TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 2

Subsection 4

A note on the role of parastatal organisations

37 Information was also provided to the Commission on the role of economic institutions such as the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) and parastatal bodies such as the Land Bank, the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), and the Electricity Supply Commission (ESKOM). This sheds light on how these institutions shaped the environment within which private business decisions were made (ESKOM, the SARB) and functioned as a financial arm of apartheid (Land Bank and the DBSA).

38 ESKOM, which supplies some of the world’s cheapest electricity, explained how the electricity supply reflected the peculiarities of apartheid:

This often caused separation of naturally integrated networks or the creation of new networks irrespective of costs ... Black areas were often left with no electricity services ... In certain instances electrified black areas subsidised neighbouring white areas.

39 The Land Bank pointed out that government policy:

narrowed the bank’s scope for granting loans and excluded the large segment of the South African population. Although not wilfully, the bank was indirectly supportive towards the prevailing inequality around land distribution and farming opportunities.

40 The DBSA made a similar argument, pointing to the way in which its operations (particularly in the homelands) were “immediately framed within an apartheid political context”. The DBSA submission noted, however, that it experienced ongoing tension between its development role and the political context within which it operated. It nevertheless accepted that it was “an integral part of the system and part and parcel of the apartheid gross violation of human rights.”

41 The Commission was gratified to learn of the transformation that had occurred in these organisations (most notably the Land Bank and the DBSA), paving the way for a constructive role in post-apartheid development. As these institutions are not part of the private business sector, they are discussed no further in this report.³

The agricultural sector

42 It was particularly regrettable that representatives of commercial agriculture did not participate in the hearing, despite an invitation to do so. Commercial agriculture has always been a fundamental component of business in South Africa and it is necessary to consider, if only briefly, its links with apartheid.

43 Like mining, agriculture has both shaped and been shaped by the racist structures of the political economy as it evolved both before and after 1948. Although the Commission’s mandate begins only in 1960, it is clear that a proper understanding of this period requires an awareness of its historical roots. This requires recognition, at the very least, of the Land Act of 1913⁴, as modified by subsequent legislation, including that of 1936. None of this was fundamentally repealed until 1991 which means that, throughout virtually the entire period of the Commission’s brief, black South Africans were prohibited from owning land in most areas of the country. Although it is certainly true that white farmers represented a spectrum of political views, it seems safe to conclude that this legislative prohibition retained the strong support of the majority of farmers throughout the apartheid years.

44 This means that, at the very least, representatives of commercial agriculture need to acknowledge (not least to themselves) the extent to which white farmers and their families have benefited (irrespective of their political views) from their privileged access to the land, which excluded virtually all other potential farmers.

45 Along with control of the land, white farmers also benefited from control over the movement of people by means of pass laws, which placed enormous power in the hands of farmers with respect to living and working conditions, wages and the lives of black workers and their families living on the farms.

46 Similarly, it is evident that the state’s policy of forcibly resettling into the impoverished homelands hundreds of thousands of black South Africans no longer needed on the increasingly mechanised, commercial farms was done, if not at the explicit request of the agricultural sector, certainly with its implicit support. Indeed, the nature of the precise link between commercial agriculture, the apartheid state and the infamous policies of resettlement as they were experienced by millions of South Africans during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is one that requires recognition and acknowledgement.⁵ Likewise, many farmers took advantage of the farm prison system, which provided them with free labour and resulted in many human rights abuses.⁶

47 Another critical area requiring deeper reflection by white farmers relates to the extent to which they failed – either by simple omission or through active hostility – to ensure better education for the children (other than their own) living on their farms. Education of farm children has long lagged notoriously behind even that education that was available for African and coloured children, either in the former ‘homelands’ or in the towns. This failure to educate children in a modern economy is itself a human rights abuse, for which the commercial farming sector must take at least some of the responsibility.