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Apartheid Forced Removals and Bantustan Resettlement

1950–1991 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Displacement Territory Seized

Displaced

3.5 million

an estimated 3.5 million people (estimates range roughly 3–3.5 million)

Share of the population affected

35%

of the Black African, Coloured and Indian population of South Africa at the 1951 census, when the Group Areas Act came into force, 1951

Territory

160,000 km²

about 13% of South African land was designated as racially exclusive Black 'homelands' (Bantustans), while the remaining 87% was reserved largely for white ownership

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What happened

Under the Group Areas Act (1950) and related apartheid laws, South Africa's government forcibly relocated non-white residents from land designated for whites, destroying mixed-race inner-city neighborhoods such as Sophiatown (Johannesburg, cleared 1955) and District Six (Cape Town, cleared from 1968) and resettling residents in segregated townships. In parallel, the government pursued a 'homelands' or Bantustan policy that stripped Black South Africans of citizenship and pushed millions into ten nominally self-governing ethnic territories covering about 13% of the country's land. Estimates of the total number forcibly removed under these combined policies range around 3.5 million people between the 1950s and the Group Areas Act's repeal in 1991. The policy was central to apartheid's system of racial segregation and was declared a crime against humanity by the 1973 UN Apartheid Convention.

Parties

South Africa's apartheid government forcibly relocated Black, Coloured, and Indian residents under the Group Areas Act and homelands policy

Disputed

The apartheid government characterized removals as orderly urban and rural planning; the United Nations, anti-apartheid movements, and most historians describe them as a systematic, racially discriminatory policy of forced displacement.

The denominator

The 1951 census recorded 8,560,083 Africans, 1,103,016 Coloured and 366,664 Asian people out of a total 12,671,452 - about 10 million people subject to the Group Areas Act, the Natives Resettlement Act and the homelands policy. The Surplus People Project's survey documented some 3.5 million removals between 1960 and 1983 alone.

The removals ran for four decades over which the non-white population roughly tripled, so measuring a cumulative 1960-83 total against a 1951 snapshot overstates the share of any single generation moved.

Where the baseline comes from

Group Areas Actopen-edited
Bantustanopen-edited

On the death toll

No significant direct death toll is attributable to the removals themselves; the harm is dispossession and confinement to homelands. South African History Online, drawing on the Surplus People Project's survey and Cosmas Desmond's 'The Discarded People', records that over 3.5 million people had been forcibly removed by 1982 under the Group Areas Act and homelands policy, with more thereafter; SPP itself stresses that precise totals are unknowable because farm evictions went undocumented. Elevated child mortality in resettlement camps such as Dimbaza was documented contemporaneously but was never converted into an excess-death estimate.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of PropertyDenationalization

South African History Online, drawing on the Surplus People Project, records that removals were enforced by 'violent action (bulldozing homes, threatening people with weapons)', and standard histories of the homelands policy record that relocated persons lost their South African citizenship as they were absorbed into the bantustans.

Formal findings

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (1998) — Affirmed 'its judgement that apartheid, as a system of enforced racial discrimination and separation, was a crime against humanity', in the appendix to its final report — source

Movements mapped

Sophiatown → Meadowlands/Soweto60,000
District Six, Cape Town → Cape Flats60,000
Urban areas → Bantustans (e.g. KwaZulu)2 million

Countries touched, on present-day borders

South Africa

Related entries

Overlaps with: Bantustans and Influx Control in Apartheid South Africa
People forcibly removed into the homelands are among the 3.5 million counted in the forced removals entry and also among the homeland population counted here; no available source separates how many, so no shared figure is given.