As a result of Pretoria's 1976 imposition of independence on the "black homeland" of Transkei, its capital city, Umtata, became one of the first communities in South Africa to experience fundamental change in apartheid. In Dismantling Apartheid, Walton R. Johnson discusses the important race and class realignments that accompanied this transition, as well as those relationships that remained unchanged.
Johnson shows that although the universal franchise radically altered municipal government and desegregation changed access to some public and private amenities, transformation of the basic patterns of dominance and subordinance occurred slowly. He describes how the established dominant group perpetuated key parts of the old order by guiding and manipulating a pliable new African middle class. For the mass of Africans, the fa ade was new but the underlying structures were the same. Effective social and political control, he shows, remained in the hands of the white elite, while few new economic opportunities opened for Africans.