The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Bill is Passed
On 26 February 1970, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Bill was passed, whereby every African was to be issued with a certificate of citizenship of his/her respective ‘homeland’. The homelands or Bantustans in question at that time were Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, Gazankulu, KwaZulu, Lebowa, QwaQwa, KwaNgwane and Venda. In 1974 the establishment of a tenth Bantustan, KwaNdebele, was envisaged. Two years later, in 1976, the first Bantustan, Transkei, became “independent”. After 1976 three black Bantustans were granted independence by apartheid South Africa, which included Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei.
Under the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, the Government stripped black South Africans of their citizenship, which deprived them of their few remaining political and civil rights in South Africa, and declared them to be citizens of these Bantustans. A Bantustan (also known as a Bantu homeland, black homeland, black state or simply homeland, in Afrikaans: “Bantoestan”) was a territory that the National Party administration of South Africa set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of its policy of apartheid. In a generic sense, Bantustans were regions that lacked any real legitimacy, consisting of several unconnected enclaves, or which had emerged from national or international gerrymandering.
The term was first used in the late 1940s and was coine
