any of 10 former territories that were designated by the white-dominated government of South Africa as pseudo-national homelands for the country's black African (classified by the government as Bantu) population during the mid- to late 20th century. The Bantustans were a major administrative device for the exclusion of blacks from the South African political system under the policy of apartheid, or racial segregation. Bantustans were organized on the basis of ethnic and linguistic groupings defined by white ethnographers; e.g., KwaZulu was the designated homeland of the Zulu people, and Transkei and Ciskei were designated for the Xhosa people. Other arbitrarily defined groups provided with Bantustans were the North Sotho, South Sotho (see Sotho), Venda, Tsonga (or Shangaan), and Swazi. Despite the efforts of the South African government to promote the Bantustans as independent states, no foreign government ever accorded diplomatic recognition to any of the Bantustans.

Bantustans were rooted in Land Acts promulgated in 1913 and 1936, which defined a number of scattered areas as “native reserves” for blacks. Some expansion, consolidation, and relocation of these areas occurred in the following decades. By the 1950s the combined areas of the reserves amounted to 13 percent of the total land area of South Africa, while blacks made up at least 75 percent of the total population. The 1959 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act relabeled the reserves as “homelands,” or Bantustans, in which only specific ethnic groups were to have residence rights. Later, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 defined blacks living throughout South Africa as legal citizens of the homelands designated for their particular ethnic groups—thereby stripping them of their South African citizenship and their few remaining civil and political rights. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the white-dominated South African government continuously removed black people still living in “white areas”—even those settled on property that had been in their families for generations—and forcibly relocated them to the Bantustans.

The South African government subsequently declared four of the Bantustans “independent”: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981. Six other Bantustans remained self-governing but nonindependent: Gazankulu, KwaZulu, Lebowa, KwaNdebele, KaNgwane, and Qwaqwa. Only two of the Bantustans (Ciskei and Qwaqwa) had a totally coterminous land area; each of the others consisted of anywhere from 2 to 30 scattered blocks of land, some of them widely dispersed. The Bantustans, run by black elites collaborating with the South African government, were allowed to perform some functions of self-government—e.g., in the realms of education, health, and law enforcement. Bantustan executive bodies were nominally responsible to legislative assemblies that were partly elected, but internal coups brought military regimes to power in some cases.

The Bantustans were rural, impoverished, underindustrialized, and reliant on subsidies from the South African government. Only about one-third of South Africa's total black population lived in the six self-governing Bantustans, and about one-fourth lived in the four independent Bantustans, yet because insufficient land had been allocated, the Bantustans were densely populated. The rest of the black population lived in “white South Africa”—sometimes legally, but often illegally—as large percentages of younger people were forced to migrate there to find work. Once workers' contracts had expired or they became too old to work, however, they were deported back to the Bantustans. In the chillingly euphemistic language of apartheid, the Bantustans became dumping grounds for “surplus people.”

Although white farmers close to the Bantustan borders transported black workers to and from their farms on a daily basis, meaningful economic development in and around the Bantustans never materialized. The original hope of the designers of the Bantustan system was that industries would be established along the Bantustan borders to utilize the cheap labour available nearby, but for the most part these hopes went unrealized. Other initiatives to create the illusion of viable economies for the Bantustans also broke down. To the end they were heavily dependent on financial aid supplied by the South African government. Poverty remained acute in the Bantustans, and child mortality rates were extremely high. Despite draconian control of where people were allowed to farm and the number of cattle they were permitted to have, Bantustan lands were oversettled, overgrazed, and hence afflicted with serious soil erosion.

The accelerating collapse of the apartheid system during the 1980s led to the white-dominated government's abandonment of its intention to make the remaining Bantustans independent. South Africa subsequently adopted a constitution that abolished apartheid, and in 1994 all 10 Bantustans were reincorporated into South Africa, with full citizenship rights granted to their residents. The former Bantustan and province organizational structure was dissolved, and nine new South African provinces were created in their place. Although the Bantustans were eliminated, their troubling legacy remained; such problems as environmental degradation and the contentious issue of redistributing land to those forcibly relocated during the apartheid era presented daunting challenges to post-1994 governments.