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 their significance in shaping segregationist policy; secondly, it situates bantustan ‘self-government’ 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Apartheid
• bantustans
• homelands
• decolonisation
• empire
• development
• relocation
• villagisation
• counter-insurgency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Laura Evans http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2471-7439

Notes

1 Deborah Posel characterises this period after 1960 as the ‘second phase’ of apartheid. Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 227.

2 It is difficult to arrive at an accurate estimate of this figure. The Surplus People Project estimated that between 1960 and 1980, approximately 1 million farm tenants had been evicted, most of whom were sent to bantustan resettlement areas. This figure thus does not encompass the thousands of people who were forcibly removed from urban areas. Surplus People Project, Forced Removals in South Africa, Volume 1, 6. Other estimates suggest a significantly larger number. Simkins estimates that in the same period, the total population of the Bantustans grew from 4,739,855 to 11,338,308 as a result of the proliferation of closer settlements and (to a lesser extent) the re-drawing of borders to encompass urban townships within the bantustans. Simkins, “The Economic Implications of African Resettlement,” 6–7.

3 Accounts of apartheid rural relocation include: Surplus People Project, Forced Removals in South Africa; Freund, “Forced Resettlement”; West, “From Pass Courts to Deportation”; Murray, “Displaced Urbanization”; Unterhalter, Forced Removal; Platzky and Walker, The Surplus People; Murray, Black Mountain; Niehaus, “Relocation into Phuthaditjhaba and Tseki”; Sharp, “Relocation and the Problem of Survival in Qwaqwa”; Evans, “Gender, Generation”; Evans, “Resettlement”; Evans, Survival in the ‘Dumping Grounds’.

4 While Bantustan independence was widely condemned, that these ethnic national units would fail to gain international recognition was ‘not always obvious or inevitable.’ Ferguson, “Paradoxes of Sovereignty,” 128.

5 Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power”; Legassick and Wolpe, “The Bantustans and Capital Accumulation”; Freund, “Forced Resettlement.”

6 Nolutshungu, “South Africa and the Transfers of Power in Africa.”

7 This project builds on earlier my earlier critique of the ‘exceptionalist’ argument in Evans, “South Africa’s Bantustans.”

8 There is a growing literature that addresses the South Africa’s global history, for example, Breckenridge, The Biometric State; Skinner, Modern South Africa in World History.

9 Hopkins, Global History.

10 Feith, “Repressive Developmentalist Regimes”; Bandeira Jerónimo, “‘A Battle in the Field of Human Relations’.”

11 Trapido, “South Africa in a Comparative Study of Industrialization.”

12 O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme; O’Meara, Forty Lost Years; Legassick, “Legislation, Ideology and Economy.”

13 Posel, The Making of Apartheid; Posel, “The Apartheid Project”; Lazar, “Verwoerd versus the ‘Visionaries’.”

14 Lacey, Working for Boroko.

15 Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 447–86.

16 Dubow, Apartheid, 111, 63–5.

17 A recent account emphasises the role of Verwoerd as theorist, while pointing to his ‘failed logic’: Moodie, “Separate Development.”

18 Posel, The Making of Apartheid; Posel, “The Apartheid Project.”

19 Dubow, Apartheid, 17 (my emphasis).

20 On ‘authoritarian high modernism’ see Scott, Seeing Like a State, Chapter 3; also Mitchell, Rule of Experts. On the ‘second colonial occupation’ see Low and Lonsdale, “Towards the New Order, 1945–63.”

21 See for example Onslow, “Resistance to ‘Winds of Change’”; Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “‘Parallel Diplomacy’”; Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “The Origins of Exercise ALCORA”; Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “Exercise ALCORA”; Barroso, “The Origins of Exercise ALCORA”; Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “The Last Throw of the Dice.”

