The economic impact of homeland consolidation on households in the fromer Ciskei : the case of Victoria East

This study attempts to ascertain the economic impact of the process of homeland consolidation in four communities that became part of the Ciskei. It describes the process of homeland consolidation at Lloyd, Bergplaas, Balfour and Qanda, and seeks to understand the effects of homeland consolidation on the level of economic activity in these areas. ‘Homeland consolidation’ was the official term used to describe the policy developed by the central government of South Africa in the 1970s to reduce the number of separate, isolated pieces of land making up each of the Bantustans. It was part of the ultimately unsuccessful and suspect process of turning these areas into independent ‘national states’. The Apartheid government bought out selected white farms/properties/land like in Lloyd, Bergplaas, Balfour and Qanda, and consolidated them with the adjacent homeland territory. The result of this process made commercial farmland available to black people. In a very narrow sense, this particular aspect of homeland consolidation was an antecedent of land reform. Because homeland consolidation took place some time ago, discerning the economic effects relied above all on people’s recollections of their past experiences, which could only be quantified in a very limited manner. In other words, the data and analysis were largely although not exclusively qualitative. Household and life history interviews were conducted using semi-structured questionnaires, and then the data was analyzed using content analysis, descriptive statistics, the Chi-square test and the two-proportion z test. Through the process of homeland consolidation and forced removals, people ended up losing productive land and livestock because they were forced to sell their livestock at a loss and they had no land where they were moved to. People were stripped of their livelihoods, in addition to losing a place that they called home and the loss of employment. This study also looked at the changes in farming before and during the apartheid era, during the time when the Ciskeian government was in power and after 1994 till now. And also looked at the broader perspective of what actually happened in the four sites from the life history interviews