“The Empire that Shaka Zulu was Unable to Bring About”: Ethnicizing Sovereignty in Apartheid South Africa, 1959–1970

Abstract

Abstract Arrangements of sovereignty in Africa fundamentally shifted during the era of decolonization, temporarily bringing about political possibilities beyond empire or nation-state. The apartheid state drew on this “federal moment” and attempted to save white minority rule by creating ethnically defined self-governing “homelands,” or bantustans, that could be fashioned as “independent” nation-states within a Southern African confederation. This article examines the ethnicization of sovereignty in the planning of KwaZulu, a bantustan for Zulu people. Rather than solely focusing on the central state, it explores how bureaucrats, royal family members, and other African leaders made claims to the boundaries of ethnicity and the proper arrangements of power. Initially, the government assumed that the Zulu homeland could be built atop the former Zulu kingdom. The planned bantustan, however, included both territory and populations that never recognized the Zulu monarchy before colonialism. As Zulu royal allies advocated for an expansive bantustan under a re-empowered monarchy, ethnologists and other bureaucrats clashed over the geographic limits of Zuluness and the relationship between the Zulu king and Africans across the Natal province. As the government retreated from its plan to empower the monarchy, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, an influential royal cousin, used competing historical claims to marginalize the royal house and position himself as the rightful hereditary leader of both the future bantustan and the Zulu kingdom. Ideas of a Zulu ethnic sovereignty that would shape the late apartheid period and democratic transition, I argue, initially emerged through these contingent struggles in the 1960s over territory, populations, and authority.