BLACK STATE

formerly Bantu Homeland, or Bantustan, any of 10 former territories that were designated by the white-dominated government of South Africa as national homelands for the country's black population. The black states were a major administrative device for the complete exclusion of blacks from the South African political system under the policy of apartheid, or racial separation. The states were organized on the basis of ethnic and linguistic groupings; e.g., KwaZulu was the designated homeland of the Zulu people, Transkei and Ciskei were designated for the Xhosa people, and so on. No foreign government accorded diplomatic recognition to any of the states. Land acts enacted in 1913 and 1936 defined a number of scattered areas as reserved for blacks. Some expansion, consolidation, and relocation of these occurred in the following decades. In 1959 a black self-government scheme, recognizing specific ethnic groups in designated areas, or homelands, was enacted. A homelands citizenship act of 1970 defined blacks living throughout South Africa as legal citizens of the homelands designated for their ethnic groups, thereby stripping them of their South African citizenship and their remaining civil and political rights. The South African government went on to declare four of the black states independent: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981. Six other black states remained self-governing but nonindependent: Gazankulu, KwaZulu, Lebowa, KwaNdebele, KaNgwane, and Qwaqwa. Only two of the black states (Ciskei and Qwaqwa) had a totally coterminous land area; each of the others consisted of anywhere from 2 to 30 scattered blocks of land, some of them widely dispersed. All of the black states had some self-governmente.g., in education, health, law enforcement, and roads. The states' governing cabinets were nominally responsible to legislative assemblies that were partly elected, but internal coups brought military regimes to power in some. The black states were rural, under-industrialized, and overly reliant on both subsistence farming and on their citizens' temporary labour in South Africa's cities, towns, mines, and farms. They were also heavily dependent on financial aid supplied by the South African government. Only about one-third of South Africa's total black population lived in the six self-governing black states, and another one-fourth lived in the four nominally independent states of Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei (qq.v.). As South African whites' support for apartheid began to waver in the late 1980s, their government abandoned its intention to make the remaining six black states independent. South Africa subsequently adopted a constitution that abolished apartheid, and in 1994 all 10 black states were reincorporated into South Africa, with full citizenship for their residents. The black states themselves were abolished and merged into a reorganized system of South African provinces.