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Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa
Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa
Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa
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Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.
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Release dateApr 28, 2023
ISBN9780520326651
Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa
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Stanley B. Greenberg

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    Legitimating the Illegitimate - Stanley B. Greenberg

    PERSPECTIVES ON SOUTHERN AFRICA

    1. The Autobiography of an Unknown South African, by Naboth Mok- gatle(i97i)

    2. Modernizing Racial Domination: South Africa*s Political Dynamics, by Heribert Adam (1971)

    3. The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912-195 2, by Peter Walshe (1971)

    4. Tales from Southern Africa, by A. C. Jordan (1973)

    5. Lesotho 1970: An African Coup Under the Microscope, by B. M. Kha- ketla (1972)

    6. Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa, by A. C. Jordan (1972)

    7. Law, Order, and Liberty in South Africa, by A. S. Mathews (1972)

    8. Swaziland: The Dynamics of Political Modernization, by Christian P. Potholm (1972)

    9. The South West Africa/Namibia Dispute: Documents and Scholarly Writings on the Controversy Between South Africa and the United Nations, by John Dugard (1973)

    10. Confrontation and Accommodation in Southern Africa: The Limits of Independence, by Kenneth W. Grundy (1973)

    u. The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion, by T. Dunbar Moodie (1975)

    12. Justice in South Africa, by Albie Sachs (1973)

    13. Afrikaner Politics in South Africa, 1934-1948, by Newell M. Stultz (1974)

    14. Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company, by John S. Galbraith (1975)

    15. Politics of Zambia, edited by William Tordoff (1975)

    16. Corporate Power in an African State: The Political Impact of Multinational Mining Companies in Zambia, by Richard Sklar (1975)

    17. Change in Contemporary South Africa, edited by Leonard Thompson and Jeffrey Butler (1975)

    18. The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique: The Zambesi Valley, 1850—1921, by Allen F. Isaacman (1976)

    19. Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology, by Gail Gerhart (1978)

    20. Black Heart: Gore-Brown and the Politics of Multiracial Zambia, by Robert I. Rotberg (1977)

    21. The Black Homelands of South Africa: The Political and Economic Development of Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu, by Jeffrey Butler, Robert I. Rotberg, and John Adams (1977)

    22. Afrikaner Political Thought: Analysis and Documents (3 vols.), by André du Toit and Hermann Giliomee (Volume 1:1780-1850,1983)

    23. Angola Under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality, by Gerald Bender(1978)

    24. Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia, by Robin Palmer (1977)

    25. The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, edited by Robin Palmer and Neil Parsons (1977)

    26. The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe, by Paul Berliner (1978)

    27. The Darker Reaches of Government: Access to Information About Public Administration in England, the United States, and South Africa, by Anthony S. Mathews (1979)

    28. The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, by Colin Bundy (1979)

    29. South Africa: Time Running Out. The Report of the Study Commission on U.S. Policy Toward Southern Africa (1981)

    30. The Revolt of the Hereros, by Jon M. Bridgman (1981)

    31. The White Tribe of Africa: South Africa in Perspective, by David Harrison (1982)

    32. 2. The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence, by J. B. Peires (1982)

    33. Soldiers Without Politics: Blacks in the South African Armed Forces, by Kenneth W. Grundy (1983)

    34. Education, Race, and Social Change in South Africa, by John A. Marcum (1982)

    35. The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and the British in the Nineteenth-century Transvaal, by Peter Delius (1984)

    36. Sol Plaatje, South African Nationalist, 1876-1932, by Brian Willan (1984)

    37. Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study, by Terence Ranger (1985)

    38. Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe, by David Lan (1985)

    39. South Africa without Apartheid: Dismantling Racial Domination, by Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley (1986)

    40. Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890-1930, by William Beinart and Colin Bundy (1986)

    41. Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa, by Stanley B. Greenberg (1987)

    Legitimating the Illegitimate

    Legitimating the Illegitimate

    State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa

    Stanley B. Greenberg

    University of California Press

    Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

    University of California Press

    Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

    University of California Press, Ltd.

