“R.S.A. Black Homelands Consolidation Proposals” (1975)

This map, titled "R.S.A. Black Homelands Consolidation Proposals / Swart Tuislande Konsolidasievoorstelle 1975" is an artefact of the cartographic engineering behind Apartheid's "Separate Development" policy.

The Cartographic Fiction of Independent States

The map depicts the National Party government's attempt to conceptually restructure the native reserves into ten distinct "Bantustans" or black homelands. The strategic design of this policy was to strip Black South Africans of their South African citizenship by declaring them citizens of these fragmented territories instead.

As clearly shown across the northern and eastern regions, the map reveals the staggering geographic absurdity of this plan. Territories like Bophuthatswana (orange) and KwaZulu (brown) were not unified landmasses, but rather a sprawling archipelago of non-contiguous pockets of land completely surrounded by "white" South Africa.

The Failed PR Attempt at "Consolidation"

By 1975, the extreme fragmentation of these territories was drawing intense domestic and international criticism, making the concept of these states ever achieving true economic or political viability look like a sham.

The 1975 consolidation proposals, issued by the Bantu Affairs Commission just a year before the Transkei was granted its unrecognized independence in 1976, aimed to buy out white-owned farms and swap parcels of land to combine dozens of islands of land into fewer, larger blocks. For instance, the plan intended to consolidate KwaZulu down from dozens of fragmented pieces into ten main blocks.

The Human Cost of Mapmaking

While the clean, colour-coded lines look like a standard bureaucratic planning exercise, these proposals carried a devastating human cost. To achieve even the modest degree of consolidation shown here, the state initiated massive, forced population relocations. Between the 1960s and 1980s, over 3.5 million people were forcibly uprooted from their ancestral homes, freehold "black spots," and urban areas, and deposited into these overcrowded, economically marginalised territories.

510mm x 440mm

Some notes in pen; a couple of spots; minor creasing.

R2,500