chiefs. In its Homeland, an African "nation" was to "develop along its own
lines," with all the rights that were denied it in the rest of the country. The
legislative framework, foreshadowed by Verwoerd, was completed in
1971, when the Bantu Homelands Constitution Act empowered the gov-
ernment to grant independence to any Homeland." Government propa-
ganda likened this process to the contemporaneous decolonization of the
European empires in tropical Africa (map 8).
The Transkei was the pacesetter for this process. The government made it
"self-governing:"in 1963 and "independent" in 1976. Bophuthatswana fol-
lowed in 1977, 'Vendain 1979, and Ciskei in 1981. As they became "inde-
pendent," their citizensweredeprived oftheir South African citizenship. The
Pretoria government also ensured that collaborative chiefs such as the
Matanzima
brothers in the Transkei controlled
all the Homelands.
KwaZulu, the most populous Homeland, was a partial exception. There,
Chief Mangosuthu
Buthelezi created a powerful political organization,
Inkatha, refused to accept "independence" on the South African govern-
ment's terms, and developed an ambiguous relationship with Pretoria. 8
Although the South African economy burgeoned in the 1950S and