Homeland faces bleak future

Press, 5 December 1981, Page 8

Homeland faces bleak future

NZPA-Reuter Bisho; Ciskei The black homeland of Ciskei, facing a future of poverty and international isolation, celebrated its independence from South Africa at midnight yesterday with a 101-gun salute. The South African flag was lowered for the last time in the partially-built Independence Stadium at Bisho, a wind-swept dusty plateau where Ciskei's capital will be built. But the soldier detailed to raise the blue and white

Ciskei flag managed only to pull down the flagpole and the new Stale’s flag had to be unfurled before a crowd of 30,000 with its mast held in place by six South African soldiers. No foreign dignitaries attended the independence celebrations for the barren and impoverished territory lying between the Indian Ocean ports of East London and Port Elizabeth. For Ciskei, the fourth homeland granted independence from South . Africa, stands as little chanCe of

gaining international' recognition as the previous three. The South African Government aims to create a constellation of black tribal States co-existing peacefully with the republic. Apart from South Africa, the only representatives at the celebrations were those of the Bophuthatswana and Venda homelands. Transkei, the third internationally-un-recognised black State, boycotted the ceremony. Transkei’s Prime Minister, George Matanzina, alleged that separating the Xhosa

people, the tribe to which Ciskeians and Transkeians belong, made a mockery of South Africa’s homeland policy. The dispute with Transkei is not the only problem facing Ciskei. It has little to export but the labour of its people, many of whom work in the mines and factories of South Africa, and has one of the lowest annual per capita incomes'in the world at $260. Those who do not work in the mines either eke a living from subsistence farming or

commute daily to the white industrial areas of the Eastern Cape, a region known for the strength of its black trade unions. More than 200 trade unionists in the region have been detained by South African or Ciskeian police in the last year. The Ciskei Government of Chief Lennox Sebe sees the unions as an obstacle, to marketing Ciskeian labour in white areas and they fear for their future in an independent Ciskei. __