Former resients of Windermere, Tramway Road in Sea Point, District Six, Lower Claremont, and Simon's Town narrate their experiences.
Overview and regional level reports on the forced resettlement of Black populations in South Africa R - based on questionnaire surveys, describes the effects of Apartheid government policy on ethnic groups in relocation or threatened areas; includes historical, demographic and legal aspects.
Survival in the 'Dumping Grounds' examines a defining aspect of South Africa's recent past: the history of apartheid-era relocation. While scholars and activists have long recognised the suffering caused by apartheid removals to the so-called 'homelands', the experiences of those who lived through this process have been more often obscured. Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research, this book examines the makings and the multiple meanings of relocation into two of the most notorious apartheid 'dumping grounds' established in the Ciskei bantustan during the mid-1960s: Sada and Ilinge. Evans examines the local and global dynamics of the project of bantustan relocation and develops a multi-layered analysis of the complex histories - and ramifications- of displacement and resettlement in the Ciskei.
White South Africa's system of apartheid created and maintained a strategy of forced removals of the majority black population as a means of dividing and controlling the economic and political power of black South Africans. The policy of forced removals was a pillar of the apartheid system, without which apartheid could not have become as fully entrenched as it was in South African society, before the establishment of black majority rule with the first multiracial elections in April 1994. Despite the assertion of the black majority to political power, however, the long standing effects of the white minority's forced removal policy remain and perpetuate the injustice of apartheid, creating an enormous obstacle to the reformation of South Africa and the economic and political empowerment of its black citizens. In this article, I refer to 'forced removals' in terms of the statutory, regulatory and economic means by which the white minority government of South Africa controlled the black majority's right to take up residence and work, and the process by which black were excluded from white controlled areas. I will discuss the problem of the internally displaced in South Africa, the historical origins and the evolution of the pervasive phenomenon of forced removals that lies at its origin. By way of introduction, I will briefly discuss the definition of internally displaced and the specific form it takes in South Africa. In the first chapter, I establish the link of the forced removals with the economic and political aspects of the apartheid policy(2) and I explain some of the methods used by the government to achieve these removals. In the second chapter I discuss the different categories of forced removal and their relation to political and economic developments. In the third chapter I outline the different forms of resistance against forced removal and the psychological and material loss for the relocated people. This constitutes an appropriate link to the last chapter dealing with South Africa in the post-apartheid era, the transitional Constitution, the 1994 Restitution of Land Rights Act and the African National Congress's broader and innovative program of reconstruction and development.