    London, England

    © 1987 by

    The Regents of the University of California

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Greenberg, Stanley B., 1945-

    Legitimating the illegitimate.

    (Perspectives on Southern Africa; 41)

    Bibliography: p.

    Includes index.

    i. South Africa—Politics and government—1978

    2. Legitimacy of governments—South Africa. 3. Apartheid

    —South Africa. 4. South Africa—Race relations.

    5. Labor policy—South Africa. I. Title. II. Series.

    JQ1911.G74 1987 323.1'68 86-30734

    ISBN 0-520-06010-5 (alk. paper)

    ISBN 0-520-06011-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

    Printed in the United States of America

    123456789

    For my parents

    Contents

    Contents

    List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

    Terminology and Source Notes

    Preface

    I. The Political Economy of Illegitimacy

    2. Contradictions and State Presence

    3. The State Exposed

    4. Reconstructing the Labor Framework—Reconstructing the Laboring Classes

    5. Constructing State Ideology

    6. Ideological Struggles within the South African State

    7. Resistance and Hegemony in South Africa

    Appendix

    Notes

    Index

    List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

    Terminology and Source Notes

    To ensure the anonymity of those interviewed (see Appendix, List of Interviews), I have been purposely vague where possible. Thus I use the general abbreviation AB for administration board without naming the specific position (e.g., AB: Central Transvaal). The abbreviation DL refers to the director of labor of an administration board (e.g., DL: Northern Transvaal), though frequently I interviewed the deputy or assistant. LB denotes an interview with the director of a labor bureau (e.g., LB: Hammanskraal). I have not given the dates of interviews, so that the natural rotation in the bureaucracy, common at the labor bureau level, will cover my tracks. Where the speaker is indicated by the text itself (e.g., the legislative advisor observes that…), further citation of the source in parentheses or a note is obviously redundant and has been omitted.

    The various permutations of the old Department of Native Affairs, now the Department of Constitutional Development and Planning, are often referred to in the text and notes simply as the department. The name changes and dates are as follows:

    Department of Native Affairs 1911-57

    Department of Bantu Administration and Development 1958-77

    Department of Plural Relations and Development 1978

    Department of Cooperation and Development 1978-84

    Department of Constitutional Development and Planning 1985-

    Preface

    This book dwells on an implausible project: the concerted effort by the white political leadership in South Africa to broaden support for the state and economic order amongst the majority, African population. With racial privilege imbedded in the state and market—with African workers defined by statute, subject to controls on movement and residence, threatened by forced removals and denationalization, and denied common franchise rights—there seems little space for such ideological musings. Coercion and state violence, not legitimacy and hegemony, seem the common coinage of this illegitimate regime. Yet, it is difficult to ignore Afrikaner politicians and intellectuals and South African businessmen entangled in new constitutional conventions, a new rhetoric of pluralism and markets, and new legal structures of control. Legitimating the Illegitimate examines the political economy of illegitimacy in South Africa—the state and markets, the growing presence and resistance of African workers, and the attempts to reconstruct the dominant ideology and social order.

    This was hardly the book I set out to write some six years ago. Then I was near completing a previous work, Race and State in Capitalist Development, in which I sought to demonstrate that economic growth in divided societies, such as South Africa, Alabama, Israel, and Northern Ireland, would exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions, not, as conventionally supposed, supersede them. In my own mind, that work raised at least two sets of issues that it could not address, at least not without lumbering on for two or three more years and further burdening an already cumbersome argument: the first concerned the nature of the state in divided societies; the second, the unresolved relationship between capitalism and the racial order in the contemporary period.

    Though the term state appeared in the title, the state apparatus was treated as a curious institution, a passive object of pressures and representations by dominant class actors, and, at the same time, an effective instrument shaping critical social processes—the market, peasant society, urbanization, and African proletarianization. The state, largely unexamined, nonetheless seemed internally consistent, unified, and effective, and dominant over society. In the concluding section on South Africa, I alluded to an emergent crisis of hegemony—a growing gulf between the expressed interests of dominant class actors and the state officialdom—but that observation was left unexplored, only to tantalize.

