Hon Deputy Speaker, hon members, I do not wonder - perhaps some of you do - why many people from rural areas continue to flock into urban areas in their numbers. Do we remember or refuse to remember that there were black spots in South Africa and that people were herded into Bantustans in the tribal areas created by this Act? Do we remember that there were farm evictions, some of which are still with us today, in order to put the "kaffer op sy plek" [black person in his place] as we continue to hear about in our rural areas today?
As if this project was not enough, where blacks were the "other coloureds" of apartheid, the regime created fake tribal leaders, tribal authorities and tribes, which still characterise South African rural areas today, thus jeopardising the democratic South African landscape in rural areas to this day.
Section 2 of the Act created black tribes, and section 3 of the Act gave the State President the authority to replace governments of black people and create tribal authorities at his discretion. This was meant to administer black affairs and make black people run their own affairs under the supervision and tutelage of the white President of the time. They removed blacks from the main body of the South African economy and the political mainstream, thus disenfranchising blacks and removing their rights in general.
The current democratic state has a Constitution that upholds human dignity and entrenches such rights in the Bill of Rights. In the black spots, black people did not have any human dignity. They were herded away like animals. Nonracialism and nonsexism are entrenched in the South African Constitution today. In those days people were categorised into tribes and kaffirs.
The supremacy ... [Interjections.] Do you want to deny this? [Laughter.] [Interjections.] Are you sure you want to deny that it did exist? [Interjections.]
The South African Constitution, and not the President, enjoys supremacy. I want to repeat this point. The South African Constitution is the supreme law of the country. The President is not the supreme law. Nobody under this Constitution is above the law, not even the President. Because of that the Constitution entrenches the rule of law. It does not allow any President, at his discretion, to remove a person or banish a person from any space in South Africa under the guise of a black spot.
Universal adult suffrage in South Africa gives all of us the right to vote, unlike this Act which excluded blacks from voting in their own country.
The Constitution entrenches equality before the law, equal protection by the law and benefit of the law, unlike Matanzima, Mphephu, Sebe and Qgozo, Mangope and all the others of the same ilk who were a law unto themselves. Their systems and structures cannot exist alongside the democratic system that we have today.
Key to the repeal of this Act is the total eradication of all vestiges of apartheid, including all undemocratic and dehumanising practices of traditional authorities against women and rural people in general.
Furthermore, the Balkanisation of South Africa cannot promote a share in the mineral resources beneath the soil, in the sea and on the land outside tribal areas. Therefore, mobilising South Africans to become their own liberators cannot be enhanced and realised in full unless we remove laws like this. We need to destroy all tribal practices that seek to weaken the progressive organisations, ideas and hegemony in a democratic South Africa.
We in the ANC appreciate that today this Act is an orphan like apartheid, and therefore support its repeal as nobody benefited from it. However, there are practices that were created by this Act whose legacy still exists everywhere in South Africa and we must pursue and find them. I thank you. [Applause.]