Extract from a Sunday Times article by Iain Lang entitled ‘Tragic South Africa: 1. Where Apartheid leads’, 5 January 1958, Catalogue Ref: DO 35/6715
The South African government Tomlinson Commission investigated the economic development of the native reserves, later formed as Bantustans or homelands. The Tomlinson report was published in 1954.
The South African Bureau for Racial Affairs (SABRA) was set up in 1948 at to provide an alternative to the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR). The organisation provided academic justification for the apartheid policy.
Transcript
The S.A.B.R.A. Plan
No completely formulated scheme for Separate Development has been promulgated by the Government or the Nationalist Party. But in 1950, two years after the Nationalists came to power, the Government appointed a Commission for the Socio-Economic Development of the Bantu areas under the chairmanship of Professor F. R. Tomlinson, “to conduct an exhaustive inquiry into a comprehensive scheme for the rehabilitation of the Native Areas, with a view to developing with them a social structure in keeping with the culture of the Native and based on effective socio-economic planning”.
Over a period of six years the Tomlinson Commission produced an eighteen-volume report, and although the Government has not accepted its recommendations in detail it has endorsed its advocacy of Separate Development, as the only alternative to the progressive integration of Europeans and Bantu into a single homogenous society.
In its plan for “complete separation” the commission proposed sixteen major Bantu areas, or Native Reserves which, with a number of smaller pockets, should be capable of carrying a population of 15 million by the year A.D. 2000. A still more interesting figure is the forecast for the “European Areas” in that year- an estimated population of 4.5 to six million Europeans, plus 6.5 million Bantu and 5.3 million other non-Europeans.
- What was the purpose of the Tomlinson Commission?
- What does the term ‘Separate development’ mean? What would be the alternative?
- What is the main recommendation of the Tomlinson Commission according to this article?
- What are the implications of this plan for Black Africans?