South Africa before 1994, with the homelands
(Source: http://www.fotw.net/misc/za)old.gif)

After South Africa became a Union, the government wanted Black and White people to live separately, so they set certain areas apart for Black people. Before the Union they were rural areas ruled by local chiefs. They came to be called ‘Native Locations' and Black South Africans were systematically dispossessed of their land access via the 1913 Land Act.

Later, under apartheid the division and control were more rigorous and these areas were called homelands. The idea was that the homelands would be like countries where the Black people could live and vote for their own governments, led by chiefs controlled by the apartheid state. As the White minority state expanded its divide and rule plan of control, there was a homeland for every major Black language in South Africa. These groups were called nations, and all Black South Africans were made citizens of one of these ‘homeland' ‘countries', regardless of where they had been born or where they now lived. The devastating forced removal of millions of now non-citizens of South Africa then became part of the history of our country.

There were a lot of problems with the homelands. Many Blacks had never even been to the place to which they were now supposed to move. And once there in the homeland, they had to get permission to come and work in South Africa. This is why many saw these ‘homelands' as labour pools. Also, the homelands were not big. All in all they made up about a tenth of the whole country. So the Blacks would have very little space to live and farm, while the Whites would have a lot of space. There were a lot more Blacks than Whites in South Africa, which made it very unfair. It was almost like this: if there were 10 farms in the country, all the Blacks together would get 1, and the Whites would get the 9 that were left. And some of the homelands were not even on one piece of land, but were divided into a lot of smaller pieces, like Bophuthatswana and KwaZulu. (See map.)

Each homeland had its own leader, always installed by the apartheid government. Some of them were called independent, which means they were seen as separate from South Africa. But being landlocked labour pools, they really were not economically or socially independent. The others stayed part of South Africa, so the leaders still had to listen to the government. But the rest of the world refused to accept the homelands as countries on their own, which meant that the homelands were essentially countries on paper only.

Click here for the Homelands Citizenship Act.