22 French, The British Way; Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame; Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency; Mumford, The Counter-Insurgency Myth; Hack, “The Malayan Emergency”; Hack, “Detention, Deportation and Resettlement”; Robbins, “The British Counter-Insurgency in Cyprus”; French, “Nasty Not Nice”; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged; Elkins, Britain’s Gulag; Dixon, “‘Hearts and Minds’?”; Bennett, “The Mau Mau Emergency”; Branch, “Footprints in the Sand”; Feichtinger, “‘A Great Reformatory’.”

23 Hyam, “South Africa, Cambridge, and Commonwealth History,” 409.

24 French, cited in Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, 3.

25 Hyslop, “The Invention of the Concentration Camp”; Smith and Stucki, “The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps”; Mühlhahn, “The Concentration Camp.”

26 Hodge, “Colonial Experts”; Whittaker, “Legacies of Empire”; Lorgen, “Villagisation in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania”; Schneider, “Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Authoritarianism in Tanzania”; Borges Coelho, “State Resettlement Policies in Post-colonial Rural Mozambique”; Whittaker, “Legacies of Empire.”

27 Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site”; Feichtinger, “‘A Great Reformatory’”; Bandeira Jerónimo, “‘A Battle in the Field of Human Relations’.”

28 This article thus continues Hopkins’ project to address the former dominions in the history of decolonisation: Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization.”

29 Lacey, Working for Boroko. The importance of this period in establishing the South African legal order and its regime of ‘native’ governance is now widely acknowledged. Dubow, Racial Segregation; Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture; Freund, “South Africa: The Union Years.”

30 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 56–85; Dubow, “‘Holding a Just Balance’.”

31 Rich, “Ministering to the White Man’s Needs.”

32 Barber, South Africa in the Twentieth Century, 83.

33 For a discussion of Smuts’ ‘imperial internationalism’ (Mazower) and his role at the League of Nations and United Nations see Mazower, No Enchanted Palace; Hyslop, “‘Segregation has Fallen on Evil Days’”; Dubow, “Smuts, The United Nations.”

34 Hyslop, “‘Segregation has Fallen on Evil Days’,” 442.

35 Ibid., 453; Dubow, “Smuts, The United Nations,” 61–2.

36 Hauptman, “Africa View.” The Peel Commission of 1937 is another key example of proposals for ethnic partition under trusteeship in this period.

37 Pedersen, The Guardians.

38 Lugard, The Dual Mandate; Smuts, “Native Policy in Africa.”

39 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 206.

40 Ibid.

41 Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.

42 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace.

43 Ibid., 141, 143.

44 Bashford, “Population, Geopolitics”; Bashford, Global Population, 78–80; 131.

45 This is the subject of work in progress by Arie Dubnov. See also Robson, States of Separation, 7–34.

46 Cooper, “Reconstructing Empire.”

47 Hodge, “Colonial Experts,” 304.

48 Ibid., 302–306.

49 Sunderland, “The Ministry of Asiatic Russia”; Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance’.”

50 Beissinger, “Soviet Empire as ‘Family Resemblance’,” 296.

51 Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 3.

52 Engerman, “The Price of Success.”

53 Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore.

54 Elkins, Britain’s Gulag.

55 Tischler, “Education and the Agrarian Question in South Africa,” 252.

56 Hodge, “Colonial Experts,” 304.

57 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 28–65.

58 Hyam, “South Africa, Cambridge, and Commonwealth History,” 409.

59 Hepple, Verwoerd.

60 Miller, An African Volk.

61 Darwin, “What Was the Late Colonial State?”

62 Ibid.

63 Bashford, “Population, Geopolitics.”

64 Ittmann, “Demography as Policy Science,” 442. See also Ittmann, “The Colonial Office.”

65 Iyer, “Colonial Population,” 88–9.

66 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 203–5.

67 Ibid.

68 Mager, Gender and the Making, 32–3.

69 Sackley describes the ‘global wave of peasantism among urban intellectuals and elites in the 1930s’, who ‘dream[ed] of social transformation through the village’. Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site,” 487–8. See also Mager, Gender and the Making, 47–71.

70 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 56–9.

