This review is concerned with developments during 1983 in the pass laws and housing, two of the most important elements in the system of influx control. Along with industrial decentralisation and the creation of local authorities to administer the African population resident outside the bantustans, they are part of a programme which dates at least from 1979, when the Riekert Report was published. The programme is intended to ensure the maintenance of the apartheid system in the face of pressure from an increasingly militant and increasingly large urban African population.
The year under review saw some of the bases of the programme being laid, and the plans for the future were spelt out on a number of occasions, with particular force and clarity immediately after the referendum.
The programme formulated by the Riekert Commission was based on the proposal that the permanence of a section of African people in urban areas outside the bantustans should be recognised in law and administrative practice. They would have residence rights and preferential access to jobs and housing. Other Africans however would be admitted to those areas only if their labour was required and if there was housing for them.
One of the government's main concerns has been to limit the number of people in the 'permanent' category. The means used include more intense controls, through the pass laws, over the movement of the majority. Housing policy, along with economic decentralisation and relocation of people is being used to distribute the African urban population as far from the main urban concentrations as possible, and where feasible inside the bantustan boundaries.
During 1982 the government attempted unsuccessfully to create a major new law to alter the pass laws on the lines of the Riekert proposals. Its bill, the Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill, was shelved in September 1983 but the policies were pursued through changes in regulations and amendments to existing legislation during 1983. A representative of the Black Sash said that changes made during 1983 'represented an almost total clampdown' on future African urbanisation.
The main developments in the pass law system in late 1982 and in 1983 were these: September 1982 The Department of Co-operation and Development instructed the West Rand Administration Board (WRAB) to refuse contract workers permission to change jobs. January 1983 WRAB introduced regulations stating that contract workers would lose their jobs if joined by members of their families from the bantustans. March 1983 It was reported that the forced return of retrenched contract workers to the bantustans was making influx control an important shop-floor issue amongst trade unions. May 1983 The Supreme Court confirmed a ruling (the Rikhoto ruling) stating that contract workers who had worked continuously for one employer for 10 years acquired the right of permanent residence outside the bantustans. Coupled with the earlier Komani ruling this appeared to open the way for many migrant workers to gain the right to live permanently outside the bantustans and to have their families with them. It was thought that 143,000 out of 800,000 migrant workers would benefit immediately, and about 30,000 a year thereafter. August 1983 Parliament amended the pass laws in a way that effectively neutralised the Rikhoto and Komani judgments. After the amendment, contract workers who had worked 10 years for one employer (or 15 for more than one) could apply to rent or buy a house but had no legal right to demand housing. The family of a contract worker who succeeded in getting approved family housing could live with him, provided they could prove they were already living with him before 26 August 1983, the day the amendment became effective. Commenting on this, a Black Sash representative noted that control of accommodation remained effectively in the hands of the authorities and was 'the most important weapon in the armoury of influx control'.
The importance of housing to the policies of influx control was underlined by several developments during 1983. These included: the announcement of a new policy on the financing of housing for Africans, as part of a large-scale house building programme; the demolition by the authorities of large numbers of houses and shelters erected without official permission; and the establishment of several very large new townships outside, or on the edge of, the main metropolitan areas.
On several occasions during 1983, as in previous years, the authorities demolished dwellings erected without official permission. In February 1983 officials of the Western Cape Administration Board and police repeatedly tried to destroy a squatter settlement in the Cape, at a site known as KTC. Although the shacks were flattened and hundreds of people arrested, other people rebuilt them. Permission was finally granted for the building of 2,500 homes on the site by people with residential rights under the pass laws. Between November 1982 and March 1983 officials of the East Rand Administration Board demolished 1,000 squatters' shacks in the township of Kattlehong. Shacks were also demolished in Soweto by West Rand Administration Board officials. In October 1983 shacks were again demolished in Kattlehong.
Early in 1983 the government announced new housing policies. The building and financing of housing for Africans outside the bantustans, hitherto almost exclusively carried out by the state, would be opened to the private sector, in particular employers, building societies and other private companies. The first step would be the sale of state-owned houses to tenants (under the 99-year leasehold system). About 350,000 houses were to be offered for sale to African tenants: those who did not buy by July 1984 would face big rent increases. The sale of houses began in July 1983. Critics of the policy pointed out that the sale of houses would only widen the circle of homeowners without solving the problem of the homeless, and that the increased cost of housing would drive people out of the main areas to the bantustans or more distant townships. The second part of the policy is a large-scale building programme. According to one report, the Office of the Prime Minister estimates the shortage of housing for Africans to be 800,000 throughout the country.
A major part of the housing programme will be the creation of new townships outside the main urban areas. During 1983 a start was made in establishing a new township (Ekangala) at Bronkhorstpruit to the east of the Witwatersrand, on the edge of the KwaNdebele bantustan. It will house 300,000 people by the year 2000. It is expected that the housing shortage on the East Rand will make people go to the new township. Some will find work in the industrial area being established nearby, while others will commute to the East Rand daily in high speed trains. In May 1983 it was announced that a new township (Khayalitsha) would be established south west of Cape Town. House building in the existing townships of Cape Town and Stellenbosch was to be halted, as was the scheme for the building of 2,500 homes at the KTC site promised only a month previously. In June 1983 it was announced that a major township was to be established at Inanda near Durban. Currently the site of a large squatter township, estimated to hold as many as 300,000 people, Inanda will hold 650,000 people by the year 2000, just inside the KwaZulu bantustan, according to the plans.
The establishment of Ekangala was reported as being of 'immense significance', as 'it signals crucial new patterns in the way the region is to be developed and in the implementation of influx control'. A government publication described it as 'the first and most dramatic manifestation of the government's new policy of decentralisation'. The decentralisation policy is generally presented in terms of a way of achieving more balanced economic activity. However government spokesmen and other analysts have identified the financial aspects as only part of a plan to achieve a distribution of the African urban population which will guarantee the conditions for the maintenance of apartheid. The present Minister for Constitutional Development, C. Heunis, explained in 1981 that 'a more balanced development action in a regional context is necessary in order to carry the policy of separate development to its logical conclusion.' In the words of another government official, 'Unless the government undertakes a major decentralisation plan, the entire tradition of political pluralisation in South Africa [i.e. apartheid] must be mortally endangered.
