Preface

Since 1948 the government of the Republic of South Africa has focused much of its policy-making upon the political as well as the social segregation of the country's various population groups. However much economic life depends upon intimate cooperation and permanent intermingling, the government has limited modern politics, in the form of participation and representative institutions with real power, to whites. The disenfranchised majority has played no overt and recognized part in political life, particularly as regards policy-making at the national level. Partially as a result, the literature on politics in South Africa is almost exclusively an examination of white institutions and history. Studies of the administrative methods by which Africans have been governed are few. There is a more extensive literature on the merits and demerits of segregation and its economic and social consequences, but much of what has been written is selective or polemical.

South Africa's program of separate development, of which the homelands are the major component, is widely detested inside and outside the Republic. Separate development has, however, brought into existence new political and administrative mechanisms, and provided a number of new roles, which were previously unavailable to Africans. Simultaneously, new organizations have been created to promote economic growth. Hence there is a need for a dispassionate examination of the homeland program as it has evolved to bring at least one political entity, the Transkei, to independence.

Of the ten South African homelands, the three largest are the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, and KwaZulu. They include 70 percent of the entire homeland area; the total de jure population of these three areas comprises over 60 percent of the African population of South Africa.^[1] Of the three only the Transkei has been studied.^[2] Unlike the Transkei, Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu are made up of many separate pieces of land, located in the major growth areas of the South African economy—the Transvaal and Natal,

[1] The de jure population of a homeland is the population allocated to it by ethnic group, whether resident there or not.

[2] Gwendolen Carter, Thomas Karis, and Newell M. Stultz, South Africa's Transkei: The Politics of Domestic Colonialism (Evanston, 1967).

respectively. There are, however, significant differences between them in geographical environment, ethnic composition of their resident populations, political traditions, and in the personalities, policies, and styles of their leaders. A study of Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu provides a basis for analyzing the impact upon South Africa of the present trend in the development of homeland policy and of the political and economic potential of that policy for the peoples of both the homelands and the Republic.

This book began as a study commissioned by the Office of External Research of the United States Department of State. Under the direction of Robert I. Rotberg, it was completed in late 1973 and discussed in a seminar in the Department of State. The present volume, expanded, revised, and updated, was made possible by grants to the authors from the Ford Foundation. Our major debts of gratitude, therefore, are to the Office of External Research of the Department of State and to the Ford Foundation. All views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation or the Department.

In South Africa politicians and officials in and out of the homelands gave generously of time and information. Chief Lucas Mangope, chief minister of Bophuthatswana, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, chief executive councillor of KwaZulu, and Professor Hudson Ntsanwisi, chief minister of Gazankulu, granted interviews both there and in the United States. Many officials of the homeland governments, the Bantu Investment Corporation, the Bureau for Economic Research re Bantu Development (BENBO), and the South African Consulate-General in New York willingly responded to our inquiries. Libraries and staff at the Africa Institute in Pretoria and at the South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg made material and other facilities available. We are especially grateful to W. G. Breytenbach, Norman Bromberger, Mary Holmes, Dudley Horner, Jean LeMay, Gavin Maasdorp, Theo Malan, Tim Muil, Benjamin Pogrund, G.J. Richter, Lawrence Schlemmer, P. J. van der Merwe, David Welsh, and Francis Wilson.

In the United States our debts are equally great. Hugh Campbell, Gwendolen Carter, William Foltz, William Herman, Lambert Heyniger, Edward C. Holmes, Thomas Karis, Edwin Munger, Harvey Summ, and C. Thomas Thorne gave us helpful criticism and advice about one or both of the manuscripts. Joëlle Attinger, Margaret Heffernan, and Alma Harrington Young provided valuable research assistance. Dorothy Hay, Edna Haran, Donna Louise Rogers, Evalyn Seidman, and Nancy J. Simkin typed the book in its many stages with skill and patience.

J.B., R.I.R., J.A.
APRIL 1976