When I worked as a journalist in South Africa 70 years ago,
Apartheid was starting to become a serious issue of the future following demands by indigenous nationalist politicians calling for sovereignty and independence for their tribal homelands throughout the country.
These events also resuscitated the former political schism from the Boer War days between the Dutch Afrikaans and English-speaking White communities who had originally settled in South Africa from Europe and Britain.
The African nationalist voice of protest was for the creation of instant self-determining tribal homelands which would continue to be financially supported in full by the White controlled Government.
As the post – World War 1950s sped by into the next decade, the South African Government finally decided to appease the indigenous majority by promising the creation of 10 homeland territories with the provision of eventual sovereignty.
These territories were given the traditional names of the Transkei, KwaZulu, Kwa Ndebele, Ciskei, Bophutharswana, Qwagwa, KaNgwane, Vende, Lebowa and Gazankulu.
Each of these planned independent territories, or Bantustan homelands as they became known, represented different tribal country lands set aside by law for indigenous ownership, control and habitation.
In this way, the ruling Afrikaans speaking Government intended to make “each of the designated areas ethnically homogenous.” This, in turn, was the basis for creating autonomous states for different Bantu ethnic groups often in violent opposition to each other.
Some 10 years later, the South African Government declared each of the 10 major African tribal groups to be lawful Bantustan homelands, largely as the African nationalist politicians had originally sought. But this naturally caused the indigenous tribal people to be disallowed from having any political rights within the White settled areas of South Africa as they had more or less technically achieved their own nationhood in the Bantustans.
Instead, they would be regarded as virtual foreigners or visitors should they enter the non-homeland White areas.
Although the South African Government expected most indigenous people to want to return to their own culture within the 10 new Bantustans, over 40 per cent were not prepared to do so in spite of strenuous goading by their respective tribal leaders.
Research undertaken at the time indicated that only 60 per cent of African people in South Africa wanted to stay in or return to their original tribal districts. The remainder claimed they preferred to live and work in White South Africa instead of being in their natural homelands.
Before long, the official Bantustan plan to award sovereignty to the African masses was adrift on the rocks of history and was a major failure.
Government financial grants to most of the Bantustans from the coffers of South Africa’s central government were soon found to be missing the mark in the homelands and were failing to reach the people for whom this support was intended.
Unemployment in the Bantustans became rife, corruption increased and the elite Afrikaans in the homelands became the main recipients of financial and material aid from the Government and official agencies.
Basically, the only Bantustan which proved to be a success of sorts was Bophuthatswana where South African tourist companies invested in major resorts and other amenities, including a casino.
This homeland also possessed valuable natural deposits of platinum which were also exploited through mining the metal, and African industry and commerce was developed with good effect to the local balance sheet.
Most of the other nine Bantustans, however, faced economic failure and were left to survive on the South African national treasury payments regularly transferred to them.
Even some of those who preferred the Bantustan idea set out to seek employment within White South Africa as temporary visiting workers, even though they knew they had been deprived of any citizen status there.
This set of circumstances led to the growth and spread of squalor in slum housing situations, crime and the general degeneration of African family life — another sad result of Apartheid and harsh racial segregation.
As a working journalist in Africa, I could never support legislated Apartheid and had many head-on collisions with the South African pre-A.N.C. Government. But I could always see only too clearly that urgent calls for separate sovereign territories within a country were socially dangerous and resulted in their peoples being manipulated and left with little material hope for the future.
One of the Associated Newspapers group newspapers I worked as correspondent for in Africa and as news editor was the Daily Mail in Johannesburg which won a prestigious international award for Press freedom in its very open condemnation of Apartheid.
Two members of the editorial staff were, in fact, jailed for their outspoken convictions over the failed Bantustan policy and the many other intrusions that Apartheid separation made in the lives of ordinary people, all too often politicised by calls for illusive tribal sovereignty.