South African Homelands as Frontiers

Apartheid’s Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era

Steffen Jensen, Olaf Zenker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138667853
• eBook ISBN: 9781317212096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores what happened to the homelands – in many ways the ultimate apartheid disgrace – after the fall of apartheid. The nine chapters contribute to understanding the multiple configurations that currently exist in areas formerly declared "homelands" or "Bantustans". Using the concept of frontier zones, the homelands emerge as areas in which the future of the South African postcolony is being renegotiated, contested and remade with hyper-real intensity. This is so because the many fault lines left over from apartheid (its loose ends, so to speak) – between white and black; between different ethnicities; between rich and poor; or differentiated by gender, generation and nationality; between "traditions" and "modernities" or between wilderness and human habitation – are particularly acute and condensed in these so-called "communal areas". Hence, the book argues that it is particularly in these settings that the postcolonial promise of liberation and freedom must face its test. As such, the book offers highly nuanced and richly detailed analyses that go to the heart of the diverse dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa as a whole, but simultaneously also provides in condensed form an extended case study on the predicaments of African postcoloniality in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid's Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era – An Introduction

STEFFEN JENSEN

(Aalborg University; DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture)

OLAF ZENKER

(University of Fribourg)

In this Introduction we discuss the apparent erasure of the homelands from the social imagination of post-apartheid South Africa. We ask what has become of the homelands and reflect on the lives of those millions that still inhabit former homeland areas. In order to explore this, we tentatively evoke and develop the terms ‘frontier’ and ‘the loose ends of apartheid’. We understand the concept of the frontier not as margin or the end; rather the homelands as frontier should be understood not as a stage of the past, but as intense zones of contestation, where the future of post-apartheid South Africa will, in part, be determined. ‘Loose ends’ refers to the many unresolved questions that are being negotiated in these zones of contestation. This Introduction falls into three parts. First, through a brief historical analysis, we depart from what we, drawing on Cherryl Walker, call the master narrative of loss and restoration, in which ‘homelands’ signalled loss and ‘post-apartheid’ a restoration. Secondly, we turn to some of the policy initiatives taken to erase the homeland past, which, ironically, often reproduced them. Third, through the different contributions, we account for the great variety of life and loose ends in the homelands today. It is our contention that only through addressing the loose ends in their complexity and ambiguity can we hope to address the legacies of the homelands in a way that may pave the way to different futures.

Driving towards the Mozambican border on the N4, just across the Komati river, a sign welcomes the traveller to the ‘Wild Frontier’. Accompanied by a graphic representation of a lion's paw, this is the frontier where wild animals are supposedly allowed to roam free. We are now, the sign seems to suggest, far away from the busy life of metropolitan South Africa. A few kilometres before, the traveller will have passed another sign indicating the direction to KaNyamansane, siSwati for ‘The Place of Wild Animals’. While both signs indicate a specific form of frontier between human habitation and the wild, an excursion to KaNyamansane will quickly set the traveller straight. KaNyamansane is a bustling township area, home to some tens of thousands of people, next to Mpumalanga's provincial capital, Mbombela (previously Nelspruit). It also used to be the central urban section of the former homeland of KaNgwane, the supposed home of the Swazi population in South Africa, which was consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history in 1994, when democracy was finally introduced to the entire South African population. If one does not know that, KaNyamansane might be like any other of countless townships around South Africa. It is this strange erasure of what used to be one of the more shameful part (and there were many shameful parts) of apartheid South Africa – what Steve Biko famously called ‘the greatest single fraud ever invented by white politicians’¹ – that we would like to address and explore in this special issue.

The contributions to this special issue cover many of the former homelands – KwaZulu, Lebowa, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, KwaNdebele, Transkei and Bophuthatswana. In different ways, they interrogate both how life is lived in the former homelands today and the events that led to the present day; they bring to light the enormous differences between the homelands and they seek to explore the multiple imaginaries and social realities of being within and belonging to former homelands: how and to what extent have people made these areas their home? Do they wish to return to earlier homes (for example, through land restitution) or, rather, long to leave for elsewhere? Did they and their kin ever leave the homeland areas otherwise often seen as incarnations of a history of relocation? What is the place of former homelands in the wider political economy – of South Africa and beyond, of labour migration, consumption and desired biographical futures? And what is the state of homelands' actual ‘lands’ in their multiple dimensions: as economic resources for agriculture, mining, forestry, tourism, residence and investment; as conflicting realms of political and legal pluralism, in which local government uneasily coexists with increasingly resurrected neo-traditional authorities; as social spaces, in which gender and intergenerational relations are renegotiated and identities remade in the light of equally contested ‘traditions’ and ‘modernities’? In order to explore these diverse questions, we tentatively evoke and develop, in this Introduction, the terms ‘frontier’ and ‘loose ends’ of apartheid.

