South Africa's Bantustans: illusion and reality

Abstract

South Africa’s program of granting sham self-government to its scattered, overcrowded, and resource-poor “Bantu reserves” must be seen, first and foremost, as a response to the rapid decolonization which has taken place since the late 1950’s in the rest of Africa. By granting all of it’s the African inhabitants “citizenship” in the various “Bantu homelands”, South Africa intends to make the super-exploitation of these nearly fifteen million people more palatable to world public opinion at least in the west, if not also in Africa; once the Bantustans have been set up, South Africa can maintain that its African workers are “foreigners” Black countries.