    In this work, I decided to look more closely at South Africa, where the state was closely identified with an ascendant ethnicity and deeply and visibly involved in shaping the incorporation of an ethnically distinct working class. This seemed like an appropriate context in which to explore the nature of the state in divided societies and the ideological discourse surrounding racial or ethnic domination. I focused in particular on the labor control framework—the administration boards and labor bureaus, which constitute critical meeting points for the state, markets, and workers where the state has attempted to exercise control over social forces. My research setting was not the state as a whole—how could it be?—but a defined area of state activity where ethnicity, working-class life, and the character of the state could be effectively explored.

    Between January 1980 and December 1985 in South Africa, with many lapses in between, I interviewed officials of the Department of Cooperation and Development (now dismembered) from chief commissioners across the country to the director general and deputy minister; administration (now development) board and labor bureau officials in the western, central, and northern Transvaal, the Vereeniging and northern Free State areas, the Western and Eastern Cape, and the Port Natal and Drakensberg districts; and officials in the rural labor bureaus and mine recruiting organizations in Le- bowa, Gazankulu, KwaZulu, and Transkei.

    Between 1981 and 1985, again with lapses, I conducted parallel research in Israel, exploring similar questions of control and legitimation. While that work will be published separately, I learned a great deal about each setting through the eyes of the other.

    In the course of this work on South Africa, the issues and questions, my perspective on the state and ideology, and, indeed, my research settings themselves began to shift. I hesitate to suggest that I allowed the evidence, the facts, to dictate my hypotheses and theo rizing. It is certainly the case, however, that my understanding was shaped profoundly by a reality that would not bend to accommodate the structures I wanted to impose on it.

    More important than the focus on South Africa was the rethinking of my conception of the state. Central to this and my earlier work was an approach to the state, situated in the mainstream of positivist and Marxist social science, that theorizes about demands on the state and policy outputs, but leaves the state itself opaque or as an unexplored unity. The character of the state is, in this view, dictated by the structure of interests in civil society and how they come to wield the state as an instrument of group or class power. But as will become evident in this work, the South African state is no unity or simple instrument. It is a complex terrain shaped by the interplay of political leaders, officials, class and allied actors, and social divisions. The contemporary South African state is wracked by bitter internal struggles that detract from simplified images that suggest strength, pragmatism, and efficacy.

    My work in its early stages presumed that state control of markets is unproblematic: a strong intention to impose racial and class priorities, articulated by officials and realized in legislation, could readily produce new and preferred market outcomes. My research therefore focused on the machinery of control, the labor control apparatus. As it turned out, I misread the process, missing above all the tensions in market regulation and the limits of state power. I do not doubt my earlier observation that developing capitalism has brought the elaboration of the racial order—indeed, massive attempts to impose racial barriers in the market. The steady elaboration of state structures, however, is a symptom, not of effective control, but of insufficient state power, threatened by wilful African subjects who individually and collectively decline to follow state direction. State control over markets, we shall see, produces tensions and contradictions that undermine and limit the imposition of state goals.

    In arguing, as I did in Race and State in Capitalist Development, that the pattern of race domination was functional to capitalist growth, I slipped easily into a parallel argument, that the racial-state form, structuring and subordinating the African populace, was also a functional aspect of the social order. That argument guided my work at the outset as I sought to examine the machinery of labor control and how it allocated labor in ways functional to ascendant capitalist interests. Against the tenor of liberal thought and escalating racial oppression during the 1960s and 1970s, the materialist analysis has rightly emphasized the functionality of the racial-state form for the economic order. But, ironically, the emphasis on functionality has crowded out the attention to contradictions and produced a curious conception of the South African state. In materialist hands, including my own, the state has been represented as an instrumentality, unproblematically shaped by dominant class actors, unitary and coherent, and repressive and effective in practice. The labor control framework in particular seemed an awesome apparatus, smashing the domestic working-class opposition, structuring the labor market and workplace, and taking control of African urbanization and proletarianization.

