“Bantustan States”

In 1951, South Africa’s apartheid state passed the Bantu Authorities Act that parcelled the entire population of black Africans into ten ethnically defined selfgoverning “homelands” or bantustans, four of which were eventually given so-called “independence.” Presented by Pretoria as a form of black self-determination, they were rejected by the liberation movement and its supporters as a political fraud: reservoirs of cheap African labour ruled by “puppet” governments, often consisting of illegitimately installed chiefs (and white civil servants on secondment from Pretoria), governed by tribal custom and coercive force. Bantustanisation was, of course, an historical failure.