Overlying and muddled power: the Ciskei Bantustan’s disputed rural governance in the twilight decade of apartheid, c.1985–95

Abstract

The paucity of writing on the rapid collapse of local administration within several South African bantustans gripped by the upsurge of civic mobilisation in the late 1980s remains one of the lacunae of the country’s late twentieth-century historiography. Land and governance within such enclaves had become a central issue as apartheid stirred up spatial and demographic calamity in its traumatic displacement and relocation of African households. The turning tide against the local administration of these reassembled human settlements during the 1980s disabled the vital cog of the state-appointed ‘tribal authorities’. Ciskei, which in the late 1970s was swiftly and arbitrarily consolidated under tribal authorities, was one of the bantustans caught up in the rising civic movement from the 1980s onwards. The overlying yet jumbled powers of such besieged tribal authorities, interfacing with the exuberant civic organisations throughout the 1990s, contributed to the advance of Lungisile Ntsebeza’s scholarship around land and rural governance in South Africa. He investigated simple, yet germane, questions such as who governs in the bantustans and how essential land and allied resources were to such disputed control. In honouring Ntsebeza’s scholarship, this article sketches out the history behind the overlying and muddled powers of these governing traditional authorities. It also explicates the myriad socio-political forces that underpinned the disputed nature of rural governance within the Ciskei Bantustan during the dying years of apartheid.