Bantustan

In South West Africa, Ovamboland, Kavangoland, and East Caprivi were declared to be self-governing, with a handful of other ostensible homelands never being given autonomy.

[4] When the National Party came to power in 1948, Minister for Native Affairs (and later Prime Minister of South Africa) Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd built on this, introducing a series of "grand apartheid" measures such as the Group Areas Acts and the Natives Resettlement Act, 1954 that reshaped South African society such that whites would be the demographic majority.

The term "Bantustan" for the Bantu homelands was intended to draw a parallel with the creation of Pakistan and India ("Hindustan"), which had taken place just a few months before at the end of 1947, and was coined by supporters of the policy.

[5] As Nelson Mandela explained in a 1959 article: The Afrikaner view was: Verwoerd argued that the Bantustans were the "original homes" of the black peoples of South Africa.

In 1951, the government of Daniel François Malan introduced the Bantu Authorities Act to establish "homelands" allocated to the country's black ethnic groups.

The role of the homelands was expanded in 1959 with the passage of the Bantu Self-Government Act, which set out a plan called "Separate Development".

This enabled the homelands to establish themselves in the long term as self-governing territories and ultimately as nominally fully "independent" states.

This plan was stepped up under Verwoerd's successor as prime minister, John Vorster, as part of his "enlightened" approach to apartheid.

By 1984, all ten homelands in South Africa had attained self-government and four of them (Transkei, Boputhatswana, Venda and Ciskei) had been declared fully independent between 1976 and 1981.

[citation needed] The government made clear that its ultimate aim was the total removal of the black population from South Africa.

In 1976, leading up to a United States House of Representatives resolution urging the President not to recognise Transkei, the South African government intensely lobbied lawmakers to oppose the bill.

[54] Arbitrary and unrecognized amateur radio call signs were created for the independent states and QSL cards were sent by operators using them, but the International Telecommunication Union never accepted these stations as legitimate.

The South African elite often took advantage of these differences, for example by constructing large casinos, such as Sun City in the homeland of Bophuthatswana.

The Bantustans' governments were invariably corrupt and little wealth trickled down to the local populations, who were forced to seek employment as "guest workers" in South Africa proper.

"[63] In March 1990, de Klerk, who succeeded Botha as State President in 1989, announced that his government would not grant independence to any more Bantustans.

"Separate development" as a principle remained in force, and the apartheid regime went on to rely on the Bantustans as one of the main pillars of its policy in dealing with the black population.

The long-term vision during this time was the creation of some form of a multi-racial "confederation of South African states" with a common citizenship, but separated into racially defined areas.

From 1990 to 1994, these "confederational" ideas were in principle still entertained by large parts of the National Party (and in various forms also by certain parties and groups of the white liberal opposition), but their overtly race-based foundations gradually became less pronounced in the course of the negotiations to end apartheid, and the focus shifted to securing "minority rights" (having in mind primarily the white population in particular) after an expected handover of power to the black majority.

But since especially the African National Congress made it clear that the principles of "one man - one vote" and a unitary state were non-negotiable, confederal schemes were eventually dropped.

[65] In the period leading up to the elections in 1994, several leaders in the independent and self-governing homelands (e.g. in Boputhatswana), who did not wish to relinquish their power, vehemently opposed the dismantling of the Bantustans and, in doing so, received support from white far-right parties, sections of the apartheid state apparatus and radical pro-apartheid groups like the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging.

Reincorporation was mostly achieved peacefully, although there was some resistance from the local elites, who stood to lose out on the opportunities for wealth and political power provided by the homelands.

General Constand Viljoen, an Afrikaner who served as chief of the South African Defence Force, sent 1,500 of his militiamen to protect Lucas Mangope and to contest the termination of Bophuthatswana as a homeland in 1994.

The other six had limited self-government: The first Bantustan was the Transkei, under the leadership of Chief Kaiser Daliwonga Matanzima in the Cape Province for the Xhosa nation.

They have never had any formal political dependence on South Africa and were recognised as sovereign states by the international community from the time they were granted their independence by the UK in the 1960s.

Moreover, it was envisaged that, by separating each ethnic group and confining people by law to their restricted areas, discrimination by race would automatically disappear.

All harbours, most of the railway network and the tarred road infrastructure, all larger airports, the profitable diamond areas and the national parks were situated in the Police Zone.

[72][73][74][75] In July 1980,[76] the system was changed to one of separate governments ("representative authorities") as second-tier administrative units (responsible for a number of affairs like land tenure, agriculture, education up to the level of primary school teachers' training, health services and social welfare and pensions) on the basis of ethnicity only and no longer based on geographically defined areas.

[115] In Nigeria, Catholic bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah has referred to southern Kaduna State as "one huge Bantustan of government neglect.