    That imagery, however, bears little resemblance to the state apparatus that I have come to know in South Africa. The labor control framework in particular is underfinanced and understaffed, uneven in practice; indeed, important elements of it have decayed or become corrupt or ineffectual; some now have been formally abandoned— a tacit admission of state incapacity. The system of influx control is internally contradictory, creating pressures it cannot contain and rising economic and political costs it cannot meet. This state machinery, elaborated over three decades of Nationalist rule and the centerpiece of apartheid ideology, cannot effectively manage the squatter areas that dominate the major metropolitan areas, the spreading disorders that dominate the townships, and the growing labor surpluses that characterize the rural bantustans.

    It was only after putting aside the imagery of state efficacy, unity, and functionality that I was able to make any sense of the present effort in South Africa to legitimate the illegitimate. This was a state characterized more by its growing limits than by its control over markets and the African majority. The attempt to fashion legitimating mechanisms is rooted, above all, in the vulnerabilities of this state in the face of the growing presence and militance of African workers.

    This dynamic—the breakdown of state coercive institutions and capacity and the search for a legitimacy formula—is the guiding thread that runs through this work. The dynamic contains two theoretical and empirical assumptions that the analysis will have to support. First, the present discourse on legitimacy derives largely from a domestic process centered on the failures of state control and the spread of African resistance. Although international actors, particularly the bankers and the Reagan administration in the United States, provide an important audience for the new rhetoric (e.g., the death of apartheid), their role is secondary to the fundamental struggle unfolding within South Africa itself over the character of the state and society.

    Second, the discourse surrounding the legitimacy question is not simply a new set of terms, a new jargon—pluralism, participation, common citizenship, freedom, and so forth—that will mask conventional apartheid. There are no doubt some actors in this struggle who are simply playing with words; there are many more who have no idea what the words mean or imply. Nonetheless, one should not underestimate the philosophic shifts involved and their importance for the form of the state and the struggle for an African political future.

    The emphasis here on dysfunctionality, the insufficiencies of control efforts, and legitimating ideologies has been wrongly interpreted as a return to a liberal perspective, one emphasizing the incompatibilities of racial privilege and market societies. There is no necessary incompatibility, as I indicated in Race and State in Capitalist Development. Dominant class actors, including mining and farming capitalists, helped make the South African racial order; progressive businessmen have stumbled on the incompatibilities only when confronted by challenges from below and by rising threats to public order. Indeed, the racial and capitalist orders in South Africa are so intertwined that it is difficult at this point to posit a simple opposition between them.

    Market processes have always introduced tensions for this economic and political construction, however, not just for the ideologues of apartheid but for the mining houses, which have sought to monopolize labor recruitment, fix African wages, and prevent labor desertion. In the present period, those tensions, more evident than ever, challenge the capacities of the apartheid state and make evident the capacities of an increasingly mobilized and emboldened African majority. In this period and under these circumstances, some white political leaders and many economic ones have sought an alternative to apartheid.

    In September 1983 I testified before the Africa Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. My observations about South Africa proved surprisingly conten- tious amongst South Africa’s strongest congressional critics. Incautiously, and with some innocence, I stated that South Africa is changing. We are witnessing basic change in the structures of racial domination. … There is a movement away from ‘apartheid,’ as we have known it and black South Africans have experienced it. I emphasized that South Africa’s present policy is two-edged, that privilege has been accompanied by new exclusions; freedom has been accompanied by new forms of repression, that the positive and negative are intricately interconnected and necessary to each other, and that the whole process lacks a progressive character. In a desperate effort to cope with rising resistance and costs, the government has reached out to coopt leaders in the African, Asian and coloured communities, and to build South Africa’s international legitimacy and, specifically, its ties with the United States.

    Committee members and colleagues retorted effectively that changes were taking place in South Africa within the context of apartheid, and that South Africa is moving toward an entrenchment of this apartheid vision of Dr. Verwoerd. Moreover, some felt that whatever the course of change, one should avoid an academic discourse in public forums that only confounds the anti-apartheid forces and that detracts from the clarity with which apartheid is perceived as an immoral state practice with enormous emotional and significant political value.

