Bantustan yearning a perverse outcome of ANC misrule
A perverse outcome of the ANC’s governance failures has been the emergence of black people who long for the vile and largely unlamented “homelands”, or bantustan, system.
In this paper last week, it was the turn of Herman Mashaba, the leader of ActionSA, who extolled the virtues of the so-called traditionalist governance model of the Bophuthatswana homeland, and specifically the purported leadership qualities of its leader, Lucas Mangope.
On Mashaba’s long list of the bantustan’s achievements, too many to repeat here, he included economic development, a good education system, an absence of nepotism and classroom discipline.
Bemoaning the demise of Bophuthatswana with the arrival of democracy, Mashaba asserted: “Had we known then what we know now, we would have insisted during the restructuring of government in North West and elsewhere that efforts be made to preserve what was good and progressive in the traditionalist governance model of Bophuthatswana.”
Those who know the origin of Bophuthatswana and other so-called homelands would not have missed how Mashaba rather disingenuously sought to skirt the matter of the bantustans’ shameful political origins and raison d’être. He did this with a disclaimer that he would not “dwell on the politics of race, apartheid and independence”. Yet apartheid was the very genesis of the bantustan system. Without apartheid there would have been no bantustans — and no Bophuthatswana.
Among those who experienced apartheid memory may, in fairness, have faded, and many who are alive today would not have been born at the time, so the history of the bantustans bears recapitulating.
They were created as part of apartheid’s grand plan to rid South Africa of its black majority by forcibly turning them into “citizens” of ethnically based “homelands”. The process would have culminated in all 10 homelands gaining “independence”, as in the case of first the Transkei in 1976, then Bophuthatswana the next year.
At “independence”, a bantustan’s “citizens” would lose their South African citizenship and supposedly their claim to political rights in South Africa, including their right to vote.
As a result, the homelands, which consisted of 13% of South Africa’s land, with the rest (all 87%) remaining in socalled white South Africa, formed a cornerstone of the apartheid system of turning black South Africans into foreigners and stripping them of their political rights.
Homelands such as Bophuthatswana were not merely a benign construct aimed at furthering the interests of black people and preserving their cultural heritage. Instead, through them, apartheid’s architects aimed not only to disenfranchise and banish blacks from South Africa but to divide and rule them along ethnic lines.
Therefore, the likes of Mangope and other leaders who enthusiastically accepted the sham independence were not the heroes Mashaba would have us believe they were. In fact, they committed treachery against black people by signing away their birthright.
Without their participation, the bantustan system, and therefore apartheid’s objective of effectively sending into exile the entire black population, would not have seen the light of day.
Had they succeeded, all black people would today be foreigners in their own land, not qualifying for citizenship even by birth. And that includes Mashaba himself. Rather than in South Africa, he instead would be campaigning for election in some godforsaken place designated his homeland by apartheid apparatchiks. Perhaps, with some luck, becoming a tinpot president or cabinet minister.
Mashaba praised Mangope and his cronies for being “oldstyle African nationalists”. In truth, that is to give true African nationalists, who fought against colonialism and apartheid, a bad name.
But the former Joburg mayor is not the only black person who hankers after bantustan rule. Often I’ve heard people, angry at the failures of the current government to provide services (to facilitate the so-called better life for all), waxing lyrical about how things were better in Mashaba’s model bantustan of Bophuthatswana or under Kaiser Matanzima in the Transkei.
Given the history of apartheid, declared a crime against humanity by the world, it would be deeply ironic if we now looked to the bantustans for inspiration, to learn how to build a more just, economically prosperous society and a well-run government. Let alone looking for moral examples thence.
You don’t need a homeland system, or to turn the majority of the population into, to quote Sol Plaatje, “pariahs in the land of their birth”, to achieve development and social progress. Nor to build a meritorious civil service and instil discipline in our schools, the dearth of which Mashaba correctly decries. Neither to fix potholes and provide potable water and proper health care to citizens.
Equally abhorrent was Mashaba’s attempt to conflate African culture with apartheid’s dispossession programme, which sought to abuse that culture to balkanise our country, leaving only whites to live off the fat of the land.
In our quest to undo the damage wrought by apartheid and to build a new, better society, we must guard against revisionism aimed at whitewashing apartheid and rehabilitating its collaborators.
That said, it is truly an indictment of the ruling party, which has misgoverned a new country born with so much hope and promise, that many among the formerly oppressed are singing the praises of a universally discredited system — as if to say: take us back to the pharaoh!