Apartheid tried to make black South Africans foreigners in their own country
The homelands policy aimed to redraw who counted as South African, not just where people lived. A 1970 law turned every black South African into a citizen of an ethnic homeland and removed their South African citizenship. Four homelands were declared independent, but South Africa was the only country that ever recognised them.
Segregated land had a long history before apartheid. The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted black South Africans to seven percent of the country, and a 1936 plan to raise this to 13.6 percent was only partly carried out. After the National Party won power in 1948, Hendrik Verwoerd, first as minister for native affairs and later as prime minister, made the homelands central to grand apartheid. The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 set aside about 13 percent of the land for black ethnic groups, run by compliant chiefs, while uncooperative ones were removed.
Supporters of the policy coined the word Bantustan to suggest a parallel with the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. In a 1959 article Nelson Mandela rejected the comparison: India and Pakistan were genuinely independent states whose minorities had equal rights, and partition had been negotiated with the people affected. The government itself came to prefer the word homelands.
The 1959 Bantu Self-Government Act laid out a path from tribal authority to legislative assembly, self-government and finally nominal independence, with Transkei used as a testing ground. Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei were declared independent between 1976 and 1981. Pretoria built embassies in their capitals and lobbied foreign lawmakers, yet no other government recognised them. In 1978 the minister Connie Mulder told parliament that, taken to its conclusion, the policy would leave no black person with South African citizenship.
That goal failed. In 1986 only about 39 percent of black South Africans lived in the homelands; most lived in townships and informal settlements around the cities. The human cost was huge all the same: an estimated 3.5 million people were forced from their homes between the 1960s and 1980s. The homelands were poor, underdeveloped and dependent on Pretoria. Ten more were created in South West Africa, now Namibia. An interim constitution abolished them as apartheid ended in 1994.
Source: Bantustan
