Contextualising Apartheid at the End of Empire: Repression, ‘Development’ and the Bantustans

Abstract

This article examines the global dynamics of late colonialism and how these informed South African apartheid. More specifically, it locates the programmes of mass relocation and bantustan 'self-government' that characterised apartheid after 1959 in relation to three key dimensions. Firstly, the article explores the global circulation of idioms of 'development' and trusteeship in the first half of the twentieth century and its significance in shaping segregationist policy; secondly, it situates bantustan 'selfgovernment' in relation to the history of decolonisation and the partitions and federations that emerged as late colonial solutions; and, thirdly, it locates the tightening of rural village planning in the bantustans after 1960 in relation to the elaboration of anti-colonial liberation struggles, repressive southern African settler politics and the Cold War. It argues that, far from developing policies that were at odds with the global 'wind of change', South African apartheid during the 1960s and 1970s reflected much that was characteristic about late colonial strategy.

A Decolonial Perspective on Online Media Discourses in the Context of Violence Against People With Disabilities in South Africa

“…Avoiding words like "people" or "person" could be seen as, at best, sidestepping the issue and, at worst, deliberately negating such humanity. The use of "handed over" in the article mentioned above further objectifies the people involved and is reminiscent of forced removals and resettlements under apartheid (Evans, 2019). The second strategy, also identified by Maldonado-Torres (2007) as evidence of coloniality, is aggregating deaths as a way of invisibilising individual personal suffering.…”

TOURISM EVOLUTION IN RURAL SOUTH AFRICA: FROM NATIVE RESERVE TO APARTHEID BANTUSTANS c 1920-1994

“…The Tomlinson report stated that "a programme of industrial development will, therefore, occupy a central position in the general programme of development for the Bantu areas" (Union of South Africa, 1955: 131). Evans (2019) sees this recommendation as aligned to the growth of interest in broader colonial planning for rural industrial development at the period of the end of empire. In the late 1950s "the apartheid government shifted its focus to 'separate development' and emphasized that the homelands would eventually become independent from the South African state" (King, 2006: 82).…”