Chapter 2 Regimes of Relocation in the Ciskei
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This chapter examines the local drivers of the apartheid relocation regime and traces the emergence of the Ciskei relocation townships that were established so shambolically during the 1960s: Sada, Dimbaza and Ilinge. If the global context informed the evolution of policy, state praxis was nevertheless driven by the overlapping local imperatives of labour control, racial segregation and political repression under a modernising settler colonial state. The ‘second phase’ (Posel, 1997) of apartheid – characterised by the centralisation of the state’s influx control regime and the expansion of its capacity to exert control and repress dissent through forced removals to the bantustans – did not radiate from the central locus of power in Pretoria, nor emanate from any ‘grand plan’ of apartheid ideologues. Rural ‘rehabilitation’ plans for dense residential settlements in the Ciskei long predated forced removals. Further, the draconian influx control regime in the Western Cape – which further hardened in the wake of the events at Paarl (1962) as racial segregation was turned to the project of state repression and colonial counter-insurgency – played a crucial role in accelerating resettlement in the Ciskei and had significant implications for the elaboration of the bantustan project at large.