Opening ParagraphSince 1960 several million Africans have been relocated in South Africa, mainly from the common (or ‘white’) area to the so-called ‘homelands’. This process of relocation is still under way, and precise enumeration of the numbers of people who have been and will be affected is impossible. Estimates vary according to the definition of ‘relocation’: it is apparent, for instance, that official sources define the process as narrowly as possible in order to minimize the numbers involved. There is abundant evidence, however, that relocation has taken place on a vast scale, and that the process has generally resulted in increased poverty and misery for its victims (Surplus People Project, 1983). Kane-Berman has recently argued that the South African Bantustans are, at present, not so much reservoirs of a reserve army of labour as dumping grounds ‘for people who have little chance of obtaining employment anywhere’ (1981: 29). From having been sub-subsistence dormitory areas for labour migrants, they are rapidly becoming places to which the structurally unemployed are being permanently consigned.
Virtually all of the married men to whom we spoke in Matatiele and Qwaqwa were bitterly opposed to their wives engaging in certain kinds of local income-generating activity. The main target of male opprobrium was shebeening, because husbands who were migrant workers were afraid that if their wives sold liquor from their homes they would be tempted into prostitution by their clients. The men were not, of course, opposed to the existence of shebeens, and were happy, when home on leave, to visit shebeens run by other men's wives, mothers or daughters.
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