An Economic History of the Homelands

KwaZulu-Natal, my home province, is suffering yet another tragedy—extreme and partially avoidable flooding is decimating incredibly vulnerable communities. 30% of KwaZulu-Natal is comprised of the former KwaZulu homeland—the homelands the topic of my MSc dissertation. This post is the second chapter of my dissertation titled: Invisible Borders—Persisting Scars: How the Apartheid Homelands Define Contemporary South Africa. In my dissertation, I estimated the magnitude of the persisting welfare reductions caused by the Apartheid homelands. For example, I found that living just 5 kilometres on the wrong side of a now non-existent homeland border increases the number of children per teacher in a class (class size) by 8%. My unabridged dissertation can be found here.

“Of all the manifestations of inequality and oppression under apartheid, none was as stark or potentially as enduring, as the territorial separation of people along racial lines” – Edward Patrick Lahiff (1997: 10)

INTRODUCTION

Grand Apartheid¹ categorically transcended segregation. The division of South Africans by race was insufficient for the National Party² (NP). Grand Apartheid instead sought to strip black South Africans of their citizenship, replacing it with an ethnically and geographically defined nationality. This was achieved by the NP legally designating land for black occupation, known as the homelands or bantustans, the central concern of this thesis. The NP thus created a pattern of race, embedded in the geography of South Africa, mirroring access to opportunity, in what would come to be known as spatial Apartheid. This thesis seeks to determine the extent to which Apartheid’s geographically determined scarcity and suffering has persisted 25 years into democracy. This chapter is an economic history of the homelands, necessary to contextualise the econometric analyses which follow.

The legacy of spatial Apartheid endures and maybe the greatest challenge facing South Africa’s young democracy. To this day, the question of land redistribution predominates South African politics (Kepe and R. Hall, 2018); the migrant labour system distorts family life and labour (Rogan, Lebani, and Nzimande, 2009); and traditional leaders control much of South Africa, impacting the livelihoods of millions (Mazibuko, 2014).

Removing the citizenship of black South Africans (denaturalization) was an ideological priority for the NP. Denaturalization reinforced the standing legal requirement for black people to carry passbooks, or domestic passports, in white South Africa. Both were part of the project of ‘separate development’, a cornerstone of Apartheid ideology. Its logical zenith was the creation of nationally independent homelands. With insidious rhetoric, the NP compared the creation of the homelands to decolonisation, granting the ‘native’ people sovereignty over their land (Geldenhuys, 1981: 24).

Fig. 1—Cartoon by J.H Jackson (1959)

Denaturalization implied the alienation of all positive rights³ and claims against the NP government. As the NP had scant de facto respect for sovereignty (evidenced by its military incursions into bordering nations), the de jure sovereignty of the homelands implied no real negative rights against the NP either. Indeed, the four homelands which attained ‘independence’ (only recognised by the South African state), continued to existentially rely on the Apartheid state. The homelands relied on the Republic for everything from budgetary finance⁴ to external trade (most homelands were landlocked, none had ports), thus refuting any possibility of de facto sovereignty.

By 1991, 47% of the South African population formally resided within land designated as homelands (C. Cooper et al., 1994). Today 29.5% of South Africans reside within the former homelands.⁵ Had all the homelands attained independence at their creation, the white population would have been a plurality in the remainder of South Africa. Indeed, the balkanization of South Africa along ethnic lines was intended foremost to make a minority out of each black African ethnic group, rather than a unitary black nationalist identity. A wave of Afrikaner nationalism had brought the NP to power. The NP was thus intimately familiar with the ‘dangers’ of nationalist identity formation.

To understand the nature of life within the homelands, and how the deprivation of these areas has persisted, it is crucial to understand the historical forces which led to this “highest stage of separate development” (Geldenhuys, 1981). This chapter is primarily an economic history of the homelands. Yet, one must keep in mind that the economic (in)viability of the homelands bears only derivatively on the innate injustice of the homelands and the ‘divide-and-rule’ ethnic nationalism that brought the homelands into existence.

THE ORIGINS AND FUNCTIONS OF THE HOMELANDS

The origins of Apartheid and the homelands lie in the settler colonisation of South Africa. Foremost was the aim to geographically separate people by race and ethnicity. However, there was an opposing incentive to employ cheap (i.e. “non-white”) labour. This led to the creation of internal passports for people of colour (PoC) labourers. These were necessary for PoC to access economically active white-only areas. Hence, the promulgation of pass laws provides the natural starting point for the eventual creation of the homelands.

