Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

‘Homelands’ for black South Africans in the native reserves. These had existed since the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which allocated 7.3 per cent of the land in South Africa (increased to nearly 14 per cent in 1936) as reserves. At that time blacks were 72 per cent of the population: they could not own any land outside the reserves. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) gave some limited administrative powers to government-appointed chiefs in the reserves, but at this time the architect of apartheid, verwoerd , had no intention of making the reserves independent. By 1959 he had changed his mind, as he hoped he could gain international respectability by giving political rights to Africans in the reserves and, at the same time, strengthen white supremacy in the rest of the country. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) set up eight (later ten) Bantustans in existing reserves, each with some self-government. Africans were divided into ‘nations’, which were the basis of the Bantustans: KwaZulu for the Zulus, Transkei and Ciskei for the Xhosa, Bophuthatswana for the Tswana. In 1963 Transkei was the first Bantustan to be given self-government and a legislative assembly, extended to other ‘homelands’ in the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act in 1970. This also deprived Africans of South African citizenship and made them citizens of their ‘homeland’, even if they had been born ... log in or subscribe to read full text