71 Ibid., 62.

72 Lazar, “Verwoerd versus the ‘Visionaries’.”

73 On ‘authoritarian high modernism’ see Scott, Seeing Like a State, Chapter 3; Mitchell, Rule of Experts. On the ‘second colonial occupation’ see Low and Lonsdale, “Towards the New Order,” 12–6. On late colonial centralisation see Darwin, ‘“What was the Late Colonial State?” 78–9.

74 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 63, 67.

75 Huber, “Introduction.”

76 Hendricks, “Loose Planning and Rapid Resettlement,” 310.

77 Hodge, “Colonial Experts,” 307.

78 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 240.

79 Ibid., 240–43.

80 Hodge, “Colonial Experts,” 307.

81 Iyer, “Colonial Population,” 88; Hodge, “Colonial Experts,” 307–8; Lewis, “Economic Development”; Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis.

82 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 241.

83 Gatrell, “Refugees and the Doctrine of Rehabilitation.”

84 Gatrell, “Refugees,” 11. Gatrell argues that as Roosevelt reasoned in 1943, the challenge was to ‘restore to a normal, healthy and self-sustaining existence’ those people living in the oppressed countries: assistance in economic ‘rehabilitation’ was essential for the successful return of exiles to their home nations. Gatrell, “Refugees,” 4.

85 Hyslop, “‘Segregation has Fallen on Evil Days’,” 442. See also Torrance, “Britain, South Africa and the High Commission Territories”; Hyam and Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok, 102–117. In the 1940s, in articulating the justification for the formal annexation of South West Africa, South African economists had even envisaged the settlement of ‘surplus’ populations from the country to the northern deserts of the mandated territory. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 54–5.

86 Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse, 176–77.

87 Spence, “The Political Implications of the Bantustan Policy,” 23.

88 Hyam and Henshaw, The Lion and the Springbok, 102–17.

89 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 274–5. This reference to the Commonwealth of Nations was a throwback to the longstanding project of South African imperialism developed first by Milner and then by Smuts.

90 Verwoerd, cited in Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 521.

91 Eiselen, cited in Dubow, Apartheid, 106.

92 Gilomee, The Last Afrikaner Leaders, 78–9; Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 531–2.

93 Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 531.

94 Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 16.

95 These were characteristic modes of the late colonial ‘dense’ and ‘self-destruct’ state, described by Darwin. Darwin, “What Was the Late Colonial State?” 77–80.

96 Ibid., 79.

97 Ivan Evans argues that the agreements made at Lancaster House were instructive for South African policy. Evans, Bureaucracy and Race, 246.

98 Darwin, “What Was the Late Colonial State?” 80.

99 O’Leary, “‘From Birmingham to Bulawayo’,” 52–3.

100 On the role of Indian elites in shaping the debate on federalism in India see Pillai, “Fragmenting the Nation.”

101 O’Leary, “‘From Birmingham to Bulawayo’,” 66. See also Collins, “Decolonisation and the ‘Federal Moment’.”

102 Collins, “Decolonisation and the ‘Federal Moment’,” 28. For a fresh examination of the Central African Federation see Cohen, The Politics and Economics of Decolonization in Africa.

103 Collins, “Decolonisation and the ‘Federal Moment’,” 33.

104 Case, “The Strange Politics of Federative Ideas”; Lipgens, “European Federation in the Political Thought.”

105 Rubin, “From Federalism to Binationalism”; Klusmeyer, “Hannah Arendt’s Case for Federalism.”

106 Lodge, Sharpeville; Lodge, “The Cape Town Troubles”; Lodge, Black Politics, 201–30; Lodge, “Insurrectionism in South Africa.”

107 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), “We Will Win.”

108 Fidler, “Rural Cosmopolitanism,” 39–40. See also Kepe and Ntsebeza, Rural Resistance in South Africa. Independent Congo became an important supporter of African liberation movements, not least the southern African organisations of the PAC and SWAPO, which, through the Congo Alliance [1963–4], gained organisational and military refuge. Passemiers, “South Africa and the ‘Congo Crisis’,” 83–106.