The VOC⁶ is said to have required their slaves to identify themselves with passes as early as 1709 (History, 2011). Yet, South African Union documents (U. o. South Africa, 1922: 2) report that “the earliest reference to pass provisions in the Cape appears to be in the Proclamation of the Earl of Macartney, dated the 27th of June, 1797, which aimed at excluding all natives from colonial territory and directed farmers and others employing natives to discharge them”.⁷ The pass laws entailed the economically costly expulsion of PoC and increased ethnic homogeneity.

Over the next century, the Afrikaners (of mostly Dutch heritage) and the British would unevenly settle South Africa. Expansion brought with it the military domination of local people, culminating in the Anglo Zulu War of 1879. Defeated, yet retaining much of their socio-political and economic systems, black Southern Africans would continue to retain some of their ancestral lands, mostly in the eastern half of the country (Welsh, 1973: 29) (Thompson, 2008: 109).

The homelands would eventually lie in the eastern half of the country. This fact is in line with the NP’s claim that the land chosen for the homelands was selected on the grounds that it was the ancestral lands of the various “native” ethnic groups (implicitly, the land not completely conquered or owned by white people). Later scholars and popular opinion would come to contest this in favour of a ‘marginal lands’ hypothesis: that the land was selected both for its poor agricultural productivity as well as its distance from productive centres in white South Africa (Houghton, 1987; Levin and Weiner, 1991; van Zyl and van Rooyen, 1991). The latter half of this hypothesis is certainly true. The average distance from each discrete area of land which comprise the homelands, to the nearest of the 20 most populated cities, is 186km.⁸ This is the shortest geodesic, or ‘straight line’, distance. Yet, with typically poor road infrastructure, actual travel distances were significantly longer (Butler, Rotberg, and Adams, 1978).

Fig. 2—The 10 homelands, comprised of 78 non-contiguous units of land, covering 13,7% of South Africa’s land area. Source: Author

In all four settler polities,⁹ the drive to expand capitalist production (both industrial and agricultural) required significantly more labour than was supplied by the precapitalist demand for employment. This led the colonial regimes to atrocious interventions to induce the population to part with their labour. An example is Natal’s implementation of a hut tax of 10 shillings per hut in 1857 (T. G. o. South Africa, 1908). Taxes such as the hut tax were often payable only in colonial currency: leading to increased labour in markets delineated by capital, the establishment of the economic value and broad tender acceptance of the currency, and the bureaucratic ‘legibility’ or enumeration of the local population.¹⁰ These were all crucial aspects to the successful geographic partitioning of people along ethnic lines.

The precursor to the homelands were the native reserves, such as those created by Sir Shepstone’s Native Reserves policy in Natal (N. Nattrass and J. Nattrass, 1990). The rationale for the reserves was explicitly economic: the generation of a surplus supply of labour (ibid.). As decreed by Earl Grey in 1849:

It would be difficult or impossible to assign to the natives such locations of an extent sufficient for their support... I regard it on the contrary as desirable that these people should be placed in circumstances in which they find regular industry necessary for their subsistence (quoted in Van der Horst (1971)).

The commodification or proletarianization of black labour was perceived to require depriving the black population of the means to exist on precapitalist modes of production (primarily subsistence agriculture).¹¹ This was accomplished through the near-total restriction of land rights, relegating the black population to the limited lands designated as native reserves and subsequently the homelands. Severely restricted property holdings combined with fertility rates above replacement, inevitably led to high levels of population, as detailed in Chapter 4.

The drive to induce indigenous labour participation reached its highest levels during the ‘Mineral Revolution’ (Worden, 2011). The Mineral Revolution began in the late 19th century with the discovery of the largest gold reserves in the world in Witwatersrand (in the Afrikaner Transvaal Republic) and diamonds in Kimberley (in the British Cape Colony) (Norman, 2006). A near inexhaustible demand for labour in the mines produced a migrant labour system that pulled millions of migrant labourers from the rural periphery in what Crush, Jeeves, and Yudelman (1991: 2) describe as “one of the key distinguishing features of South African industrialisation”.

