Fragmented Nations: A History of the Bantustans

For nearly forty years, the South African government attempted to organise the political life of its African majority into a constellation of separate ethnic-national homelands — ten territories scattered across the country, four of them declared independent states that almost no other government in the world was willing to recognise. By the time the project collapsed in 1994, it had cost the South African state hundreds of billions of rands, displaced more than three million people, and produced a body of human-rights violations whose consequences continue to shape the country today.

Fragmented Nations is the first comprehensive narrative history of that project. Drawing on archival records, the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a wide range of contemporary scholarship, Liam Richard May traces the homelands story from its colonial origins in the seventeenth century to its dissolution in 1994 and its continuing residues — the Ingonyama Trust, the Venda flag revival, the political careers of the homeland-era figures who survived into the new democracy.

Throughout, the book takes seriously both the architects’ doctrinal claims and their critics’ fundamental objections, presenting the evidence on its own terms and letting the reader render the verdict.