109 West and Martin, “Introduction,” 23–4.

110 Passemiers, “South Africa and the ‘Congo Crisis’,” 166–208.

111 See various issues of South African Digest (Pretoria: Department of Information, 1962–1966).

112 Hyam, “The Parting of the Ways,” 166–172.

113 Cooper, Africa Since 1940, 66; Stockwell, “Ends of Empire,” 276–77.

114 Darwin, The Empire Project, 625.

115 Onslow, “Resistance to “‘Winds of Change’,” 223.

116 African National Congress, “Paper prepared at the request of the Special Committee Against Apartheid.”

117 This is the subject of ongoing work on partitions by Arie Dubnov.

118 Delius, “Internal Argument,” 372.

119 Miller, “Voortrekker or State Builder?”

120 Miller, “Africanising Apartheid.”

121 Miller, “Voortrekker or State Builder?” 130.

122 Miller, “Things Fall Apart,” 183.

123 Rees and Day, Muldergate.

124 Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site,” 492. See also Engerman, “Development Politics.”

125 Sackley, “Village Models.”

126 Ibid., 765.

127 Ibid., 761. A contemporary example of South African rural town planning includes Zwelitsha township, in the former Ciskei. Planned by those in the NAD who ‘espoused a segregationist-developmentalist ideology’, Zwelitsha ‘was an experiment,’ Mager argues; ‘it was a prototype designed to solve the problem of congestion on the land and meet the state’s need to control the urbanisation of Africans.’ Gender and the construction of the nuclear family was central to this vision of creating orderly urban workers from landless peasants. Mager, Gender and the Making, 47, 47–71.

128 Sackley, “Village Models,” 765.

129 Mayer popularised his technical model of ‘community development’ in his widely-consumed book. Mayer, Pilot Project, India.

130 Sackley, “The Village as Cold War Site,” 501–3.

131 Kalinovsky, “Not Some British Colony in Africa,” 202. The significance of debates about self-government and development in Central Asia among elites in Asia and Africa demands further research in terms of how it shaped South African bantustan policy.

132 These dimensions are examined in Miller, An African Volk.

133 Bandeira Jerónimo, “‘A Battle in the Field of Human Relations’”; Bandeira Jerónimo, “The States of Empire,” 87.

134 Feichtinger, “A Great Reformatory,” 4. See also Scheipers “The Use of Camps in Colonial Warfare.”

135 Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “The Origins of Exercise ALCORA”; Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “Exercise ALCORA”; Barroso, “The Origins of Exercise ALCORA.”

136 Miller, “Things Fall Apart”; Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “Exercise ALCORA.”

137 Miller, “Things Fall Apart,” 190–1.

138 Ibid., 192, 190–2.

139 Evans, Survival in the ‘Dumping Grounds’.

140 Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “The Origins of Exercise ALCORA,” 1122–3. For an account of resettlement strategies in Angola (1960s), see Bender, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency.”

141 Bandeira Jerónimo, “‘A Battle in the Field of Human Relations’.”

142 Jundanian, “Resettlement Programs”; Cilliers, Counter Insurgency, 79–103; Toase, “The South African Army,” 212.

143 The distinction between fenced strategic villages (aldeamentos) and rural resettlement villages (reordenamentos rural) was, in practice, minimal, Bender argues. Bender, “The Limits of Counterinsurgency,” 336.

144 Bandeira Jerónimo, “‘A Battle in the Field of Human Relations’.”

145 Bandeira Jerónimo and Costa Pinto, “A Modernizing Empire?” 62.

146 Jeronimo, “The States of Empire,” 90. The Paysannats in the Belgian Congo is another relevant example for this discussion of the centrality of rural resettlement as counterinsurgency strategy.

147 Cann’s apologia for the ‘benign and expansive’ ‘social operations’ pursued in the ‘Portuguese way’ of counterinsurgency points to the perceived success among military strategists of rural population concentration and relocation in restoring colonial control. Cann, “Portuguese Counterinsurgency Campaigning in Africa,” 313, 346.

