Ours is a history written in blood – a history in which violence is so deeply embedded in the fibre of our existence that to reflect on the past is to navigate through brutality. And Bantustans, euphemistically referred to as homelands, are symbols of the brutality that has been historically meted out on Black bodies. Bantustans were established with the ostensible reason of creating self governing homelands which would be guided to full independence (Evans, 2012), but they were in fact zones of exclusion characterised by the production of colonial power.
Understanding the theoretical underpinnings of Bantustans is imperative in our quest not only to make sense of South Africa’s historiography, but to understand the historical dynamics of separate development that continue to shape the prevailing material conditions of our people in the democratic dispensation. Bantustans, though abolished in 1994 and reincorporated into the Republic of South Africa, have left a permanent mark not only on the spatiality of our country, but on the imaginations of our people and their sense of place in the new South Africa.
Bantustans were zones of exclusion created specifically to isolate Black people from a South Africa to which apartheid logic had determined they had no legitimate claims. According to Evans (2012), the establishment of Bantu stans was rooted in factors both domestic and international. Following the end of the Second World War in 1945, many countries experienced rapid industrialisation. This created a huge demand by industrialists as well as commercial farmers for cheap labour. The mining sector in South Africa was also in demand of cheap labour. Since the previous decade, the mining sector had experienced industrial transformation. Jones and Muller (1992) contend that the price of gold increased owing to devaluation, which made the exploitationof low-grade ore economically viable. This upsurge in the gold-mining industry created a multiplier effect in the industrial sector, mainly in the local manufacturing and construction industries (Jones and Muller, 1992).
But the ruling National Party was faced with a challenge: the provision of cheap labour to industries in urban areas would create a crisis of migration into the cities, defeating the purpose of the already existing system of influx control. This ignited the debate on the creation of homelands. Following the Sharpeville/Langa Massacre in 1960, the question of influx control crystallised, and the systematic removal of Black people from urban areas into homelands really began. The establishment of Bantustans had by then already been firmly rooted in legislation, with the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, 1959 (No. 46 of 1959) having been passed the year before.
The removal of Black people from urban areas was not simply about the reconstruction of space, it was also about the reconstruction of the very South African identity. Eleven years after the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, 1959 (No. 46 of 1959) was passed, an even more draconian piece of legislation was passed – the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, 1979 (No. 26 of 1970). This denaturalisation law allocated Black people citizenship in their defined traditional homelands, which were legally separated from the republic. But being allocated citizenship in these homelands did not come with any meaningful political change, for Black people were still denied civil and political rights. Simply put, Black people were no longer citizens of South Africa – they had effectively been denaturalised but remained still the subjects of the apartheid regime.
It would take 24 years before the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, subsequently renamed the National States Citizenship Act, 1970 (No. 26 of 1970) was repealed. But by this time, a lot of significant damage had been done. Because of years of systematic neglect, meaningful economic development in and around Bantustans had never materialised. This was in sharp contrast to urban areas of South Africa where the labour of migrants from the Bantustans had been used to build a strong economy for the White minority. But the damage was more than just economic and spatial – it was also deeply socio political.
Because Black people had been allocated citizenship in traditional home lands where resources were scarce, there was huge contestation among differ ent ethnic groups for these limited resources. Vail (1989) in his work entitled, The Creation of Tribalism in South Africa contends that homelands played a significant role in shaping tribal and ethnic identities. This is because homelands served as a labour reservoir for the urban locales within the Republic of South Africa, and as such were the reserve for migrant labour. According to Vail, the migrant labour system was rooted in the construction and maintenance of tribal and ethnic identity because as members of various cultural groups left their isolated rural areas and interacted with each other in industrial or urban locales, they formed stereotypes of themselves and others, and these stereotypes effectively highlighted and strengthened culturally defined distinctions amongst peoples. (Vail, 1989)
These would go on to retard the creation of a single South African identity, for parochial ethnic loyalties were merely cultural ghosts lingering on into the present, weakened anomalies from a fast receding past. As such, they were destined to disappear in the face of the social, economic and political changes that were everywhere at work. (Vail, 1989)
In South Africa today, 25 years into the democratic dispensation, these stereotypes that were born of the Bantustan construction continue to find expression, with ethnic minorities such as Balobedu being continuously ejected from the faulty national identity that is being superficially constructed.1
Bantustans as zones of exclusion thrust Black people into marginal existence in ways that have shaped how they relate with a South Africa in which they were once foreigners. But this marginal existence was not based solely on the politics of nativity that were birthed in the past, but in the continued exclusion that happens today. This is because "space and where we are in it … determines a large portion of our status as subjects, and obversely, the kinds of subjects we are largely dictates our degree of mobility and our possible future locations" (Kirby, 1996). An analysis of the patterns of development in South Africa demonstrates that even in the new dispensation, former Bantustans are still greatly deprived of growth and development prospects. The legacy of separate development has meant that these areas are less resourced than their urban counterparts, plunging those who reside in them into poverty, unemployment and structural inequality.
Herein the question of meaningful citizenship arises. If Black people in former Bantustans continue to experience the effects of separate development and being thrust to the edge of the periphery of economic activity (David et al, 2008), can they stake a claim to meaningful citizenship?