Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act

The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act extended the system created by the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951. It defined eight official “national units”—North Sotho, South Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu—and provided for territorial authorities with executive and legislative powers in the reserves.

The government presented the arrangement as a gradual transfer of self-government. In practice, it organised African political life into state-designed ethnic units while central control remained in place through the Union government and its commissioners-general. The Act therefore gave apartheid's homeland policy a constitutional structure and a language of political development.

The first major application was Transkei's move to self-government in 1963. The Act's framework led toward the later homeland constitutions, the 1970 policy that assigned Black South Africans citizenship of designated homelands, and the declaration of Transkei's supposed independence in 1976.

The policy also created political authorities with interests of their own. Some homeland leaders later rejected Pretoria's proposed independence or resisted reincorporation into a democratic South Africa because it threatened their offices, influence and territorial control. Resistance in KwaZulu and the 1986 uprising that halted KwaNdebele's planned independence showed that the homeland system could not simply be imposed as a settled constitutional order.

Significance

Made separate development the constitutional route for apartheid's homeland system, dividing African political representation into state-designed ethnic units and preparing the way for later self-governing and supposedly independent Bantustans.