Bantustan

A Bantustan was a territory that the National Party administration of the Union of South Africa and later the Republic of South Africa set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa, as a part of its policy of apartheid.
The term, first used in the late 1940s, was coined from Bantu and -stan. It subsequently came to be regarded as a disparaging term by some critics of the apartheid-era government's homelands. The Pretoria 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. Under the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, the government stripped black South Africans of their South African citizenship, depriving them of their few remaining political and civil rights in South Africa, and declared them to be citizens of these homelands.
The government of South Africa declared that four of the South African Bantustans were independent—Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei, but this declaration was never recognised by anti-apartheid forces in South Africa or by any international government. Other Bantustans 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. An Interim Constitution effectively abolished the Bantustans with the complete end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994.

Creation

Beginning in 1913, successive white-minority South African governments established "reserves" for the black population in order to racially segregate them from the white population, similar to the creation of Indian reservations in the United States. The Natives Land Act, 1913, limited blacks to seven percent of the land in the country. In 1936 the government planned to raise this to 13.6 percent of the land, but it was slow to purchase land and this plan was not fully implemented.
When the National Party came to power in 1948, Minister for Native Affairs 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 creation of the homelands or Bantustans was a central element of this strategy, as the long-term goal was to make the Bantustans independent. As a result, blacks would lose their South African citizenship and voting rights, allowing whites to remain in control of South Africa.
The term "Bantustan" for the Bantu homelands was intended to draw a parallel with the creation of Pakistan and India, which had taken place just a few months before at the end of 1947, and was coined by supporters of the policy. However, it quickly became a pejorative term, with the National Party preferring the term "homelands". 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. These amounted to 13% of the country's land, the remainder being reserved for the white population. The homelands were run by cooperative tribal leaders, while uncooperative chiefs were forcibly deposed. Over time, a ruling black elite emerged with a personal and financial interest in the preservation of the homelands. While this aided the homelands' political stability to an extent, their position was still entirely dependent on South African support.
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 process was to be achieved in a series of four major steps for each homeland:

The unification of the reserves set aside for the various "tribes" under a single "Territorial Authority"
The establishment of a legislative assembly for each homeland with limited powers of self-rule
The establishment of the homeland as a "self-governing territory"
The granting of full nominal independence to the homeland

This general framework was not in each case followed in a clear-cut way, but often with a number of intermediate and overlapping steps.
The homeland of Transkei served in many regards as a "testing ground" for apartheid policies; its institutional development started already before the 1959 act, and its attainment of self-government and independence were therefore implemented earlier than for the other homelands.
This plan was stepped up under Verwoerd's successor as prime minister, John Vorster, as part of his "enlightened" approach to apartheid. However, the true intention of this policy was to fulfill Verwoerd's original plan to make South Africa's blacks nationals of the homelands rather than of South Africa—thus removing the few rights they still had as citizens. The homelands were encouraged to opt for independence, as this would greatly reduce the number of black citizens of South Africa. The process of creating the legal framework for this plan was completed by the Black Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, which formally designated all black South Africans as citizens of the homelands, even if they lived in "white South Africa", and cancelled their South African citizenship, and the Bantu Homelands Constitution Act of 1971, which provided a general blueprint for the stages of constitutional development of all homelands from the establishment of Territorial Authorities up to full independence.
By 1984, all ten homelands in South Africa had attained self-government and four of them had been declared fully independent between 1976 and 1981.
The following table shows the time-frame of the institutional and legal development of the ten South African Bantustans in light of the above-mentioned four major steps:

Homeland

Tribe/Nation

Territorial
authority

Legislative
assembly

Self-
government

Nominal
independence

Notes

Transkei

International recognition

Bantustans within the borders of South Africa were classified as "self-governing" or "independent". In theory, self-governing Bantustans had control over many aspects of their internal functioning but were not yet sovereign nations. Independent Bantustans were intended to be fully sovereign. These areas received little attention from the colonial and later South African governments however, and were still very undeveloped. This greatly decreased these states' ability to govern and made them very reliant on the South African government.
Throughout the existence of the independent Bantustans, South Africa remained the only country to recognise their independence. The South African government lobbied for their recognition. 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. 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. Each TBVC state extended recognition to the other independent Bantustans while South Africa showed its commitment to the notion of TBVC sovereignty by building embassies in the TBVC capitals.

Life in the Bantustans

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. The four Bantustans which attained nominal independence repealed all apartheid legislation.
Laws in the Bantustans differed from those in South Africa proper. 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.
Bophuthatswana also possessed deposits of platinum, and other natural resources, which made it the wealthiest of the Bantustans.
However, the homelands were only kept afloat by massive subsidies from the South African government; for instance, by 1985 in Transkei, 85% of the homeland's income came from direct transfer payments from Pretoria. 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. Millions of people had to work in often appalling conditions, away from their homes for months at a time. On the other hand, only 40% of Bophuthatswana's population worked outside the 'homeland' because the homeland was able to create industrial sites like Zone 15 and Babelegi.
The homelands were extremely unpopular among the urban black population, many of whom lived in squalor in slum housing. Their working conditions were often equally poor, as they were denied any significant rights or protections in South Africa proper. The allocation of individuals to specific homelands was often quite arbitrary. Many individuals were assigned to homelands they did not originate from, and the designation of an individual as part of a particular ethnic group was often arbitrary, especially for individuals with mixed ancestry.
Bantustan leaders were widely perceived as collaborators with the apartheid system, although some were successful in acquiring a following. Most homeland leaders had an ambivalent stance regarding the independence of their homelands: a majority was sceptical, remained cautious and avoided a definite decision, some outright rejected it due to their rejection of "separate development" and a professed commitment to "opposing apartheid from within the system", whilst others believed that nominal independence could serve to consolidate their power bases and presented an opportunity to build a society relatively free from racial discrimination. The leaders of the Bantustans, despite their collaboration with the apartheid regime, occasionally criticized the South African government's racial policies and called for the repeal or softening of apartheid laws. Various plans for a federal solution were at times mooted, both by the Bantustan governments and by opposition parties in South Africa as well as circles inside the white ruling National Party.