this policy in the towns, the government intensified its predecessors' at-
tempts to limit the influx of rural Africans by prohibiting them from
visiting an urban area for more than seventy-two hours without a special
permit and by authorizing officialsto arrest any African who could not
produce the requisite documents. Every year, more than 100,000
Africans
were arrested under the pass laws; the number peaked at 381,858 in the
year 1975-76.10 The government also removed African squatters from
unauthorized camps near the cities, placing those who were employed in
segregated townships, and sending the rest either to the Homelands or to
farms where the white owners required their labor.
The government also began to eliminate "black spots" in the coun-
tryside-that
is to say, land owned or occupied by Africans in the white
areas. And since white farming was becoming largely commercial and
mechanized, Africans lost their last land rights on white farms and many
Blacks became redundant to the labor needs of farmers..The "surplus"
Africans were expelled from the white rural areas, and, because they could
not enter the towns, most were obliged to resettle in the Homelands, evenif
they had never been there before. In several cases, the government started