148 Pinto da Cruz and Ramada Curto, “The Good and the Bad Concentration,” 212–4.

149 Bessant, “Coercive Development”; Mager, Gender and the Making, 72–97.

150 Evans, “The Makings and Meanings,” 70; Kinkead-Weekes, “Africans in Cape Town,” 330–46.

151 Evans, “The Makings and Meanings,” 65–100; Kinkead-Weekes, “Africans in Cape Town,” 324–5.

152 Darwin, “What Was the Late Colonial State?” 78.

153 This history is examined in more detail in Evans, Survival in the ‘Dumping Grounds’.

154 Hendricks, “Rapid Resettlement.”

155 Evans, “Gender, Generation.”

156 Morris, “Apartheid, Agriculture and the State.”

157 van Laun, “Of Bodies Captured,” 44–5.

158 van Laun, “In the Shadows of the Archive”; van Laun, “Of Bodies Captured.”

159 Cape Argus, cited in van Laun, “In the Shadows,” 9.

160 van Laun, “In the Shadows,” 120.

161 Stockwell, “A Widespread and Long-Concocted Plot”; Furedi, “Britain’s Colonial Emergencies”; Darwin, “The Central African Emergency”; Murphy, “A Police State?”

162 van Laun, “In the Shadows,” 121.

163 Jackson, cited in TRC, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 37–8. See also Christian Action, The Purge of the Eastern Cape.

164 Badat, The Forgotten People; Evans, Survival in the ‘Dumping Grounds’.

165 Evans, “The Makings and Meanings”; Evans, Survival in the ‘Dumping Grounds.’

166 Darwin characterises the late colonial ‘security state’ as ‘a bloated superstructure resting on a resentful and rebellious colonial society’; the colonial state, was, he argues, ‘transformed into an army of occupation.’ Darwin, “What Was the Late Colonial State?” 79.

167 Texts by Clausewitz, Beaufre and Thompson were of special interest to South African personnel. Daniel, “Racism,” 37–40.

168 Ibid., 39.

169 Ibid., 40.

170 Ibid., 41. See also Ribeiro de Meneses and McNamara, “The Origins of Exercise ALCORA,” 1122.

171 Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine.

172 Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

173 Legassick, “Capitalist Roots of Apartheid,” 359.

174 Evans, Survival in the ‘Dumping Grounds’.

175 Evans, “Resettlement”; Evans, “South Africa’s Bantustans.” The work of Tara Zahra is instructive for understanding political ‘indifference.’ See her ‘Imagined Noncommunities.’

176 Re. the effects of resettlement in bolstering bantustan authorities see Evans, “Resettlement” and Peires, “Ethnicity and Pseudo-Ethnicity.”

177 The history of banishment under apartheid is examined in Badat, The Forgotten People.

178 Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, 195.

179 Evans, Survival in the ‘Dumping Grounds’.

180 Cherry and Gibbs, “The Liberation Struggle in the Eastern Cape”; Ntsebeza et al., “Resistance and Repression in the Bantustans”; Cherry, “Hidden Histories.”

181 This dynamic is explored in Murray-Li’s work on Indonesia. Murray Li, “Compromising Power”; The Will to Improve.

182 Ellis et al., The Squatter Problem; Western, Outcast Cape Town, 277–308.

183 Cole, Crossroads; Isaacs, “Crossroads”; Benson, “Crossroads Continues.”

184 Cook, “Khayelitsha.”

185 Harvey, “The ‘New Imperialism’.”

186 Evans, “Resettlement and the Experiences of Farm Dwellers.”

187 I refer here to Posel’s analysis of the apartheid project, shaped by ‘vision and blunder, principle and pragmatism.’ Posel, “The Apartheid Project,” 320.

188 Szeftel, “The Transkei”; Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labour Power,” 426; Egerö, South Africa’s Bantustans.

189 Bandeira Jerónimo, “‘A Battle in the Field of Human Relations’.”