was an outcome of government policy, which had forcibly
stamped out African economic growth and created the
reservoir of cheap, uneducated African labor to be
employed in European-controlled mines and lands. After
1913 vast numbers of Africans were evicted from their
lands, which were taken over by whites, and crowded into
the Homelands, which were too small for them to earn an
independent living from. As intended, therefore, they would
be forced to look for a living in the white economy,
supplying their labor cheaply. As their economic incentives
collapsed, the advances that had taken place in the
preceding fifty years were all reversed. People gave up
their plows and reverted to farming with hoes—that is, if
they farmed at all. More often they were just available as
cheap labor, which the Homelands had been structured to
ensure.
It was not only the economic incentives that were
destroyed. The political changes that had started to take
place also went into reverse. The power of chiefs and
traditional rulers, which had previously been in decline, was
strengthened, because part of the project of creating a
cheap labor force was to remove private property in land.
So the chiefs’ control over land was reaffirmed. These
measures reached their apogee in 1951, when the
government passed the Bantu Authorities Act. As early as
1940, G. Findlay put his finger right on the issue:
Tribal tenure is a guarantee that the land will
never properly be worked and will never really
belong to the natives. Cheap labour must
have a cheap breeding place, and so it is
furnished to the Africans at their own
expense.
The dispossession of the African farmers led to their
mass impoverishment. It created not only the institutional
foundations of a backward economy, but the poor people to
stock it.
The available evidence demonstrates the reversal in
living standards in the Homelands after the Natives Land
Act of 1913. The Transkei and the Ciskei went into a
prolonged economic decline. The employment records