All events · The War's Long Shadow

Bantustans and Influx Control in Apartheid South Africa

1951–1994 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Confinement

Confined

16 million

About 15.5 million people lived in the ten homelands by the early 1990s, held there by homeland citizenship and influx control. The 1991 census counted 10,746,504 people in the six self-governing homelands, and counts from 1980-81 put about 4.7 million more in the four nominally independent ones (Transkei 2.7 million, Bophuthatswana 1 million, Ciskei 678,000, Venda about 350,000) (Library of Congress country study); the total combines counts from different years and is approximate, and is consistent with the U.S. Bureau of the Census estimate that 48 per cent of all black South Africans lived in the homelands in 1992. Enforcement reached the whole African population: the Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, said in 1991 that more than 17 million people had been arrested under influx control laws between 1921 and 1986, and a figure of over 12 million arrests between 1948 and 1985, with more than 381,000 in 1975-76 alone, is cited by Human Rights Watch. Forced removals into the homelands are not counted here: they are part of the Surplus People Project's total of about 3.5 million removals between 1960 and 1983, recorded in the entry on apartheid forced removals.

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What happened

From the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 the South African government designated ten territories as ethnic homelands for the African majority, covering about 13 per cent of the land, and progressively transferred political rights there while removing them in the rest of the country. Movement into and residence in urban "white" areas was regulated by influx control and the pass system: the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act of 1952 required every Black person over 16 to carry a passbook recording employer, address and permission to remain, with only white employers able to authorise residence; officials could cancel that permission with a stroke of the pen, and by the government's own count more than 17 million people were arrested under influx control laws between 1921 and 1986. Forced removals into the homelands and relocation settlements, part of some 3.5 million removals between 1960 and 1983, are recorded in a separate entry; by the early 1990s about 15.5 million people lived in the homelands. Under the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 all Black South Africans were assigned homeland citizenship, and when Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei were declared independent between 1976 and 1981 their assigned populations lost South African nationality; no state other than South Africa recognised these entities, and the UN General Assembly and Security Council rejected their independence. The requirement to carry passbooks was lifted in July 1986 with the Abolition of Influx Control Act, and the bantustans were reincorporated into South Africa on 27 April 1994.

Parties

The South African apartheid state assigning the Black population to ethnically defined homelands and controlling their presence in "white" areas through pass laws and influx control

Disputed

The South African government of the time presented the homelands as decolonisation and separate development granting self-determination to distinct nations, and pass controls as ordinary labour and urban regulation; the UN General Assembly, the Organisation of African Unity and every other state rejected the homelands as a device for stripping the majority of citizenship, and the 1973 Apartheid Convention and later the Rome Statute treated such territorial fragmentation as an element of the crime of apartheid - the figures for forced removals also vary between roughly 3.5 million and higher estimates depending on which categories of removal are counted.

On the death toll

No source attributes a death toll to the bantustan and influx-control system itself. The Surplus People Project's 1983 survey put forced removals at roughly 3.5 million people between 1960 and 1983; malnutrition and infant mortality in the resettlement areas were documented by health researchers and church bodies at the time but were never converted into an attributable count. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's mandate covered gross violations of bodily integrity — killing, torture, abduction and severe ill-treatment — and it treated forced removals and apartheid's structural violence as context rather than as gross violations within that definition, so its victim statistics do not measure this event.

Documented forms of violence

DenationalizationArbitrary DetentionDestruction of Property

The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (1970) stripped South African citizenship from Black South Africans assigned to the 'independent' homelands, mass pass-law arrests ran to hundreds of thousands a year, and the demolition of communities such as Sophiatown and District Six is documented by the Surplus People Project's 1983 survey of forced removals and in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's contextual findings.

Formal findings

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (1998) — Final report (Volume 5) found the apartheid state and its security forces the primary perpetrator of gross human rights violations; the Commission recorded that forced removals and other structural aspects of apartheid formed part of the broader context within which the gross violations it was mandated to investigate took place — source

Countries touched, on present-day borders

South Africa

Related entries

Overlaps with: Apartheid Forced Removals and Bantustan Resettlement
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.