3 research outputs found
Contextualising Apartheid at the End of Empire: Repression, ‘Development’ and the Bantustans
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