Forced resettlement and the political economy of South Africa

Open Access

Abstract

Apart perhaps from the direct confrontations that take place between capital and labour, the most significant social process in recent South African history has been the continued and massive population removals. The South African government has at times insisted that such removals were fundamentally voluntary in character. Since the often bitterly resisted removals of the 1950s from both urban and rural areas, however, force has at least potentially been at issue and often directly applied. Consequently it seems appropriate to refer to a policy of forcedresettlement. In their recent important analysis of South African conditions, John Saul and Stephen Gelb described the population removal programme as the ‘ugliest of all aspects of apartheid’. This justifiable assertion follows on sporadic, often journalistic, coverage of removal that goes back to Cosmas Desmond's remarkable book, The Discarded People.Desmond's account was largely narrative and concerned with the unpleasantnesses of removal itself and its immediate consequences. Saul and Gelb, by contrast, only devote a short if valuable amount of space to discussing forced resettlement. Between these two poles there is a need for a generalised and analytical assessment which places the programme in a political and historical context and this is the aim of the following discussion.

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