“South Africans assumed on 27 April 1994 that their vote for freedom would erase the ethnic enclaves known as ‘Bantustans’ or ‘homelands’ and guarantee a common citizenship with equal rights under one law. Officially, the 10 homelands were dismantled under the interim constitution
that introduced democracy in 1994, paving the way for the reversal of the
dispossession that had been entrenched by the 1913 and 1936 land acts. Instead, 20 years later, a series of laws, bills and policies proposes a separate legal regime for people within the boundaries of those former Bantustans. A version of ‘customary law’ that defaults to the tribal boundaries and ascribed identities of the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 is used to justify continued segregation and unequal citizenship. The effect is to consolidate
the unilateral authority of chiefs in relation to land ownership and to deny
other rural South Africans the right to decide for themselves how to use and
share the newly discovered mineral wealth of the land they have owned and
occupied for centuries.”
