Bantustan

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A Bantustan (also known as a Bantu homeland, a black homeland, a black state or simply known as a homeland; Afrikaans: Bantoestan) was a territory that the National Party administration of South Africa set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as a part of its policy of apartheid.^[1]

The term, first used in the late 1940s,^[2] was coined from Bantu (meaning "people" in some of the Bantu languages) and -stan (a suffix meaning "land" in the Persian language and some Persian-influenced languages of western, central, southern Asia and Eastern Europe). 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 (then under South African administration), 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.^[3]

The government of South Africa declared that four of the South African Bantustans were independent—Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei (the so-called "TBVC States"), but this declaration was never recognised by anti-apartheid forces in South Africa or by any international government. Other Bantustans (like KwaZulu, Lebowa, and QwaQwa) 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. A new constitution effectively abolished the Bantustans with the complete end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994.