The hybrid word is, in many ways, extremely misleading. The newspapers have christened the Nationalists' plan as one for "Bantustans". As Nelson Mandela explained in a 1959 article: However, it quickly became a pejorative term, with the National Party preferring the term "homelands". The term "Bantustan" for the Bantu homelands was intended to draw a parallel with the creation of Pakistan and India (" Hindustan"), which had taken place just a few months before at the end of 1947, and was coined by supporters of the policy. As a result, blacks would lose their South African citizenship and voting rights, allowing whites to remain in control of South Africa. The creation of the homelands or Bantustans was a central element of this strategy, as the long-term goal was to make the Bantustans independent. When the National Party came to power in 1948, Minister for Native Affairs (and later Prime Minister of South Africa) Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd built on this, introducing a series of "grand apartheid" measures such as the Group Areas Acts and the Natives Resettlement Act, 1954 that reshaped South African society such that whites would be the demographic majority. In 1936 the government planned to raise this to 13.6 percent of the land, but it was slow to purchase land and this plan was not fully implemented. The Natives Land Act, 1913, limited blacks to seven percent of the land in the country. Racial-demographic map of South Africa published by the CIA in 1979 with data from the 1970 South African censusīeginning in 1913, successive white-minority South African governments established "reserves" for the black population in order to racially segregate them from the white population. A new constitution effectively abolished the Bantustans with the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. In South West Africa, Ovamboland, Kavangoland, and East Caprivi were declared to be self-governing, with a handful of other ostensible homelands never being given autonomy. Other Bantustans (like KwaZulu, Lebowa, and QwaQwa) were assigned "autonomy" but never granted "independence". The government of South Africa declared as independent four of the South African Bantustans- Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei (the so-called "TBVC States"), but this declaration was never recognised by anti-apartheid forces in South Africa or by any international government. Under the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, the government stripped black South Africans of their South African citizenship, depriving them of their few remaining political and civil rights in South Africa, and declared them to be citizens of these homelands. The Pretoria government established ten Bantustans in South Africa, and ten in neighbouring South West Africa (then under South African administration), for the purpose of concentrating the members of designated ethnic groups, thus making each of those territories ethnically homogeneous as the basis for creating autonomous nation states for South Africa's different black ethnic groups. It subsequently came to be regarded as a disparaging term by some critics of the apartheid-era government's homelands. The term, first used in the late 1940s, was coined from Bantu (meaning "people" in some of the Bantu languages) and -stan (a suffix meaning "land" in the Persian language and some Persian-influenced languages of western, central, and southern Asia). By extension, outside South Africa the term refers to regions that lack any real legitimacy, consisting often of several unconnected enclaves, or which have emerged from national or international gerrymandering. A Bantustan (also known as Bantu homeland, black homeland, black state or simply homeland Afrikaans: Bantoestan) was a territory that the National Party administration of South Africa set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of its policy of apartheid.
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