New Histories of South Africa's Apartheid-Era Bantustans

Book excerpt: The bantustans – or ‘homelands’ – were created by South Africa’s apartheid regime as ethnically-defined territories for Africans. Granted self-governing and ‘independent’ status by Pretoria, they aimed to deflect the demands for full political representation by black South Africans and were shunned by the anti-apartheid movement. In 1972, Steve Biko wrote that ‘politically, the bantustans are the greatest single fraud ever invented by white politicians’. With the end of apartheid and the first democratic elections of 1994, the bantustans formally ceased to exist, but their legacies remain inscribed in South Africa’s contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic landscape. While the older literature on the bantustans has tended to focus on their repressive role and political illegitimacy, this edited volume offers new approaches to the histories and afterlives of the former bantustans in South Africa by a new generation of scholars. This book was originally published as various special issues of the South African Historical Journal.