ABSTRACT
‘Homeland’ or bantustan policy shaped the history of South Africa during the apartheid era. Most ‘homelands’ never achieved full spatial consolidation and their constituent parts were interspersed with white-owned farming areas and small towns. Some ‘homelands’ incorporated peri-urban zones of cities whose centres remained in South Africa proper. The term bantustans, with its dismissive reference to apparently inconsequential central Asian republics, gained purchase – though ironically a number of these regions later won independence with the breakup of the Soviet Union. The ‘homelands’ were characterised as amongst the most oppressed zones, housing the most impoverished people: Transkei In Dependence, as one student pamphlet punned. Even in South Africa, the dominant white political authorities could not simply reconfigure African societies as they pleased. Analysis was further complicated by a recognition that segregation increasingly implied a partial preservation of African traditional authority.
