Loose cannon Robert Kirby
Sometimes apparently atrociously bad ideas deserve a second look. It happens all the time in diet-advice. One minute they tell you eating eggs is bad for your blood vessels, the next they’re saying that if you don’t eat at least two eggs at every meal your blood vessels will close up and become as stiff as welding-rods.
In an open-minded spirit of fair play to all ideas, it might be worth having a second look at the Verwoerdian master-plan of Separate Development. Now that all the righteous fuss is, at long last, dying down, perhaps an objective reassessment will show there’s unexpected merit in what old Henk had to say.
Before continuing there’s one important elementary qualification. Separate Development might work, but only in reverse. What South Africa should consider doing is turning inherent separatism to its advantage. The first step would be to declare certain areas of the country – for want of a better term, white homelands. Not, I hasten to add, in the way reactionary elements would have an Afrikaans homeland, where the intention seems to be little more than somewhere to continue where FW de Klerk left off. More as a sort of place to accommodate on a permanent basis, soaked-out folk who deliberately live by exotic codes. Somewhere where their shrill complaints will forever be drowned in pink gins and string quartets; a place where they can live and flourish, comforted by their own dated canons.
For convenience sake let’s call such a homeland a Honkeystan. It would be a land in which to settle all those who might be termed the “insolubles” in South Africa’s new democratic stew. And there are a quite lot of them, on both sides of the racial spectrum: those who would prefer to get along with their lives without continual sniping from people of opposing camps. Take them out and the whole place becomes much less stressful. Have a look around you today. We have now reached the unhappy stage where everyone is calling everyone else a racist.
What the idea of a Honkeystan proposes is that sometimes people, who can’t co-exist happily in a commune, might well manage to do so as neighbours. The garden fence is more than just a border. In its humble way it’s a symbol of individuality, of personal domain – as much as a shock that is to dedicated Stalinists, who detest the idea of anyone owning their own life.
Let’s say the idea took off and, let’s say, the Western Cape was designated as the first Honkeystan. Everyone currently living there would be quite entitled to go on living there – but only if they wanted to. The central South African government would do what the Nats used to do, that is pour in a few billion rand to help give the place a kick start.
After that, the same basic rules would apply as did in the bad old Bantustans. White workers living in the Western Cape Honkeystan who wanted to seek employment in the remaining – the greater and more lucrative part of South Africa – would, as in the old homelands, only be allowed to do so on a contract basis. Just like they used to do with black mine-workers. I’m not suggesting these white workers should be forced to carry passes, an identity book carried at all times would suffice. Only as a measure against illegal labour practices, black employers should be required to counter-sign these ID books at, say, three months intervals.
Knowing what utter snobs the whites can be, there would have to be some attempt at upgrading the current hostels for migrant workers. Those inhabiting these hostels at the moment would be accommodated in the emptied mansions of the capitalists who had been moved to the Western Cape. Ultimately in these kinds of situations, everything would balance itself out
Those moving to the Honkeystan would be required to surrender all intrinsically valuable assets, such as company cars, houses, investments, indeed the companies and factories themselves, also precious cultural objects. Giving up one’s Tretchikoff collection would be the very least to pay in the way of a departure tax. Only essentials would be allowed to leave the greater South Africa.
No electoral franchise would be granted the white migrant workers because they would be free to exercise their political rights in their own homeland.
Surely such a move would give added breadth to the brilliant concept of the African renaissance. A yielding to the essentially humanist concept that every-one deserves a place in the shade, too.