Transkei

Okay.

You see, when you think about Martin Lagasic and Harold Rolpe and Magu Bani, where they talk about dissolution conservation, the miner who comes from the Transkei, from Alfred Nzo, the mine pays him like a boy.

He's reproduced back in the Transkei.

where the woman by farming and all that has to sustain this man on the mine.

The capitalist on the mine pays him boy's salaries.

Sure.

And that was facilitated by the then leader of Transkei, General Van Tolo Misa, because in the Transkei Defense Force-

Mm

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the Pan-Africanist Student Organisation.

And look, we, we, we were internal fighters, but we had to get military training, and I had happened to be able to leave the country via the Transkei Defense Force with the help of General Holomisa via Eswatini, Mozambique, into Harare.

You know, there was a stage I slept at the benches of the headquarters of the Zimbabwean Defense Force.

You studied at Wits.

You lived and worked in the former Transkei and later in Gauteng.

But these days you're based in the Netherlands where you work as a freelance writer, reviewer and translator.

What took you to the Netherlands? Was it a feeling of needing to get away from South Africa or was it more a case of being drawn towards opportunities there?

[singing]

Transkei, where Mandela was born and raised.

There's no tradition of democracy here, and many people have little idea of what voting actually involves.

[footsteps]

And they were made foreigners in the land of where they were born, in the land of their birth.

Between 1976 and 1981, Transkei, Bomfutswana, Vendasiskei were declared independent.

Now, in general, remember that I made a video where I told you about the Bantustans and how the colored delineation came into being and how people had to go around carrying passes.

This is where it came from.

Africans in the chat, let me know.

I drove down the Transkei once in South Africa.

That was the scariest thing I've ever done.

The mental over there driving.

They block all efforts to get into fossil fuels.

We, for example, wanted to do a seismic study in the Transkei.

And we had done one already.

We were doing a more detailed 3D seismic.

Black communities were equally divided in their encounters with modernity for the same reasons.

Science as a prerequisite for rural development was appreciated as much by the progressives in the Transkei as it was in Cape Town and in Natal too, where mission-educated Africans shared the same progressive ethos about the spread of animal diseases and dipping cattle and sheep was a shared pastime.

The traditionalist majority amongst black chiefs, however, were dead set against these newfangled ideas.

It was a threat to their world order and in some ways it still is with these backward-leaning African traditionalists who rail against any idea that appears progressive, i.e. white or westward-leaning.

This was too liberal for the Afrikaner bond as well as people like Sprigg and Rhodes.

They wanted to exclude more blacks from the vote and to do this, the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London had to be convinced that any changes to the law in South Africa were not politically damaging to British politicians back home.

A reconsideration of the franchise began formally in 1885 after Timbu Land was incorporated into the Transkei, which was part of the Cape.

A year later in 1886, the Afrikaner bond endorsed raising the property qualification as well as introducing a literacy test and disenfranchising anyone who had community of tenure.

Um, they block all efforts to get into fossil fuels.

Um, we, we, for example, wanted to do a seismic, uh, study in the Transkei, and we had done one already.

Uh, we were doing now a more detailed 3D seismic.

And they brought a case to court which said we had not consulted enough with the local population.

But, um, you know, it gets postponed a year, it gets postponed a year, what can you do? Um, you know, you're not so clever as you thought you were, but, uh, it'll come through at some point, you know? And if you're patient enough, uh, I think it will, it will work out in the end.

Likewise, South Africa.

You know, the Transkei as, as an example, we have two blocks that virtually make up the whole basin of the Transkei.

Uh, we've done some studies already.