Black fascism

Cape Town

Anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of South Africa should pay careful attention to a speech made by President Mbeki at an official funeral in the Eastern Cape on 22 June. Surrounded by powerful black leaders of the new, liberated South Africa, Mbeki gave a eulogy for the departed man and urged the nation to rally behind his dream and to carry on his work. The deceased was the leading black supporter of apartheid, Kaiser Matanzima, the former president of the Transkei ‘homeland’, Pretoria’s ultimate stooge in the days of white minority rule.

The two key figures in the formation of ‘Grand Apartheid’ were Hendrik Verwoerd and Kaiser Matanzima. Grand Apartheid was a piece of socialist engineering which shoved people around like earth in front of a bulldozer, much in the same way as the schemes of Stalin in the USSR, Pol Pot in Cambodia and Nyerere in Tanzania. The main idea was to push the blacks, who accounted for more than 70 per cent of the South African population, into ‘homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’, which made up 13 per cent of the land area. It depended on having compliant black leaders. Chief Buthelezi was not such a man: he bravely and unwaveringly refused ‘independence’ for the KwaZulu homeland. But Kaiser Matanzima in the Transkei was just such a man, and became a founding father of Grand Apartheid.

Matanzima was not a bloody tyrant on the scale of Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe, but he was a cruel and corrupt despot. Under him, the Transkei gained ‘self-government’ in 1963, whereupon he gave himself emergency powers of detention without trial and control of public meetings. In 1976 he accepted ‘independence’ for the Transkei. He oppressed and impoverished his black population while living in luxury himself.