Home land policy

• The Tomlinson Report and the Bantustans
• The Tomlinson Report believed that the laws and policies of the apartheid government undermined agriculture and created a class of full-time farmworkers residing in the homelands
• The Tomlinson Report believed that the homelands had become a dumping ground and that migrant labour was a problem
• The Tomlinson Report recommended that private land ownership be encouraged in the homelands to undermine the power of the chiefs
• The government prioritised a policy of 'betterment' or rehabilitation in the homelands, which involved moving rural families into compact villages and dividing the land into smaller paddocks to control grazing
• The Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 set up eight self-governing homelands in which black African people were to be citizens, effectively making white people the largest racial group in South Africa
• The Bantu Authorities Act and the Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 provided the lynchpin for grand apartheid and the policy of Bantustans as separate and independent countries
• Bantustans


  Homelands created for black South Africans under apartheid
• Problems and contradictions in the Bantustan policy

  • New areas of white-owned land bought to extend the homelands, but still made up a very limited percentage of South Africa's land area
  • National Party not prepared to divide South Africa equally as whites would never have accepted the sacrifice
  • Africans to be subdivided into their historical chieftaincies and language groups, but whites would remain whites
  • No separate bit of 'white' South Africa for Afrikaners, English-speakers, Portuguese South Africans, or Jewish South Africans
  • Most Africans conceived of themselves at least partly as Africans and not simply as members of a small chieftaincy or ethnic group
  • People held multiple identities (extended family, clan, Zulu, South African, Johannesburg worker)
• The inadequacies of the Bantustans
• HOW the African National Congress (ANC) made support for the policy politically unacceptable
• Many of the books on South Africa assume that the pass laws were effective
• The fact that they were so central an issue for the African political opposition seems to prove the point
• One of the most remarkable features of the early years of Nationalist rule was that pass laws failed to keep Africans out of the cities
• The African urban population of South Africa rose from 1.8 million people in 1946 to 3.5 million in 1960: more than the whole of the white population
• African rights in the cities were diminished but many people were prepared to brave the pass laws in order to find work and other opportunities
• Some white employers, including householders with domestic servants, colluded with workers to bypass influx control
• Fort Hare came under government control for the full segregation by race of the university system, with separate language universities and set our policies for different African ethnic groups and other apartheid measures (see Chapter 3)
• Hendike, Minister of Native Affairs, in 1954: 'My department's policy is that the Bantu must be guided to serve their own community in their own areas and not be allowed to be drawn into the economic life of the European community... The Bantu must be guided to develop to the full in their own areas and not in the European areas... There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour... But within his own community all doors are open for him'