Bantustan

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, the country of South Africa enforced the physical segregation of its Black and white populations through a policy known as apartheid. During the country’s apartheid era, South Africa’s majority-white government established a set of ten territories identified as “homelands” of the country’s Black citizens. These ten territories were collectively known as Bantustans. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “Bantustan” is a combination of the terms Bantu and stan, with Bantu meaning “people” in some tongues belonging to the Bantu language family and stan meaning “land” or “country” in multiple languages native to western and central Asia.

Observers note that the Bantustans served as a critical administrative tool used by South Africa’s white-dominated government during the apartheid era to achieve and maintain control of the country’s majority-Black population. The ten Bantustans officially dissolved in 1994, when South Africa’s post-apartheid government reconfigured the country’s internal divisions and administrative structure.

Background

South Africa established its apartheid policy in 1948, when the white-dominated National Party (NP) won control of the country’s federal government. Observers note multiple interconnected motivations behind the NP’s support for apartheid. The policy was rooted in notions of white racial superiority and an accompanying fear that South Africa’s Black majority would come to dominate political, economic, and cultural life in the country unless they were forcibly suppressed. The NP passed legislation known as the Group Areas Act in 1950, which segregated the South African population by race. Despite opposition from the African National Congress (ANC), led by Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), the NP forged ahead with plans to institute its segregation policy in federal law.

At this stage, the NP established physically separate areas for Black and white residents, making it illegal for a Black South African to enter a white-designated area without official permission from the relevant authorities. These racial segregation policies were enforced by a set of legal standards collectively known as “pass laws.” Black areas were known at this time as “reserves,” and they were marked by extreme poverty and squalor so severe that some Black South Africans would deliberately violate pass laws to be arrested and jailed in prisons where living standards were higher.

Over the course of the 1950s, racial and political tensions rose in South Africa and by 1960, the NP had banned the ANC and other political organizations including the Communist Party. The ANC pivoted away from civil disobedience and established a paramilitary wing to fight South Africa’s white-dominated government using aggressive strategies including sabotage and acts of violence. Over the course of the 1960s, international pressure mounted on South Africa to reform its racial policies. During the tumultuous decade, Mandela received a life sentence for his political activism and South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) was assassinated by antigovernment militant Dimitri Tsafendas (1918–1999).

Rejecting pressure from the international community, South Africa accelerated its racial segregation objectives. In 1970, the South African government passed the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, which limited the citizenship of the country’s Black population exclusively to the “homelands” specific to their designated ethnic group. Though earlier pieces of legislation formed the basic framework for the Bantustans, it was the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act that formally established their presence in South African federal law.

Overview

The first forcible relocations of Black South Africans to racially segregated areas occurred during the 1960s, before the Bantustans were officially enshrined in South African law. However, it was after the 1970 passage of the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act that the racial “homelands” came to be densely populated. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), more than three million Black South Africans were forced to move to the Bantustans over the course of the 1970s. Expert estimates of the total number of people transferred by force to the Bantustans from the 1960s–1980s reach 3.5 million.

During the apartheid era, ten Bantustans were established in South Africa. They were Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, KwaNdebele, KwaZulu, Lebowa, Qwaqwa, Transkei, and Venda. Multiple similar Black “homelands” were also established in neighboring South West Africa (now Namibia), which was under the administrative control of South Africa for most of the twentieth century. The Bantustans were generally situated in parts of South Africa and South West Africa that did not directly abut areas designated for the exclusive use of white residents.

Under the applicable statutes, South Africa’s ten Bantustans were initially considered territories of the federal government. Four of the Bantustans— Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei, and Venda—were later declared independent states by South Africa’s government. However, their independence never received international recognition. Most of the remaining Bantustans came to be considered “autonomous regions” within South Africa and were capable of passing and enforcing their own laws.

Histories of the Bantustans note that the designers of apartheid policy, including Verwoerd, intended for the Black homelands to eventually become completely independent; they were created with the explicit purpose of establishing an isolated, white-only state of South Africa. However, economic underdevelopment left the Bantustans dependent on the economically prosperous white areas of South Africa. This inequity was most visible in agriculture. South Africa’s most fertile and productive farmlands were reserved for white agrarians, while much smaller and agriculturally inferior tracts were assigned to the Bantustans. As a result, residents of the Bantustans became heavily reliant on white South Africa for food. The Bantustans also served as sources of labor for white South African businesses; their Black residents were permitted to enter white-designated areas for work, mainly in agriculture and mining. Meanwhile, unemployed Black South Africans were afforded no such privileges and were functionally confined to the largely squalid Black homelands.

During the mid-to-late 1980s, revolts broke out across Black South Africa and the country’s white-dominated government gradually engaged in a process of reform. The racial desegregation of public accommodations began in 1989 under F.W. de Klerk (1936–2021); the ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990, the same year that South West Africa became independent as Namibia. Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and elected president of South Africa in 1994, upon which the Bantustans were dissolved and replaced with nine new provinces in a reconfigured, desegregated South Africa.

Bibliography

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Ally, Shireen and Arianna Lissoni. New Histories of South Africa’s Apartheid-Era Bantustans. Abingdon-on-Thames, United Kingdom: Routledge, 2017.

Blakemore, Erin. “How Nelson Mandela Fought Apartheid—And Why His Work Is Not Complete.” National Geographic, 17 Jul. 2020, www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/nelson-mandela-fought-apartheid-work-not-complete. Accessed 14 Jan. 2022.

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Larson, Zeb. “South Africa: Twenty-Five Years Since Apartheid.” Ohio State University, Aug. 2019, origins.osu.edu/article/south-africa-mandela-apartheid-ramaphosa-zuma-corruption?language‗content‗entity=en. Accessed 14 Jan. 2022.

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