Acornhoek, South Africa
Acornhoek, South Africa
The Amazwi Villager Newspaper serves the town of Acornhoek and the surrounding village communities, which once were part of homeland areas of the apartheid government.The policy of apartheid came into being with the accession to power of Dr HF Verwoerd in 1958. He began implementing the homeland structure as a cornerstone of separate development. Verwoerd came to believe in the granting of "independence" to these homelands, separate states for individual ethnic blacks groups.
Thirteen per cent of the total land was reserved for homelands to house blacks, some eighty percent of the population. This land was divided into ten black homelands amongst eight ethnic groups: Xhosa, Tswana, Venda, Zulu, Pedi, Swazi, Sotho, and Tsonga.
Acornhoek and nearby Bushbuckridge were designated Sotho and Tsonga lands. Here, as in the other homelands, blacks were stripped of their South African citizenship and no longer able to apply for South African passports. Women had very little or no legal rights, no access to education, and no right to own property.
Many of the inequalities created and maintained by apartheid still remain in South Africa overall, and in Acornhoek specifically. Living conditions in the Acornhoek community are still very primitive with many homes lacking running water or electricity. There is little commerce, no big towns nearby, and the unemployment rate could be as high as 60%, though with unregistered employees and companies it is difficult to get an exact figure.
Overall, the country has one of the most unequal income distribution patterns in the world: approximately 60% of the population earns less than R42,000 per annum (about US $7,000), whereas 2.2% of the population has an income exceeding R360,000 per annum (about US $50,000). Despite the ANC government's implementation of a policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), blacks make up over 90% of the country's poor but 79.5% of the population.
(Source: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_under_apartheid)
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