South Africa’s unique system of migrant labour was directly caused by the homelands due to their distance to productive centres in white South Africa, such as mines, forcing labourers to migrate for employment as they could not legally reside in white South Africa. The homelands thus became ‘reserves of migrant labour’, redoubling the pre-industrial racial order with a highly oppressive system of male-only mining compounds, typically in a state of violence and privation (Vosloo, 2020).

The relative prosperity of the mineral revolution heightened demand for agricultural product. This led to a general acceptance by the white population that restricting black land rights was required to both ensure the flow of cheap labour to the mines as well as to restrict ‘unfair competition’ to the emerging class of white commercial farmer (N. Nattrass and J. Nattrass, 1990). As Colin Bundy (1979: 115) puts it:

“Both the farmer and the mine-owner perceived in the late nineteenth century the need to apply extra-economic pressure to the African peasantry; to break down the peasant’s ‘independence’, increase his wants, and to induce him to part more abundantly with his labour, but at no increased price.”

However, as per Wolpe (1972), the labour-inducing oppression of black people (primarily accomplished through the restriction of land rights) was limited by a countervailing end of the NP: wage subsidisation. At the household level, agricultural production in the reserves subsidised the wages of the migrant labourer while the extended family provided welfare services that would otherwise be costly, such as housing and childcare. Thus, “African redistributive economies” allowed capitalists to remunerate their migrant workers below the real cost of “reproduction” (Lahiff, 1997: 12).

The household was trapped by the insufficiency of both the penurious wage of migrant household members and the artificially limited agricultural production of the household, thus forced into participating in both. The economic incentive to reduce wages acted to prevent the total restriction of rights in what Wolpe would characterise as a defining feature of segregation and a primary difference with Apartheid, a distinction shortly explained.

The migrant labour system, designed to entrench economic servitude, has had long-lasting social consequences. Although this chapter is an economic history, it would be remiss not to mention the broader social consequences of the migrant labour system. By 1990, up to 80% of men between 25 and 50 were absent from any given homeland (N. Nattrass and J. Nattrass, 1990: 521). They were absent in order to migrate to their places of employment in white South Africa as they could not legally reside in white South Africa. Absenteeism combined with extreme levels of violence in the mining compounds led to a breakdown of social order in the homelands. As per N. Nattrass and J. Nattrass (1990: 521):

“High rates of outmigration reduce the domestic labour supply, increase the burden on the women remaining behind, upset social relations, and hamper production and investment decisions as these are usually tightly controlled by men”.

Consequently, the migrant labour system has been identified as causing many of South Africa’s deepest social ills, such as the staggering number of children raised by one or fewer parents (65.6%) (K. Hall and Sambu, 2019) and the extremely high rate of gender-based violence (Elder, 2003). These harms were entrenched by the self-perpetuating nature of the system, as migration undermined the homeland economy leading to further reliance on migration and “the creation of a cycle of dependency and underdevelopment” (N. Nattrass and J. Nattrass, 1990).”

The first law governing the reserves after the Union of South Africa (1910)¹² was the 1913 Native Land Act. This Act formalised the reserves (not yet homelands), designating only 7% of the country as reserves, while simultaneously proscribing the sale of all land to black people outside of the reserves. The law additionally abolished sharecropping and other farm tenancy unless the labourer worked a minimum of 90 days of compulsory labour a year.

This pushed the equilibrium further away from the wage subsidising functions of the reserves. Colin Bundy (1979: 213) believed this was done with “the intent to inhibit the process of class differentiation within the reserves and prevent the emergence of either a class of black commercial farmers or a landless proletariat, each of which posed its own threat to the system of racial segregation and migrant labour”. Liberal commentators often perceived these laws to be economically irrational, even from the perspective of the NP (Wellings and Black, 1986). Yet, an economic system based on the exploitation of the masses has as its first principle the preservation of the socio-political order.¹³

The first laws to formally create political, judicial, and administrative structures in the reserves were the 1920 Native Affairs Act and the 1927 Native Administration Act. These laws established the legal standing of a separate and subsidiary legal system, Native Law, such that “The Minister [of Native Administration] may authorize any native chief or headman recognized or appointed [by the Governor General] to hear and determine civil claims arising out of native law” (Section 12 1a).

