Transkei Victory

Abstract

The Transkei had long been a political wasteland. Electioneering in Tembuland in 1929, Sydney Bunting found that the Africans of the Transkei were ‘more held down here than anywhere else in South Africa. By a long regime of “segregation” and congestion, all the stuffing seems to have been knocked out of them.’ He varied the metaphor: `it is bottled up, with a very heavy official hand on the cork’.¹ It continued so, ignored by the ANC as part of its general political neglect of rural South Africa. It was claimed as a stronghold of Apdusa, the A-AC rump, which had done almost nothing to organize activity or increase membership in the Transkei or anywhere else. Yet by 1960, parts were seething with discontent and the heavy hand of officialdom could scarcely hold down the cork.