Frontiers have been the subject of multiple imaginaries as well as explored academically. The classical ‘frontier thesis’, by Frederick Jackson Turner² on the USA, constructed the frontier line of westward-moving European settler communities as a genuinely innovative zone for the production of a peculiarly egalitarian, democratic and aggressive American national character. In contrast, Igor Kopytoff³ suggested, with regard to the ‘internal African frontier’, that these politically open spaces nestling between different societies rather had a conservative function, reproducing within emerging frontier communities traditional social models from the respective African metropolitan societies. For South Africa, Martin Legassick famously explored what he called the ‘frontier tradition in South African historiography’.⁴ Rather than focusing on the inherent racism of the frontier, as liberal scholars did, Legassick stressed a need to explore the frontier as a particular form of capitalist accumulation, where patron–client relations dominated over master–slave relations. There are identifiable forms of all these aspects in the former homelands. However, rather than theoretically prescribing homelands as frontiers either innovative or conservative, dominated by race or class, we suggest analysing, in an empirically open way, the former homelands in South Africa as central zones of contestation of important boundaries. While the frontier in older scholarship often focused on the expansion of settlers, we explore the frontier from different angles to locate numerous boundaries. These boundaries might be between white and black; between different ethnicities; between rich and poor; or differentiated by gender, generation and nationality; or between wilderness and human habitation. In this way, our approach to the homelands as frontiers resonates with recent writings within anthropology on what Veena Das and Deborah Poole have termed the margins of the state.⁵ Rather than focusing on the margins as something far away or peripheral, they suggest that what are considered the margins is in fact often constitutive of power, and central to its operation. While we agree with the centrality, the term ‘margin’ is none the less suggestive of subordination of sorts. This would unduly structure how we interpreted the fault lines between, for instance, traditional rule and democratic dispensation, where we would resist ascribing dominance or marginality to either side. Hence we choose to retain the concept of the frontier as zone of contestation rather than as margin. In this way, we try to reposition the homelands at the centre of South African social and political relations. While homelands are often at the end of a road that leads nowhere, at the physical border of otherness or marginal to the centre, in this special issue we argue that they are central in various specific ways. At the risk of sounding pompous, the promise of liberation and freedom must face its test here. It is here that the future of South Africa is negotiated, and here that the dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa are particularly acute.

While the homelands evidently are not the only frontiers in South Africa, they embody the end of apartheid with particular intensity. Approaching this end in terms of its multiple ends,⁶ we suggest that the many loose ends of apartheid seem to be crystallised or concentrated with specific urgency in the homelands. We use the term ‘loose ends’ deliberately as a way of talking about remnants, residues and things that should have been put to rest with the fall of apartheid. Here we draw inspiration from Ann Laura Stoler's recent distinction between ruins and ruination, in her analysis of empire. Rather than focusing on the edifice of empire – or apartheid – as a thing of the past, we need to explore how those who remain make a life out of what has been given them. She suggests a need to ‘emphasize less the artefacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their appropriations, neglect, and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present’.⁷

In this special issue, Shireen Ally's contribution most directly tackles the difference between ruins and ruination, as she tries to locate the missing archive of KaNgwane (the imperial artefact) to find a warehouse full of pulp, surrounded by people – objects of the very archive – about to sell the paper to a paper mill. Hence we explore the re-appropriations of the loose ends (for instance the ruined files of an archive) into new futures. As Deborah James eloquently argues in her contribution, the loose ends are woven together to form specific post-apartheid socialities. However, due to the indeterminacy and ambiguity of the loose ends – these frontier zones of intense contestation – they tend never to be fully stabilised, but open to a range of different post-apartheid projects. It is these attempts to weave projects together from the loose ends that animate many of the contributions, be that the house construction of Mr Siboza (Jensen), the saving club activities of Sophie Mahlaba (James), the oral history fancy of a provincial archivist (Ally), or the legal land battles of Abraham Viljoen (Zenker).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. South African Homelands as Frontiers: Apartheid’s Loose Ends in the Postcolonial Era – An Introduction
• 2. Fragments of the Past: Homeland Politics and the South African Transition, 1990–2014
• 3. Material Remains: Artifice versus Artefact(s) in the Archive of Bantustan Rule
• 4. This House Is Not My Own …! Temporalities in a South African Homeland
• 5. Custom, Normativity and Authority in South Africa
• 6. South African Land Restitution, White Claimants and the Fateful Frontier of Former KwaNdebele
• 7. ‘Women Use their Strength in the House’: Savings Clubs in an Mpumalanga Village
• 8. Moralising Magic? A Brief History of Football Potions in a South African Homeland Area, 1958–2010
• 9. City Slums, Rural Homesteads: Migrant Culture, Displaced Urbanism and the Citizenship of the Serviced House
• 10. ‘Keeping Land for Their Children’: Generation, Migration and Land in South Africa’s Transkei
• Epilogue: On the Frontiers of Time
• Index