Thereafter, chieftaincy gained legal recognition under the NP. Yet, “one should not be misled by the nomenclature [of chieftaincy] into thinking of this as a holdover from the pre-colonial era” Mamdani (1996: 23). Native law was a crucial step towards the creation of independent homelands, accompanied by the executive consolidating control of important aspects of ‘native administration’, once under the authority of parliament. It also created a system of governance in near-perfect opposition to the tenets of contemporary institutional economics, as per Mamdani (1996: 23):

The authority of the chief thus fused in a single person all moments of power: judicial, legislative, executive, and administrative. This authority was like a clenched fist, necessary because the chief stood at the intersection of the market economy and the nonmarket one. The administrative justice and the administrative coercion that were the sum and substance of his authority lay behind a regime of extra-economic coercion, a regime that breathed life into a whole range of compulsions: forced labour, forced crops, forced sales, forced contributions, and forced removals.

Poor governance structures have a well-studied direct bearing on the economic prosperity of people (Chong and Calderon, 2000). The legacy of Native Law persists under the democratic Constitution of South Africa, Chapter 12, enshrined as Customary Law. Indeed, these institutions have recently been legislatively strengthened by the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act 3 of 2019. Thus, when determining the persistence of the effects of Apartheid socio-political structures on the welfare of the current residents of the former homelands, as this thesis attempts, one must not envisage post-Apartheid politics and governance de novo. Much of the persistence found reflects the persistence of the institutions themselves, rather than the lag between the dismantling of pernicious institutions and economic liberation.

Further, a commonly accepted foundation of economic liberty, property rights, is greatly circumscribed by many contemporary traditional leaders and Chapter 12 institutions, such as the Ingonyama Trust (see the Appendix, Figure 6.1 for a map of the land currently held by the Ingonyama Trust). Under the Ingonyama Trust (the Zulu monarchy), land is held in common and administered by the trust, in what has been described as a neo-feudalist system of landholding (Mazibuko, 2014). With the Ingonyama Trust continuing to hold roughly 30% of KwaZulu-Natal and almost all of the former KwaZulu homeland, it is likely that the effects of the Trust will significantly influence the estimates of the persistence of the effects of Apartheid in former KwaZulu. This is perhaps why the pattern of education inequality is most clear in contemporary KwaZulu-Natal. Quoting from Basic Education (2005):

Experience from a village education project in the Maputaland area of north-eastern KwaZulu-Natal shows the political difficulties created when traditional power relations are disturbed. The education project began formally in 1989 although its roots lay in a process of community development stretching back to 1978. The project was managed by a democratically oriented development committee as part of a broad donor funded community development programme. The project was able to leverage expertise from universities and NGOs into various aspects of the project. The education programme included:

•    A resources centre with books, videos, magazines and newspapers

•    Four full-time personnel

•    A school support programme An ’out-of-school’ matriculation programme (in partnership with SACHED)

•    A literacy programme

•    A recreational (films, discos) and sports programme.

The education programme worked closely with work and skills development projects in agriculture, aquaculture, horticulture, healthcare and social welfare, the development of village infrastructure and skills training and production units. Over a five year period, this integrated community development programme developed a strong support base but was unable to win the support of the traditional authority structures. This lead to the closure of the whole development project, including the education programme. The key issue to emerge from this example is that of governance. Who own[s] and controls the project? i.e. The TA or the development committee?

The Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 increased the land in the reserves to 13.7% of South Africa, where it would remain, with minor changes, until the end of Apartheid (1994). The act was the last major legislation governing the reserves before the beginning of Apartheid. The act established the Native Trust (later the Development Trust) which was responsible for acquiring the land for the expansion of the reserves.

The Trust’s land acquisition was exceptionally arbitrary, often involving drawing a border around “Black spots”—areas populated by black people in white South Africa—without any contiguity to the land already designated as homeland. Two examples are the incorporation of the KwaMashu and Umlazi townships into the KwaZulu homeland. This led to the extreme fragmentation of the homelands, with KwaZulu being comprised of 42 isolated fragments (Fig. 4).

Fig. 3—The persisting pattern of race in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. (Firth, 2013)

The colours of the dots represent the self identified races of the Census 2011 takers. The “Black spot” of KwaMashu is the blue (designating “Black African”) area beneath the green area (Indian, Phoenix) at the top of the map. Umlazi is the blue area at the very bottom of the map.

Fig. 4—The 42 fragments of the former KwaZulu homeland. Source: Author from Malinda (2015).

