‘We Must Resist Force With Force’ : Pretoria Project Angers ‘Peaceful’ S. Africa Tribe

The black revolt against apartheid has come to Moutse, once one of the quietest districts in this strife-torn country, and the South African government now faces the threat of open rebellion from a community whose leaders describe it as “peaceful, conservative and law-abiding.”

“We are all in the struggle now,” Chief Tlokwe Mathebe said at a gathering at his home here. “If we seem to have become radicals, this government in Pretoria has made us so, and it should know that we will resist to the last man.”

As Mathebe spoke, the men of Moutse raised their clenched fists in the black-power salute usually seen at political rallies in South Africa’s urban black townships, not at tribal meetings in remote rural areas.

“We must resist force with force,” another speaker, Maredi Chueu, a schoolteacher-turned-politician, declared. “We have been holding back but now we should mobilize. The government has pushed us too far. It is time to resist, to fight back.”

‘Power to the People’

The thatched-roof assembly hall, crowded with more than 2,000 people, erupted with shouts of “Viva Moutse! Viva Moutse!” and then of “Power to the people!”

The people of Moutse have been angered by government plans to incorporate the district into the neighboring Ndebele tribal homeland, Kwandebele. Most of Moutse’s 120,000 residents belong to a different ethnic group, the Pedis, speak a different language, Northern Sotho, have a much different culture and way of life than the Ndebeles--and have their own fragmented homeland, Lebowa, one portion of which is within 20 miles of here.

On one level, the developments in Moutse, in northern Transvaal province about 60 miles northeast of Pretoria, the South African capital, constitute the latest chapter in South Africa’s efforts to put as many of its 25 million blacks as possible into self-governing tribal homelands, where their demands for political rights might be satisfied without jeopardizing white rule over the country as a whole.

“For a long time, we were threatened with removal from this area and resettlement somewhere else,” said Godfrey Mathebe, a local businessman and an elder of the Mathebe clan. “We were a so-called ‘black spot’ with whites around us and the government wanted this land for whites. But we resisted and resisted because this land is ours and has been ours for more than 200 years.

New Government Measure

“Now, the government has a new trick--instead of moving us to a homeland, it is moving the homeland to us. But this is not Lebowa, which would be our homeland, but Kwandebele. They are still trying to take our land, but this time they are giving it to their lackeys in Kwandebele.”

Moutse sees itself, as Chueu put it, as “the head of John the Baptist being presented on a silver platter as a present to the prostitutes and thugs of Kwandebele when it takes its so-called ‘independence’ in 1986.”

Until now, Moutse has been so quiet that its schools were the only ones in northern Transvaal not affected by the prolonged student boycotts of the past two years. But the rising anger here is another example of how broadly the struggle against South Africa’s apartheid system of racial segregation and minority white rule has spread in the past year and a half--often as a response to the government’s own actions.

“The government has unleashed very powerful and perhaps very destructive forces,” said Chueu, who has represented Moutse in the Lebowa legislative assembly since 1978. “Since 1980,when we began to see a plan to give Moutse to Kwandebele, we have succeeded in restraining the people, persuading them that it is better to talk than to fight. But, with this government action, the chiefs can no longer hold the people back.”

More than 30,000 persons packed a sports stadium in Dennilton, Moutse’s major town, for a protest rally last month and spontaneous meetings of several thousand residents occur almost daily to discuss developments.

Police, Youths Clash

Over the past two weeks, there have been almost daily clashes between youths here and the police. Two youths have been shot and killed, a dozen others wounded and more than 30 arrested. The stores and homes of two local Ndebeles who support the incorporation of Moutse into Kwandebele were burned, and other “enemies of the tribe” have been told to leave the area for their own safety.

(Police have also arrested a television crew, two white South Africans working for the London-based World Television News, and charged them under the country’s severe security laws with inciting violence in Moutse.)

