Word: transkei
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WHEN A MEMBER of the First Transkei Battalion steps forward today to replace the South African flag with the newly independent nation's ochre, green and white one, the ceremony will differ markedly from Mozambique's independence celebration almost exactly two years ago. In Mozambique, a cheering crowd heard President Samora Machel describe his people's lengthy struggle for liberation from the Portuguese colonists and his party's program for development and participatory democracy. Today in the Transkei, buried in the heart of apartheid South Africa, no one will cheer the new prime minister as he shakes hands with South...
...fact, Vorster and his fellow South African diplomats are likely to be the only envoys from foreign countries who attend the Transkei independence ceremony. The Organization of African Unity--a body that includes almost all the black nations of Africa--ruled over a year ago that no one would legitimize the Transkei nation by recognizing the new government, and most non-African states have announced they will follow the OAU's lead. Even the United States, which kept the world guessing about its intentions until three days ago, said last week it will not send representatives to Umtata, the Transkei...
...ceremony will not go unnoticed--far from it. The Transkei is the first homeland, or bantustan, to receive independence from South Africa's white-dominated government and can be viewed as an example of the best apartheid has to offer South African blacks. The only one of nine homelands to request or receive self-rule, the Transkei is South Africa's response to international pressure to change a political system that allows some four million whites to have near-total control over a nation of nearly 25 million...
...Transkei, an area of just over 16,550 miles, is no great gift to the people who will live in it. Like all the homelands to which black South Africans are assigned, it contains no industry, no mineral deposits and little fertile land. Unlike the other bantustans, the Transkei does have a coastline, but it has no port through which to import or export goods...
...Although Transkei's population is presently just over 1.7 million, the South African government has assigned over three million to the homeland. If the rest of the population should ever claim a right to Transkei residence, the result would be disastrous: in 1972, the Transkei was already so overcrowded that the then minister of roads and works for the area warned that his ministry might works for the area warned that his ministry might refuse to allow any more immigrants into the homeland, because the land could not support those who already lived there. Half the Transkei citizens, then, will...