The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Bill is Passed

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 coined from Bantu (meaning people in some of the Bantu languages) and -stan (a suffix meaning land in the Persian languages). It subsequently came to be regarded as a disparaging term by some critics of the apartheid-era government’s homelands. “These were the historical realities which shaped the early ‘reserves’ and the policy of segregation in its original colonial form. Thus the basic ideas behind the Bantustan programme, and the geographical configurations which have resulted from them, are deeply rooted in the history of colonialism in Southern Africa and cannot be understood in isolation from their colonial background” (Sechaba, Vol. 10 First Quarter, 1976).

The Government established ten Bantustans in South Africa, and ten in neighbouring South West Africa, for the purpose of concentrating the members of designated ethnic groups, thus making each of those territories ethnically homogeneous as the basis for creating autonomous nation-states for South Africa’s different black ethnic groups.

The apartheid regime declared as independent four of the South African Bantustans — Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei (the so-called “TBVC States”) — but this declaration was never recognised by anti-apartheid forces in South Africa or by any international government. Other Bantustans (like KwaZulu, Lebowa, and QwaQwa) were assigned ‘autonomy’ but never granted ‘independence’. 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.

The Bantustans were generally poor, with few local employment opportunities. However, some opportunities did exist for advancement for blacks and some advances in education and infrastructure were made. Their single most important home-grown source of revenue was the provision of casinos and topless revue shows, which the National Party government had prohibited in South Africa proper as being immoral. These provided a lucrative source of income for the white South African elite, who constructed megaresorts, such as Sun City in the homeland of Bophuthatswana. Bophuthatswana also possessed deposits of platinum, and other natural resources, which made it the wealthiest of the Bantustans.

At the time of the passing of the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Bill, the African National Congress (ANC) became proactive in sensitising the international community, especially the solidarity movements in Western Europe, North America and certain Latin American countries, to be vigilant in terms of not allowing their governments to give recognition to the phony and fraudulent independent Bantustans. “The decision of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the United Nations rejecting the Bantustan concept” was widely publicised and the ANC went an extra mile to ensure that “any effort by any government or body to ignore these resolutions must be vigorously challenged” (Sechaba, Vol. 10 Fourth Quarter, 1976).

However, the homelands were only kept afloat by massive subsidies from the apartheid government; for instance, by 1985 in Transkei, 85% of the homeland’s income came from direct transfer payments from Pretoria. Bantustan leaders were widely perceived as collaborators with the apartheid system, although some were successful in acquiring a following, largely from the lower middle-class and the migrant labourers. In general, the leaders of the Bantustans were in collaboration and often in collusion with the apartheid regime. With the demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, all Bantustans were dismantled, and their territories reincorporated into the Republic of South Africa, with effect from 27 April 1994.

Sources:
South African History Online (SAHO).
British Anti-Apartheid Movement, “The Bantustan Programme: Its Domestic and International Implications, Sechaba, Vol. 10 First Quarter, 1976.
Editorial, “Transkei: The Myth of Independence”, Sechaba, Vol. 10 Fourth Quarter, 1976.

Castro Khwela
Good evening fellow Compatriots!