Reply #94: Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland share many historical characteristics

[HamdenRice]

Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland share many historical characteristics of the homelands. I lived in South Africa for two years during the late 80s. My first visit, on a human rights inquiry, was 1986, and I returned to live there doing research in the late 80s, and visited several times during the transition, and made a research trip concerning land issue. I realize it was politically correct to deny the homelands any legitimacy overseas, but among regular black South Africans internally, the homelands had much more geographic and historical legitimacy than was understood overseas. That's why several homelands became "liberated territory." First, KaNgwane (the Swazi homeland) allowed the United Democratic Front (de facto, the legal, internal wing of the ANC) to operate and field candidates for the homeland government, and as a result, KaNgwane had a UDF Parliamentary majority. Brig. Gen. Bantu Holomisa overthrew the homelands government of Transkei in 1987 and allowed the ANC's military wing to operate there. During the transition, the SACP (South African Communist Party) cadres tried to overthrow the Ciskei government with disastrous results, causing the Bisho massacre. In short, the homelands governments were important.

Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland had histories that were indeed a lot like the homelands. In the 19th century, the borders of South Africa were poorly defined and whites had tenuous control over areas that had in tact African polities. The homelands and Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland were treated almost identically -- as reserves and protectorates that were too difficult or expensive to completely conquer. There was a lot of debate about whether the final borders would include LBS, but the African nationalists and British humanitarians prevented their incorporation into South Africa.

Just as Lesotho is the rump of Moshoeshoe's Sotho Kingdom and Swaziland was the rump of Mabuza's Swazi kingdom, the BaPedi homeland, Lebowa, was the remnant of Sekukuni's BaPedi kingdom -- a kingdom that put up some of the fiercest resistance to colonization in the Transvaal. You can think of the homelands in the 19th century this way: If the Germans had invaded France in 1940 but were unable to conquer Paris and its surroundings, signed a truce, and created a reservation for the French which it ruled indirectly. That's really what the homelands were. Over the 20th century, the colonial authorities took more and more control, but people remembered the origins of each reserve.

Each homeland resulted from some form of resistance against colonialism, and that's why they had territorial legitimacy, even if the leadership eventually chosen by Pretoria did not. The Paramount Chief of the Tswana Territorial Authority (which became Bophutatswana), Tidimane Pilane, was replaced with Pretoria's help by Lucas Mangope in the early 1970s. By the late 1980s, Chief Pilane was elected head of the UDF-affiliated Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa (Contrelesa).

After passage of the 1936 Native Land and Trust Act, the government began trying to "consolidate" the black population into the homelands, by expropriating their land and transferring the populations to the reserves. Btw, it wasn't the army that did this; it was the police. Also, it isn't technically correct to say all the valuable land was "stripped out." In the 19th century, the Boers and British did in many places push kingdoms and chiefdoms into less fertile areas as the basis for the reserves. But the reserves also had a great deal of fertile land. The real problem was that the forced removals after the 1930s led to terrible environmental degradation of the reserves. For example, in the 1950s, the apartheid government carried out an environmental survey of the Sotho homeland, QwaQwa and determined it could support about 10,000 people, but its population increased quickly to 20,000, and by the 1980s was 250,000. Similarly, Ciskei was more of a rural slum than an agricultural area.

Structuralism is very useful for understanding historical processes, but it is most useful when it sticks to the facts as well.