Extract from a Sunday Times article titled ‘Tragic South Africa: 1. Where Apartheid leads’, 5 January 1958

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.

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