Apartheid and the Bantustans From Reserves to Reincorporation

As anticolonial nationalism and postwar decolonization undermined the global legitimacy of South Africa’s settler colonial order, the apartheid government sought new ways to rationalize and entrench white minority rule. The Afrikaner nationalist regime mimicked the global discourses of self-determination and development to justify tightening its regimes of repression and colonial exclusion: instead of the full political representation demanded by African nationalists, the Black majority would instead be granted nominal “self-government” in one of ten ethnic “homelands” or bantustans. Through an examination of the changing historiography on the bantustans, this chapter examines the context, evolution, and consequences of these policies over the twentieth century, from the creation of a national scheme of “native reserves” in 1913 to the creation of apartheid-era bantustan states. Drawing on recent historiography, it explores the dynamics surrounding the making of these ethnic regimes, their social and economic milieu, and the mass displacement, relocation, and militarized repression that were integral to the bantustan project. It explores escalating resistance to apartheid as it played out in the bantustans, traces their demise and eventual reincorporation in 1994, and surveys their profound and lasting legacies in postapartheid South Africa.