Word: voting
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...beads danced and sang the words Enkululele kweni (Go forward to independence). Since many of the voters could neither read nor write, election officials, under the close scrutiny of local police, showed them how to mark their ballots. The outcome was never really in doubt: by a lopsided vote of 295,891 in favor and only 1,642 against, the tribesmen chose to break away from South Africa and establish their own Republic of Ciskei...
Ciskei's vote for freedom is part of South Africa's grand strategy, begun almost 30 years ago, to segregate its 23 million blacks into ten autonomous homelands scattered across the country. Although blacks make up more than 80% of South Africa's population, the territories set aside for them occupy only about 15% of the land. Moreover, the lines have been carefully drawn to leave most of South Africa's industrial areas and its diamond and gold mines in the hands of the 4.5 million whites. The three homelands that have already declared their "independence...
...February a seven-member international commission, including some prominent Afrikaners, recommended against autonomy because Ciskei was too poor to stand on its own. Undeterred, Ciskei Chief Minister Lennox Sebe launched a propaganda campaign urging his people to vote for freedom. Critics charged that Sebe had become a puppet of South Africa interested mainly in enhancing his own power. Responded one of Sebe's ministers: "We are not just a group of blacks in South Africa. We are a nation. As blacks in South Africa, we have no rights. We are just pigs...
...Pretoria, the Ciskei vote was a way of trying to show that the whole homelands strategy was worth salvaging, despite a barrage of doubts about it even by the Afrikaner establishment. For months South African editorials have de cried the lack of progress toward making the black territories self-sufficient. Said the pro-government Johannesburg Citi zen: "It doesn't take a genius to know that homeland development has failed...
...factions were kept apart by the Indonesians, who sat between them at all the meetings. Professor Subroto, the Indonesian Energy Minister, headed off a vote on including Iran's denunciation of Iraq in the official record by telling the legend of the man who must decide whether to eat a fruit, in which case his father will die, or not to eat it, in which case his mother will die. Said Subroto at the end of the meeting: "OPEC demonstrated that even with a war between two of its members, it can continue to function...