Capricious Patronage and Captive Land: A Socio-political History of Resettlement and Change in South Africa's Eastern Cape, 1960 to 2005

Probing the apartheid government’s contentious resettlement policy, Capricious Patronage and Captive Land transcends a mere enquiry into the apartheid government’s policy in shaping South Africa’s human settlement – it provides a multifaceted scrutiny of forces that moulded this process. Zoning into the inner precincts of the Eastern Cape, Professor Wotshela demonstrates how its land became captive as apartheid design galvanised a spatial and demographic cataclysm in the traumatic displacement and relocation of African families.

Resettlement was not exclusively swayed by actions of Afrikanerdom’s influential National Party: contrived tribal authorities, serving at the base of the government pyramid, dispensed land and linked basic services to loyalists of homeland political parties. This process of territorial manipulation fostered new social and political patronage networks. But civil movements from marginalised and disgruntled groups ardently contested the homeland policy.

Within a post-apartheid landscape, politics of remobilising communities expanded social boundaries of the Ciskei, the western parts of the Transkei and the adjacent white farming Border district. Capricious Patronage and Captive Land demonstrates in detail how these polygonal demands for land extended newer residential settlements as much as they tested the early forms of land reform in the early phases of South Africa’s democracy.

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Intoduction 1

Introduction 3

Delineating a segregating Ciskei and adjacent Border African  areas in the mid-to-late twentieth century 35

Part 1: ADJUSTING AFRICAN ENCLAVES, RELOCATIONS, TRIBAL POLITICS AND HOMELAND CONSOLIDATION, 1960 TO 1985 66

Landownership, rural planning and segregation in Upper Kubusi/Isidenge and the Stutterheim municipal areas, 1960 to 1980 69

Entitlement to confusion: State policy and local politics’ obliteration of the mission quitrent tenure in Mgwali, 1960 to 1980 92

Apartheid relocation transit camps, ‘Promised Land’ (iZweledinga) and its resettlement scheme in the Ciskei, 1975 to 1985 129

Ntabethemba, Mountain of Hope: Territory and settlement expansion in the northern Ciskei, 1976 to 1985 169

 PART 2: RESISTANCE, REPRESSION, REMOBILISATIONS AND VERNANCE RECONSTRUCTION IN THE BORDER AND

THE CISKEI, 1981 TO 2005 200

Asihambi, ‘We are not moving’: Removals and resistance in the Border area: Mgwali, the Stutterheim municipality and Upper Kubusi/Isidenge settlements, 1981 to 1990 203

Civil mobilisation and the breakdown of the Ciskei tribal and regional authority system, 1985 to 1993 233

Local politics and state land invasion, ‘informal’ settlements and the expansion of Ciskei social boundaries, 1990 to 1994 270

Reintegrating settlements, trials of land redistribution and restitution in Stutterheim and northern Ciskei, 1995 to 2005 305 

EPILOGUE 349

11 Summary and Conclusions 351

Bibliography 363