Long-Term Struggles for Land and Related Services: Egalitarian Local Authority in the Eastern Cape’s Border-Kei Region from the Mid-1980s to 2010.

ABSTRACT:For many within Bantustans during the epoch of late apartheid, the struggle for egalitarian local authority, and provision of services, innately linked to those for residential and other land needs. Such occurrences were particularly evident in the Ciskei, which largely emerged as a receptacle for countless relocated African families, and whose land and amenities was controlled, and then dispensed through state-created tribal authorities. Those contrived power brokers served at the base of government hierarchy but were equally influential in linking services to loyalists of the Bantustan system whilst fostering its social and political patronage networks. Naturally, the system impelled reaction and contestation in the form of robust civic movements from those the Bantustan policy sought to incorporate by early 1980s. Equally, such civic movements widened by the late 1980s to include even those already within the Ciskei Bantustan, but initially alienated from land and services allotted by tribal authorities. By then this movement had become key to rural and urban representative voices and was no longer restricted to the Ciskei. It marked a Border-Kei region of the current Eastern Cape Province, which from the early 1990s coalesced around the Ciskei, the western parts of the Transkei and the enfolded former white farming districts with their towns. How then did the calibrated local authority system after 1994 typify various formations of this area against persistent land demands and services, as well as reorganising chiefly authorities (now referred to as traditional authority)? To what extent did governance and distribution of services continue being routed for benefaction? This paper provides an historical outline of the campaign for egalitarian local authority, and ultimately shows the early complexities of an integrated municipality in 2000 in that hitherto segregated Border-Kei region of South Africa’s Eastern Cape.