British Build Foundations

Strict control over land and labour was originally established by the British. It provided the foundations of economic discrimination upon which Afrikaaners could then build apartheid. After subduing the Africans with superior firepower, the British would have been happy to give them some democratic privileges. But not the Boers. Afrikaaner nationalism has always been unrepentantly racist. 'Political ideas which apply to our white civilisation do not apply to our administration of our native affairs' said General Smuts, South Africa's second Prime Minister, in 1917. Africans were to have no democratic rights and no claim to advancement in white society.

With the discovery of gold and diamonds and the manufacturing boom which followed, there was an ever-increasing demand for black labour. But the white economy wanted only labouring men and women. Spouses and children became unwanted 'appendages' to be left in the homelands.

Life has never been good in the homelands. While men were drawn into the mines by their need for cash, women were left to cultivate the unyielding soils.

With agriculture providing only one-tenth of family income there is often no choice but to leave the homelands in search of work. Many people return to the cities illegally. In October 1979 the Johannesburg Financial Mail calculated that a black person could spend nine months out of every twelve in gaol, but still earn 85 percent more during the remaining three months in the city than he could in a full year in a homeland. And so the cycle of unemployment, prosecution and migration in search of work continues. Last year more than a quarter of a million blacks were arrested for offences against the pass laws alone. In this way, apartheid makes a crime out of job-seeking and punishes the attempts of women to stay with their migrant-worker husbands.

But one in every three black South Africans now lives in an urban area ad the black industrial workforce now totals about three million. Unlike those who stay in the homelands knowing nothing but poverty, urban blacks experience their inequality at firsthand. Their labour creates wealth and provides services for the white society. A black maid has the most intimate knowledge of white domestic life. Every day she sets before the 'madam's' children food that she can never hope to afford for her own.

And so it is with the black miner working alongside his white supervisor whose pay packet is ten times the size of his.

More than half the families in Soweto have incomes below the poverty datum line They know that they are poor. But they also see the white wealth which surrounds them.