Two other Moutse youths were killed by Kwandebele vigilantes, according to residents, who charged that the homeland government is sending special units (one made up of men called imbokotho, or millers, because they “grind down” the political opposition) to eliminate those opposing the district’s incorporation and Kwandebele’s plans to become “independent” in 1986.

Unusual Coalitions

The threat of incorporation has produced an unusual coalition in Moutse--the traditional tribal leaders, such as Chief Tlokwe Mathebe, homeland politicians like Chueu and Godfrey Mathebe and militant black youths, such as members of the local Dennilton Youth Congress, none of whom would normally have much, if anything, to do with the others.

“We came together because of the situation,” Godfrey Mathebe said. “That we are working together shows how united the people are against this. . . . I am sure that we still have some political differences, but these are disappearing. We are all fighting the system now.”

Chueu, 51, who is leading the resistance to Moutse’s incorporation, warned in an interview here, “If the government tries to incorporate us forcefully into Kwandebele, there will be 120,000 Moutse people out in full opposition. You will see a full-scale tribal uprising here. Blood will certainly flow.”

Gesturing to a road where young blacks were stoning police vehicles and ducking tear-gas grenades fired in reply, he said, “Unfortunately, the Afrikaner doesn’t understand any language but this--violence.” The Afrikaners, descended from Dutch, French and German settlers, dominate the white-minority government.

Warnings From Black Sash

Similar warnings have come from the Black Sash, a liberal white women’s group that works in black areas and monitors civil rights in South Africa, and the independent South African Institute of Race Relations.

“This is a cynical, expedient manipulation of people,” Ethel Walt of Black Sash said. “That we expect. But forcing Moutse’s people into Kwandebele also ignores the government’s own policies on ethnicity and shows what nonsense the supposed ethnic rationale for the homelands really is.”

The outbreak of violence in Moutse should “cause Pretoria to think again but it seems bent on forcing the 120,000 inhabitants of Moutse into Kwandebele despite persuasive evidence that the great majority of them want no part of this plan,” John Kane-Berman, the institute’s director, warned. “For the government to act in this manner would be cause for concern at the best of times. For it to do so in the current climate is highly irresponsible.”

Drawing New Attention

Moutse is also starting to draw international attention. Herman W. Nickel, the American ambassador, visited the district to show official U.S. concern and Britain is looking closely at the situation.

Although J. Christiaan Heunis, the minister of constitutional development and planning, said in announcing Moutse’s incorporation into Kwandebele that the move would be submitted to Parliament for approval, he declared last month that his decision was final. All that was left for Moutse, he told its chiefs and other representatives, was to negotiate its terms for incorporation into Kwandebele. Moves are already under way to transfer its police, teachers, health workers and others to Kwandebele’s jurisdiction.

Ben H. Wilkens, deputy minister of development and land affairs, said the government “takes ethnic groups into consideration (in establishing tribal homelands), but we can’t always find just one people in an area, so these new states are not ethnically homogenous. What is more important, we think, is their economic viability.”

Incorporation Decried

Prof. John Dugard, a leading South African constitutional authority and civil rights lawyer, described the proposed incorporation as “a new and more wicked form of population removal.”

“While it is true that the people will not be moved,” Dugard said, “by redrawing the boundaries of Kwandebele, the people of Moutse will be placed under an alien regime that is likely to prove even more discriminatory and repressive than that of Pretoria.

“This move indicates that Pretoria is still determined to attempt to solve its problems by creating independent homelands and forcibly depriving black South Africans of their South African citizenship.”

Heunis and Wilkens said that those not wanting to live in Moutse after it is incorporated into Kwandebele can be resettled at government expense in Lebowa, where Pedis are predominant, the common language is Northern Sotho and the local government has declared its intention to remain within South Africa and not become independent.

Compromise Rejected

This compromise is rejected by Moutse residents. “This land is our heritage from our father for our children,” Chief Mathebe said. “We will not leave. We will not be forced off.”

