Work in Progress Issue no.36

Police shootings in Uitenhage's Langa township have deepened an already serious crisis of township rule. In rural and urban areas alike, black townships look more like war zones than residential areas. With police and army occupation, and a legal ban on gatherings in areas most affected, the claim of civil war is not far-fetched. Under pressure from organised capital and conservative Western interests, government lurches from blunder to crisis in an attempt to give substance to its 'new deal'. Increasing pressure from a surprisingly united disinvestment lobby in the USA and elsewhere, is matched by a growing international belief that the Botha government cannot deliver even limited reforms. Moderate and conservative Western interests have at last realised that change South African government-style does not necessarily involve progress. While the rebellion of the townships involves attacks on the symbols of political power - police, local authority or community council representatives - the underlying basis of rebellion is increasingly economic. Millions are unemployed. More and more school leavers and boycotting pupils know that they will never be employed. Retrenched workers experience a desperate situation as one-time family breadwinners - with little or no social security, savings, or prospects of employment. Sustained economic recovery seems unlikely without transforming the very nature of the economy. And any containment of the ever-growing township crisis is dependent on high economic growth. Neither world economic trends, nor government's monetarist policies, seem likely to pull the economy out of its fatal combination of high inflation and stagnation. If recession is to be a permanent feature of the next few years, then an increasingly ungovernable crisis-ridden society is a real prospect