    Perhaps they were right, and indeed, if that were the ultimate consequence of my testimony, I would frame the argument very differently. I emphasize the reconstruction of apartheid and the attempt to fashion a new hegemony because these developments reflect the state’s vulnerabilities to market and political forces. Emphasis on an unchanging apartheid suggests a continuing unity and state capacity, whereas the reality is very different—contradictions and struggle, limits, rising costs, and political challenges. The State of Emergency declared in 1985 was less an instance of effective coercive regulation than a sign of the state’s weakening grip on events in the African areas. By emphasizing these processes and the state’s vulnerabilities, I hope to demystify both the state and the notion of reform. At the same time, I hope to encourage and reinforce the work of those who would challenge this illegitimate order.

    Writing is an indulgence that makes extraordinary demands on other people and institutions, asking that they disrupt their routines to worry about my questions and chapters. I continue to be awed by the number of people who, without question or need of persuasion or explanation, led me through library holdings or took a pencil to my drafts.

    Those who purchase this book should find it relatively free of warts, but they should appreciate that others before them were subject to much worse. I want to thank my colleagues who allowed me to present my work at their seminars and conferences and to develop and clarify my thinking. Various chapters were presented to the African Studies Program, Harvard University (1986), the Queen Elizabeth House and the Middle East Centre, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University (1985), the Truman Institute for the Advancement of International Peace, Hebrew University (1985), the Department of Politics, University of Cape Town (1985), the seminar and New England Workshop of the Southern African Research Program, Yale University (1985 and 1984), the African Studies Association (1985 and 1983), the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London (1984), the Economic History Society of Southern Africa (1984), the Conference on Economic Development and Racial Domination, University of the Western Cape (1984), the African Studies Seminar and Comparative History Project, Columbia University (1984), the African Studies Institute, University of the Wit- watersrand (1983), the Brodigan Memorial Lecture and University Lecture, Wesleyan University (1982/83), the Sociology Department, Birzeit University (1982), the Conference on South Africa and the West, University of Natal (1982), the Sociology Department, Haifa University (1981), and the Study Commission on U.S. Policy toward Southern Africa, Rockefeller Foundation (1980).

    My own students, who could not escape reading these materials, nonetheless provided me with valuable criticisms. I wish to thank my students at Wesleyan University (Politics of Divided Societies, State and Society, and Israeli Politics and Society) and at Yale University (Racial and Ethnic Conflict in Southern Africa).

    A great number of people agreed to be interviewed, to direct me to materials, or simply proved gracious and accommodating. In both South Africa and England, I have some very special friends who have provided their homes and continuing support—Charles van Onselen, Belinda Bozzoli, Hermann and Annette Giliomee, Michael and Mary Savage, and Barbara and Stanley Trapido.

    This book benefited immensely from early and extended conversations with Harold Wolpe, Michael Burawoy, Douglas Hindson, Eric Lane, and John Saul. A great many colleagues agreed to read individual chapters and offer comments, including Heribert Adam, Belinda Bozzoli, Michael Burawoy, Jeffrey Butler, Timothy Couz- ens, Leonard Doob, André du Toit, William Foltz, Hermann Gili- omee, Joost Hilterman, Wilmot James, Joseph LaPalombara, Neil Lazarus, Charles Lindblom, Chris Lowe, Ian Lustick, Shula Marks, Bill Munro, William Nasson, Nic Olivier, Charles van Onselen, Michael Savage, Jose Stevens, Leonard Thompson, Stanley Trapido, and Leroy Vail.

    The story in this book—the portrayal of labor control practices and political struggles within state institutions—could not have been pieced together without the active cooperation of state officials themselves. Few that I interviewed will have much good to say about this book. Nonetheless, officials at virtually every level gave freely of their time and thoughts when in many instances their world was under siege.

    I was able to take advantage of the extensive South African holdings at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale and the untiring efforts of Moore Crossey; the library of the Truman Institute, Hebrew University; the Gubbins Library at the University of the Witwatersrand; the Albany Museum, 182.0 Settlers’ Memorial Museum at Grahams- town; the library of the University of South Africa; the incomparable news clippings files at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town; and the Library of Congress.

