Apartheid

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movement. The British introduced the vote in regional elections for a few property-owning
Blacks with a certain minimal income and at least the rudiments of literacy in the Cape
province, but this was revoked in 1936. 366
One of the most racist aspects of South Africa’s legal system was the exploitation of
black non-citizen migrant workers, eventually including millions of black Bantustan
‘citizens’, and the simultaneous heaping of privileges on white immigrants. Already during
the 19 th century this policy was implemented for diamond and gold mine workers from the
neighboring countries, especially from Lesotho, Rhodesia, and Mozambique.
Before 1994, immigration policy was a naked instrument of racial
domination. Until 1991, the official definition of an immigrant was
that he or she had to be able to be assimilated into the white
population. By definition, therefore, Africans were not considered
immigrants. Rather, they came to South Africa as temporary workers,
entering through back-door channels as contract migrants... 367
From the 1960s, the ten Homelands were made into ‘self-governing’ areas, and four
were granted ‘independence’ by the South African government during the 1970s, and a further
one in 1981. South Africa itself was the only country that ever recognized these ‘countries’,
too weak – economically, politically and even culturally – to become truly independent in any
sense of the word. White capitalists were forbidden by the South African government from
investing directly in any business venture in the Homelands.
In actual fact, the creation of the Homelands was a trick, invented by the apartheid
regime for two main purposes. The first was to answer the powerful wave of decolonialization
that had swept through Africa during the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, leaving South
Africa, South West Africa (until 1991) and Rhodesia (until 1980) as the only three countries
out of the fifty-four countries of the African continent under formal white minority rule from
1975 onwards. Only a single African country had really been politically independent fifty
years earlier, Ethiopia. The South African government hoped to appease critics abroad with
this strategy but failed to do so. Secondly, the South African government saw the creation of
Homelands as an opportunity to expel unwanted masses of Blacks from the country, to deny
them any rights and benefits and indirectly to condemn them to a slow death. By 1980,
population density in the Homelands, which were undeveloped and had land of very little
agricultural value, was 23.8 per square mile. In South Africa as a whole (including the
Homelands) it was 9.1.
It was the manifest strategy and policy of the government to force almost all Blacks
into the Homelands, and to treat Blacks that were or could be needed by the economy in South
Africa as visitors, with less rights than South African (black) citizens, i.e. with practically no
rights. Just to make sure, the South African Whites placed their collaborators on the thrones or
at the helms of the Homelands, with undemocratic governments, of course. That way,
absolutely no political trouble could be expected from them, despite the deliberate preprogramming
of acute crises, including mass starvation, coups d’état and counter-coups. 368
Still, there were some pieces of agriculturally useful land within the designated
Homelands. But the former had been taken and occupied long ago by white farmers. Instead
of handing them back to the Blacks, however, the government created borders around existing
white farms, as well as continuous and easy access to these from the rest of South Africa. And
as a result: ‘Nearly every Homeland consisted of several pieces of land, separated by whiteowned
farms. Bophuthatswana had nineteen fragments, some hundreds of miles apart;
366 Mandela 1995 (1994): 96; Wilson: African Decolonization, 1994
367 Crush: South Africa: New Nation, New Migration Policy? 2003
368 Thompson 1990: 191ff; Lester 1996: 126ff