Justin Pearce
The State Archives has allowed the Mail & Guardian access to cabinet memoranda, which were for years kept locked away in terms of the Archives Act.
But a search through the papers revealed nothing that would have caused the collapse of the South African state — though some very telling documents do stand out among a largely mundane collection.
The papers shown to the M&G are all memoranda submitted to Cabinet by government departments to motivate requests that Cabinet act on a particular matter. Many of them deal with such matters as a proposed salary increase for secretaries or a summary of the five-year programme of the National Committee on Hydrology.
But several of the papers are confirmation of the obsessive and self-contradictory attempts to enforce grand apartheid.
Take, for example, the one from the ministry of planning and statistics called Coloureds in the Republic of South Africa — regional settlement areas and labour sphere of influence. It states bluntly that “coloureds must be removed from the area to the east of the Fish-Cat line, except in East London, Breidbach and Queenstown. The coloured group areas in Aliwal North, Dordrecht, Lady Grey, Elliot and Maclear must not be de-proclaimed, but coloureds must be slowly moved out.”
The drafters of the paper acknowleged there may be snags with this plan, for example the building trade and other industries objecting to “bantu” labourers replacing coloureds.
A memo submitted by the department of bantu administration deals with the establishment of a “bantu film industry”. It motivates the need for such an industry on the grounds that “there are no bantu films, and white films are often unacceptable, undesirable and not suitable for bantu audiences.
“The low moral standards of many overseas films, laced with situations of immorality and subtle racial equality, contribute to the undermining and eventual destruction of cultural values.”
The paper outlines a plan for the Bantu Film Trust, which was to have three white directors and a budget of R4,5-million to make 30 films a year.
The department of information presented Cabinet with a memo on the improving of South Africa’s image abroad, emphasising the importance of improving the government’s relationship with foreign correspondents.
“Permanent correspondents have no facilities and are left in the clutches of people with hostile intentions, who are only too happy to help. Some of them even have their offices at the Cape Times, the Star or the Rand Daily Mail.”
The Archives Act puts an automatic 30-year embargo on all the government documents, but the M&G was granted permission to see the cabinet memoranda and other documents.
A request by M&G to see the minutes of cabinet meetings prompted the Department of Arts and Culture to request a search for cabinet notebooks from before 1978, which had gone missing. These notebooks are the only records of cabinet meetings from that era, since formal minute-keeping only began on the orders of state president PW Botha in 1978.
Department of Arts and Culture representative Frans Basson has told the M&G these notebooks, covering the period 1956 to 1978, have subsequently come to light among “miscellaneous boxed material” in the archives.
The M&G is still awaiting ministerial permission to see these and other cabinet records.o