    Though I labored with some of the translations, more often I depended upon the expert assistance of Maretha du Toit, Jeffrey Lever, Neil Lazarus, and Bill Munro. Bill, in addition, prepared the index and, aided by Jennifer Sosin, proofed the printer’s pages.

    I would not have gotten to any of those libraries or conducted the field research without the support of a number of foundations: the American Philosophical Society at two critical junctures (1981, 1984-85); the Rockefeller Foundation, which supported the Study Commission on U.S. Policy toward South Africa (1980) and provided space at the Study Center in Bellagio, Italy (1985); and the Ford and Open Societies Foundations, which have continued to support the Southern African Research Program at Yale University.

    Despite the word processor, real people intervened regularly to keep this project going, including Pam Baldwin at the Southern Af rican Research Program, the whole staff of the Truman Institute, Lee Messina and Jane Tozer at Wesleyan University, and everyone at my consulting company, the Analysis Group, who managed to work around my erratic schedules.

    Rosa DeLauro, my wife, has maintained her record, typing and proofing none of this, while doing more important things for both of us. This book is dedicated to my parents, who started me on this course, although they are still trying to figure out how I ended up taking this particular political detour. For better or worse, this book is theirs.

    I. The Political

    Economy of Illegitimacy

    OPERATION PALMIET

    The words I am your friend on the stickers handed out to blacks in unrest plagued Sebokeng during the night of action by the South African police, with support from troops, must have had a calming and reassuring effect on most of the town’s 120,000 inhabitants.

    The many friendly adults and children who waved to policemen and troops created the impression that the keepers of peace and order were welcomed like a big, strong brother. Many of the undesirable elements were driven from their dens and taken away.

    The successful Operation Palmiet… [is] in keeping with two traditional approaches in South Africa: the Afrikaner’s republican tradition of a civilian army will not dodge its responsibility to protect its property and the property of law-abiding citizens; and the Blacks who respect a winner.

    Die Volksblad (trans. S.A. Digest), October 26,1984

    Perhaps more than any other state and social order, South Africa stands illegitimate and repressive before its own people. This is not the illegitimacy of a capricious or brutal regime, indifferent to popular needs and indulgent of privilege and police violence. For South Africa, illegitimacy—the lack of validity, in Weber’s terms—is a defining characteristic of the social order.¹ The state is formally and fully associated with the needs and dominance of a privileged racial minority; indeed, to all appearances, the state’s racial character provides its raison d’etre. The racial-state identity takes a legal and publicly sanctioned form that pervades the national symbols and governing ideology, as well as the practical activity of state agencies. Even if economically integrated, the African majority stand outside the established order as legal aliens who may not associate with the nation.²

    The apartheid state is repressive; indeed, it seems necessarily repressive. There are no doubt more murderous regimes. Few states, however, operate within a legal and ideological framework that appears to mandate dependence on direct coercion and to preclude the search for more consensual methods. The formal exclusions inscribed in the state have been accompanied by a complex of racial laws and sprawling bureaucratic and police agencies, and, in the end, have been confirmed by the courts and prison system. There is a perverse and necessary logic to the resulting repression: 3.5 million Africans forcibly cleared from black spots between 1960 and 1982 and resettled in designated African rural areas; at least 250,000 Africans prosecuted annually under the pass laws, at one point rising to 650,000, or 10 percent of the working-age population; an annual African prison population in 1982-83 of 450,000, or 1 out of every 44 persons, a ratio exceeded by almost no other country in the world.³ There is a completeness to a repressive order that, at the top, leaves the African majority without any legal political representation or national identity and, at the bottom, subjects them to group areas, removals, tribal authorities, and police raids of various sorts.

    The African majority, formally outside the dominant political arrangements and the subject of such repressive policies, have affirmed in practice what seems necessary in theory—the illegitimacy of the South African state. A 1980 survey conducted among Africans from the Ciskei region found that 90 percent rejected apartheid’s separate political institutions, favoring instead universal adult suffrage within a unitary nonracial framework. Three

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