On 26 October some 20 per cent of registered voters went to the polls in elections for local councils in African areas. The township polling was part of municipal elections for all groups. Coloured and Indian areas also returned low polls. The boycott was the culmination of several months of campaigning by anti-apartheid organisations in defiance of government repression of opposition to the elections over the previous eight months and an intensive propaganda campaign urging people to vote.
A high turn-out in African areas would have assisted the government in the implementation of its constitutional scheme. Not only are the councils intended to play a key role in the restructuring of local government, but the newly elected councillors are to act as an electoral college for members of the proposed National Statutory Council - a body with limited advisory powers intended to represent Africans as an alternative to meeting demands for full democratic rights. The extent of the boycott demonstrated the continued rejection by the black majority of any dispensation which denies these rights.
In February the government banned organisations which it expected would oppose the elections and explicitly prohibited the Congress of South African Trade Unions from calling for an election boycott. In the month before the election pressure intensified, with scores of activists detained, meetings banned and organisations and individuals subjected to attacks and harassment by the authorities. All police leave was cancelled in the run-up to polling day as actions by the armed wing of the ANC increased.
People were also subjected to intense pressure to register as voters and to go to the polls. In late September, independent MP Jan Van Eck said in parliament that residents of rural towns were being 'subjected to a shocking system of intimidation' including threats that they would be denied services unless they registered to vote.
In October a resident of Khayelitsha, in the Western Cape, applied to the Supreme Court for an interdict restraining vigilantes from assaulting people in an attempt to force them to vote. In Kayamnandi, also in the Western Cape, hostel dwellers were threatened with expulsion from their accommodation by municipal police unless they turned out to vote for the township's mayor. In De Aar, in the Karoo, members of a local youth organisation stated in affidavits that they had been flogged by police who accused them of meeting to discuss the elections.
In Mamelodi, near Pretoria, there were reports of municipal police raiding homes and coercing people to vote. There were also widespread reports that candidates were offering bribes to township residents to persuade them to vote. In an attempt to boost the turn-out by voters the government also instituted a two-week period of prior voting.
Despite the restrictions and the climate of intimidation, many defied the law by calling for a boycott; others took a stance critical of the elections, without making explicit boycott calls. Opposition came from a wide spectrum of organisations, many previously not involved in opposition to the councils. In the second week of October four Anglican bishops in Cape Town issued a pastoral letter to congregations throughout the country calling on worshippers to 'make a prayerful and thoughtful consideration' of their response to the elections, one of many statements by religious organisations over the previous eight months. A few days later 85 religious leaders from the Christian and Muslim faiths, and several academics issued a statement calling for a boycott. In the same week meetings were held on three university campuses to endorse the boycott call.
Six teachers' organisations meeting at Hanover Park, Cape Town, resolved not to participate in elections and to oppose the use of schools as polling stations. Emergency detainees at two Western Cape prisons went on hunger strike to protest at the elections.
In the week prior to the elections representatives of ten organisations, most of them affiliates of the restricted UDF, called for 'a national day of peaceful protest' on polling day and urged people to support the call by religious leaders for a boycott.
Opposition to the elections in the black community was widespread. In African areas, of the 1,851 wards in which elections were due to take place, no candidates came forward in 126, while 808 had only one candidate. Voting therefore took place in only 49 per cent of wards.
The uncontested wards, and those where no candidates came forward, were concentrated in areas where resistance to the town councils had been most intense in the period 1984-6: the Eastern Cape; the major African townships of Cape Town; those around Pietermaritzburg in Natal; some in Durban and in parts of the Eastern Transvaal.
The government claimed that the 20 per cent turn-out was an endorsement of its constitutional schemes. However, closer analysis of the figures by independent observers clearly demonstrated that only a small fraction of the black community had voted. The majority of the black population deemed to be citizens of 'independent' bantustans and those living on farms were not eligible to vote. Squatters and residents of 'illegal' forms of housing were also not eligible to vote. In the ten townships where elections took place in Natal, for example, there were 25,428 registered voters, based on township managers' housing lists. Independent researchers placed the number of potential voters (those over the age of 18) at between 80,000 and 100,000.
Registered voters in contested wards numbered only 1,464,198 (18 per cent of the black population of voting age outside the 'independent' bantustans) and of these 80 per cent did not vote. Official government figures for percentage polls therefore gave little indication of the real extent of participation, based as they were on registered voters. When looked at regionally there were wide variations in levels of participation.
In most townships in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal region polling was less than 20 per cent. In Tembisa it was only 3.52 per cent and in Soweto 11 per cent. The highest poll in the region was in Mamelodi, with a turn-out of 27.53 per cent of registered voters.
In Natal the official percentage poll in the ten townships where voting took place was 29.9 per cent. In the Western Cape there was an election in only one township, Khayelitsha, where there was a relatively high turn-out of 43.4 per cent of registered voters. However, as described above, voting in Khayelitsha took place against a background of intimidation.
Although polls in Indian and Coloured areas were higher than those in the African townships, they were still lower than 50 per cent of registered voters in most areas. The figure was much lower in large urban areas than in rural areas and small towns. In the Transvaal, the Transvaal Indian Congress estimated that only 17,000 of 90,000 adult Indians eligible to vote had done so.
