User:Mmakhotso58/sandbox

Overview: The Transvaal Rural Action Committee was formed in 1983, as a sub-committee of the Black Sash.
Black Sash created the TRAC project in 1983 to work with communities in the then Transvaal and Northern Cape who were facing forced removals. At the time the Apartheid government was trying to force as many people as possible into the ethnic based Bantustans, which it referred to as Homelands. People resisted as these Bantustans were not home, and were overcrowded and far away from jobs. The grand plan of the Apartheid government was to lead these Bantustans to "Independence", and deprive Black South Africans of their SA citizenship. TRAC's mandate was to work with communities who had approached Black Sash for help with resisting the removal. Aninka Claassens was first employed as a field worker in 1983, followed by Marj Brown in February 1984, and later Joanne Yawitch joined as the third fieldworker. In 1983, the communities that TRAC worked with were Mathopestad, Motlatla, Machakaneng, Bethanie, Kwangema, Driefontein, Daggakraal, Badplaas, Leandra, Bethal, Ekangala, Moitse, Valspan, Huhudi, Lothair and Warburton, Winterveld, and Hartebeesfontein. These included rural and urban communities, who were either threatened with removal or incorporation into a Bantustan. The most famous forced removak that TRAC exposed was the removal at gunpoint of the BaKwena Ba Mogopa in 1984, on the 14th February.

TRAC's modus operandi:
As a sub-committee of Black Sash, TRAC was not aligned to any political party. It was dedicated to human dignity, equity and accountability and operated on two basic principles: responding to requests from communities, and working through democratically elected or broadly representative local structures. TRAC later became independent of Black Sash, post Apartheid, and became an affiliate of the National Land Committee. It worked closely with the Rural Women's Movement (RWM), and the Land Access Movement of South Africa (LAMOSA). In its work, TRAC focused particularly upon Gender, Environment, Tenure, Capacity-building and Local Government issues. Post the threat of forced removals, TRAC assisted communities to have their voice heard in future land reform programmes, and delivery mechanisms. It also lobbied for redistribution of land, restitution for the communities who had lost their land in the era of forced removals, and facilitated development on land where people had received restitution, or land through redistribution.

TRAC publications include:
The Myth of Voluntary Removals,1984.

Umhlaba: Rural Land Struggles in the Transvaal in the '80s, by Aninka Claassens, November 1989.

A Toehold on the Land, May 1988.

Kwandebele: The struggle against Independence, 1986.

TRAC newsletters