The Native Trust was responsible for the development of the already overcrowded and poverty-stricken reserves and for preventing what was perceived as an imminent ecological crisis being induced by erosion (Letsoalo and Rogerson, 1982). This fear led to the programme of ‘Betterment’, which aimed to prevent soil erosion through, inter alia, controlling the number of cattle in the reserves. Betterment was exceptionally hated, leading to outbreaks of violent opposition, such as in Sekhukhuneland (1958) and Pondoland (1960) (Mbeki, 1964: 111).

The NP claimed that culling cattle was necessary to improve milk yield, the genetic bloodstock, and pasturage, further claiming culled stock fetched a fair price when sold at auction (Beinart and C. Bundy, 1980: 300). Yet, for the rightful owners of the cattle, these arguments fell on deaf ears with the perception that the auctions “provide[d] a captive market for speculators and (white) farmers” where prices are “often determined at an artificially low level” (Yawitch, 1982: 12). Yet, it is possible that this brutal regime was effective in reducing erosion and thus the quality of the soil. I test this hypothesis in Chapter 4 Section 4.2, where I find it is likely that the homelands have reduced topsoil fertility.

THE BEGINNING OF APARTHEID, RESERVES BECOME HOMELANDS

The election of the NP in 1948, the beginning of Apartheid, marks the beginning of the shift of the reserves into self-governing homelands or bantustans. Yet, the word bantustan was coined earlier. The first usage I can find is from the South African Institute of Race Relation’s Fourteenth annual report, 1942: “Some speakers have referred to it [the reserves] as “Bantustan” — but it is to be compared, not with Pakistan, but with Utopia or with Plato’s republic” (SAIRR, 1942). The word is a portmanteau of ‘Bantu’, the large linguistic group, and ‘-stan’ the suffix for land in the Persian group of languages.

At first, ‘Bantustan’ was used by the NP before it was co-opted as a term of disparagement. Indeed, even the first recorded usage above uses the word disparagingly, a practice adopted by liberationists, such as Biko (1978).¹⁴ Soon the NP used the term ‘Homeland’ nearly exclusively. I use the word ‘homeland’ throughout this thesis not in support of the NP’s usage, but because the residents of the homelands preferred the homelands to be called as such (Lahiff, 1997: 9).

In the progression from segregation to Apartheid and Separate Development, Wolpe identifies not merely greater intensity in the project of segregation and wage subsidisation, but an entirely new paradigm of oppression:

“The practice and policy of Separate Development must be seen as the attempt to retain, in a modified form, the structure of the “traditional” societies, not, as in the past [under segregation], for the purposes of ensuring an economic supplement to the wages of the migrant labour force, but for the purposes of reproducing and exercising control over a cheap African industrial [emphasis added] labour force in or near the ‘homelands’, not by means of preserving the pre-capitalist mode of production but by the political, social, economic and ideological enforcement of low levels of subsistence... under circumstances in which the conditions of reproduction (the redistributive African economy in the reserves) of that labour force is rapidly disintegrating” (Wolpe, 1972: 450).

World War II induced a period of industrial expansion, drawing black workers to white-only cities (Levin and Weiner, 1991: 88). Black industrial employment, which the NP associated with a rise in the militancy of black workers, occurred alongside the collapse in subsistence agriculture (primarily due to the pre-Apartheid land laws detailed above).¹⁵ The equilibrium between wage subsidisation and labour inducement was thus broken, leading the NP to double down on ‘influx control’ and the ‘three rural pillars of Apartheid’ (communal land tenure, tribal administration, and betterment (Hendricks et al., 1990)) in an attempt to maintain control over the black population. Failure to maintain subsistence outside of the tightly controlled migrant labour system led to ever more brutal forms of NP oppression. This characterises a fundamental shift, from segregation to Apartheid, according to Wolpe.

Between 1950 and 1980, 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes, most “repatriated” to the homeland which legally corresponded to their ethnicity (Platzky and Walker, 1985). In this time, the Apartheid regime passed a slew of repressive legislation on the path to creating nationally independent homelands.