“Heunis has told us that we will be raped and that we might as well submit,” Godfrey Mathebe commented. “Our reply is, simply, ‘No way.’ We are going to fight and fight all the way.”

But Pretoria, in searching for a new political structure for South Africa, continues to believe in the viability of the tribal homeland system, Heunis said, and Moutse’s incorporation in Kwandebele should be seen in that context. “The independence of certain nations and the self-governing status of others will be part of the political answer to the problems of this country,” he said. As a result, he added, South Africa will grant independence to Kwandebele when it formally asks for it.

“Simon Skosana (Kwandebele’s chief minister) is getting us as his reward for going independent and making the whole bantustan (homeland) system look like it works,” Chueu commented. “Without Moutse, an independent Kwandebele would be even more of a political farce.”

Extensive Growth Seen

With the addition of Moutse’s area, about 255 square miles, and its relatively prosperous and well-educated population of 120,000, Kwandebele will be more than two-thirds larger in land, 25% more populous and, with the district’s mineral deposits, much better off economically. Moutse also has a hospital and a well-established school system that Kwandebele lacks.

Moutse residents’ greatest worry is that they will lose their South African citizenship when Kwandebele changes from a self-governing homeland within South Africa into a nominally independent one and, as a result, perhaps lose their right to work in urban areas.

They also fear that they will become easy victims of the rough justice that meted out by Ndebeles under tribal law and that their Northern Sotho language and culture will be threatened under Ndebele rule.

“Moutse’s people are about to lose their land because Kwandebele will nationalize it for the minerals; they are about to lose their citizenship and become foreigners in their own country and they are about to lose their language,” Chueu said. “Their chiefs, who are the symbols of unity and men looked up to for leadership, will be deposed by the Kwandebele government.

“The businessmen won’t be able to get licenses any longer as Ndebeles will be favored. Their (Moutse) children will have to go to school in an alien language. In short, we will become a minority in a country that is not ours and where the majority will discriminate against us.”

Attacks Heighten Fears

The brutal vigilante and imbokotho attacks here recently have heightened fears in Moutse about what life would be like in Kwandebele. Said one old man here, “Kwandebele--that is a land of terror. God save us from it.”

“We can live happily side by side with Ndebeles and we have for years,” Godfrey Mathebe said, “but we don’t want to live under them. . . . Besides, we are not someone’s cattle to be sold off to another if the price is right.”

The Mathebe clan, which settled here more than two centuries ago, moreover regards this region as belonging to it and the Ndebeles as newcomers, as their “guests” who were given refuge here 60 or 70 years ago and permitted to stay. The local Ndebele chiefs, for this reason, have always deferred to the Mathebe chiefs, according to Moutse residents.

“Under our customs, it simply cannot happen that a guest takes over the host’s home and then turns him into a servant,” Chueu said.

Moutse had hoped for support from Lebowa, the Pedi homeland that it was once part of and where its representatives still sit in the legislative assembly, but Cedric N. M. Phatudi, the Lebowa chief minister, has fallen silent after earlier calls for a referendum here and warnings that forced incorporation of the district into Kwandebele would bring bloodshed.

“Phatudi has been bought,” said Chueu, who is chief whip of the homeland’s ruling Lebowa People’s Party in the legislative assembly. “He is committed to a program of territorial expansion for Lebowa and he has been given more land, better land, and a rail line for giving up Moutse. The people here don’t count for a damn in this bantustan system.”

As Moutse’s strategist in the fight against incorporation, Chueu sees diminishing options, and he keeps returning to protest, even violence.

“We need to escalate our protests, we need to sharpen the conflict,” he said. “There may be violence and even deaths, we know, but it may be necessary now. That is the situation we are in, the country is in.

“Kwandebele must be made to see Moutse as so violent, so resistant that they will drop their demand for Moutse. The government must be made to see that they will have only endless trouble unless they leave us alone. They are to blame for bringing us so close to rebellion.”