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Promulgation of the Republic of South Africa Constitution Act of 1983, the inauguration of eleven Black Town Councils in January 1984, and subsequent legislation regarding third tier government brings immediacy to the subject of the geographic implications of political autonomy and the control of urban finance in South Africa. This paper reviews recent changes affecting local government under the new political dispensation and discusses some important geographic implications of these changes. In particular it advances the argument that the logic of current legislation directed towards the exercise of municipal autonomy by individual ethnic groups can be extended to presage fundamental change in national social and political structures of a sort not envisaged by the architects of the present constitution. In short local autonomy could become an instrument in the dialectics of political change in South Africa.