The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 expanded the powers of the chieftaincy and created “territorial authority status”, first received by Transkei in 1957, the highest from of authority provided for in the Act (Geldenhuys, 1981: 5). The Promotion of Bantu Self Government Act of 1959 created a tiered system of Tribal, Regional, and Territorial authorities and was the first to legislatively tie ethnicity with specific homelands, creating eight “separate national units” (Hill, 1964: 15). The Transkei Constitution Act of 1963 granted self-government to the Transkei. Transkei gained nominal independence in 1976, followed by Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981, the so-called TBVC states. Independence was ‘nominal’ because only the South African Republic recognised their independence.

Fig. 5—The flags of the homelands (Source: Unknown)

The homelands continued to substantially subsidise the real cost of the migrant labour system, both before and after nominal independence, although no longer primarily through precapitalist modes of production. The system both artificially reduced revenue collection while burdening the homelands with most public costs. Migrants typically only remitted between one-fifth and one-quarter of their income to their families in the homelands (J. Nattrass, 1976). Yet, this income comprised between 45 and 60 per cent of the total product (or GNP) of the homelands (Southern Africa, 1987).

Consequently, the vast majority of the earnings of the legal residents of the homelands were taxed in the Republic where it was spent. Low real taxation combined with public expenditures still falling to the homeland governments (such as schooling and retirement) demonstrates the parasitism of the migrant labour system on the homelands. Thus, by 1987, post-nominal independence of the TBVC homelands, transfers from the Republic comprised more than 50% of the homeland budgets (Geldenhuys, 1981). This ensured the homelands were existentially dependent on the NP, guaranteeing a high degree of control.

CONCLUSION

It is evident that Apartheid had profound effects on the lands designated as homelands. As this thesis shows, these harms have persisted into democracy. How democratic South Africa contends with spatial injustice is dependent on a firm knowledge of exactly how persistent the patterning of subjugation and impoverishment has been. While acknowledging the historicity of current oppression is vital, it does not follow that a reversal of the programmes that led to this oppression will undo anything. Yet, backwards-looking considerations are important for (non-consequentialist) justice and locating and understanding the forces which continue to impinge on the prosperity of South Africa’s people.

1. Grand Apartheid encompasses the expansive restrictions on the political, land, and basic human rights of black people. Petty Apartheid refers to the segregation of facilities.

2. The ethnic nationalist Apartheid government of South Africa from 1948 to 1994.

3. Positive rights oblige the state to act. For example, the right to health care obligates the government to provide public health care. Negative rights prohibit the government from action. For example, the right to free speech prohibits the government from prosecuting someone for criticising the state.

4. Geldenhuys (1981): “Of the total homeland budgeted revenue of R1 184 million in 1978/79, only R441 million consisted of revenue from own homeland sources, with a further R59 million being a balance brought forward from the previous year. This meant that South Africa provided an amount of R684 million, or some 58% of the total homeland revenue. At present, some 10% of South Africa’s national budget is allocated to homelands.

5. Author’s calculation from Tatem (2015).

6. The Dutch East India Trading Company.

7. Determining which of these opposing claims is true has not been trivial. Both are adequate academic sources. Yet, I cannot corroborate either claim. SA History does not directly cite their claim, but are otherwise generally considered reputable. Union reports are excellent historical documents, but there may have been political motive in ascribing the first pass law to a British Earl.

8. Author’s calculation.

9. The settler polities were the colonial settler political units which were comprised of the British Colonies of the Cape and Natal and the Afrikaner Traansvaal Republic and Orange Free State.

10. Bureaucratic legibility refers to the identifiability of individuals, and thus ultimately the taxability and control of a population. The extreme degree of control implied by hut and pol taxes led to many rebellions in Africa, notably the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906 (Stuart, 2013).

11. How much welfare can be derived from precapitalist subsistence agriculture is an interesting but separate question. No matter how little can be derived from household production for household consumption, the explicit ends of reducing self sufficiency is sure to have been at least in part effective.

12. Which united the Afrikaner and British settler polities through the South Africa Act of 1909

13. For a somewhat revisionist take on the homelands, see the first chapter of Ally and Lissoni (2017).

14. I follow Biko in not capitalising ‘black’ and ‘white’ for the adjectives describing people. The NP capitalised the terms, using them as proper nouns, to bolster their essentialist notion of race. I do not capitalise bantustan or homeland either, as per Biko.

15. Partly corroborated by estimates placing the real value of subsistence agriculture in the 1980’s at less than 10% of total, with many homelands producing less than 1% of their income from subsistence agriculture (N. Nattrass and J. Nattrass, 1990: 520).

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