A previous issue of FOCUS quoted a report on the conditions of ex-political prisoners restricted after their release to the resettlement area of Dimbaza, in the Eastern Cape Province, and condemned there to a life of abject poverty.
Now the Sunday Post has investigated another resettlement area, Ilinge, which is in the Transkei, now an "independent state". Despite "independence", however, South African ex-political prisoners continue to languish in Ilinge. One of them is Albert Befile of Port Elizabeth, who told the Sunday Post: "I am going to write to the South African Minister of Justice to allow me to go back to Port Elizabeth ... I am not working and have no future. I did not come here of my choice. I was dumped here after my release from the Island where I served 6½ years. People are roaming around here with empty bellies." Another is Henry Magqza, also of Port Elizabeth, a 65-year-old ex-Island prisoner who has not worked since his release in the late 1960s. He is in ill-health and depends on his bi-monthly pension of R30.
Ilinge, as the newpaper explains, "is a settlement of over 3,000 houses and corrugated iron shacks and lies just inside Transkei, about 15 km from Queenstown. Started ... by the South African Government in the mid-60s for ex-political prisoners, people pushed off white farms and "derelicts", it was inherited by the Transkei ... in early 1976. And the Transkei has done little to improve its "inheritance". Like residents of other resettlement camps throughout the country, people are starving and there are no industries. It boasts of one small factory that employs mainly handicapped people and women. Workers claim they are paid a flat "slave wage" of R35 per month"
