space and expanding the role of traditional authorities aimed to unwind South Africa’s rapid urbanization during the 1940s.50 In Johannesburg, the number of black South Africans living in the city increased from 244,000 in 1939 to 400,000 in 1946 (Harrison 1992). The industrialization of the rural farming sector and a growing urban economy meant that opportunities for wage labor had shifted, and rapid urbanization led to the proliferation of informal settlements in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. Among other legislation, the Group Areas Act (1950) and the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act (1951) were enacted by the National Party to address the growing black South African urban population. The policies created separate residential areas for different races and legalized forced relocation to achieve this end.
However, the apartheid system was created through a piecemeal process that was never complete. As Deborah Posel (1991) has emphasized, policies associated with apartheid were amended repeatedly, highlighting the gradual intensification of segregation rather than the imposition of a grand vision. For example, the Group Areas Act was enacted by Parliament in 1950 and amended five times before being repealed and reenacted in a new form in 1957. The 1957 version of the Group Areas Act was amended a further three times before being repealed and reenacted in 1966. The policy was amended an additional nine times before being repealed a final time in 1991 during the negotiated political transition. All this underscores Posel’s claim that “ordering” according to the logic of racial separateness was never fully achieved. Still, although racialized social engineering was left unfinished, the violent restructuring of urban space had destructive and lasting effects on black urban social formations in South Africa.
The Group Areas Act’s implementation extended the apartheid state’s power to reorder urban space by enabling forced removals of black residents to periurban townships. The newly created Native Resettlement Board announced plans to destroy the area of Sophiatown in Johannesburg and remove the community in 1953 before initiating the process in 1955. Another famous instance of forced removal occurred in Cape Town with the community of District Six in 1968. The mass removal of black inner-city inhabitants across South Africa was accompanied by the development of periurban townships, such as Soweto (Johannesburg), Nyanga and Gugulethu (Cape Town), and Umlazi and KwaMashu (Durban). Primarily built by municipal authorities, the townships became overcrowded almost immediately. Indeed, the apartheid state directed new construction to occur in the rural reserves rather than build sufficient urban housing. The density of the townships was due also to the efforts of black South Africans to remain in urban areas and maintain their social, economic, and political ties. Thus, forced removals and relocations to the townships were accompanied by an increase in subletting, the construction of backyard shacks, and general periurban densification (Mabin 1992).
However, apartheid’s scope extended beyond the reordering of urban space and into the domain of social reproduction. The Bantu Education Act (1953) mandated racially segregated educational facilities and limited black South African education to vocational skills associated with low-wage professions. Universities that provided education for black South Africans were also affected by the policy. For example, the University College of Fort Hare, where Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe studied, was transformed by the apartheid state despite its history as an independent university. The Bantu education system was modeled on the “separate but equal” education system that was developed in the southern United States during the segregationist era. Policy development within the Union government had been facilitated by input from Charles Loram, who attended Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, and whose work influenced the development of the Bantu Education Act (Davis 1976). As with the “poor whites” question, interested parties from the United States played a significant role in defining the trajectory of legislation that deepened racial inequality in South Africa.
Given the central role of rural missions in the development of black resistance during the colonial era, many were mandated to close by the apartheid state. The Bantu Education Act also impacted rural mission schools, as many maintained integrated student populations despite the entrenchment of racial segregation during the colonial period. For example, the aforementioned Lovedale Missionary Station was forced to close its doors by the apartheid state. The closure of rural mission stations also affected access to health care. For many black South Africans, rural mission hospitals were the closest source of Western biomedical treatment. As the missions closed, so too did access to basic medical treatment for rural black South Africans.
The apartheid state also halted the development of innovative new solutions to rural health delivery that were implemented during the interwar period. Dr. Sidney Kark developed community-oriented primary health care, a groundbreaking approach to health in the ethnic homeland that was then known as Zululand. At the Pholela Health Centre, Kark and several colleagues trained black South Africans living in a rural community in basic epidemiological methods, data-gathering techniques, and clinical assessment. The project produced startling improvements in community health, particularly in the area of child health and nutrition (Geiger 1987; Tollman 1994). Kark’s aim was to empower rural communities through education and training to improve local health outcomes. The project was an undoubted success, and it formed the backbone of a new rural health system proposed in the Gluckman Report (1945).51 However, empowering black South Africans in rural communities was not a precedent that the apartheid state sought to reproduce. To the contrary, the National Party expanded the power and control of traditional authorities and limited access to health care and education for black South Africans.
The expansion of state control over black South Africans during apartheid was contingent on the complicity of rural traditional authorities, the foundation on which the National Party developed the apartheid state. The logic of racial “separateness” reinforced the power of traditional elites, while ordinary black South Africans saw their rights, mobility, and ability to access resources limited. Once enemy combatants against colonial states, traditional authorities became local power brokers and political intermediaries. Regional kings, chiefs, and local headmen secured access to laborers for the mines and farms and maintained patriarchal sociopolitical relations, while men engaged in wage labor via circular patterns of migration (Vail 1989). An important component of the transition to rural traditional authority across Africa was the cessation of traditional institutions for women’s political influence. Reflecting the patriarchal terms on which European colonial administrators articulated with African social formations, leadership positions and traditional law were transformed to focus on male roles in regulating traditional societies (Van Allen 1982). Therefore, in addition to ossifying customary law, the development of native reserves also introduced new limits to women’s power and autonomy that were actively upheld by traditional authorities.
Influx control, or the movement of black South Africans from rural to urban areas, was contingent upon the cooperation of the “decentralized despots” that maintained political authority in the reserves (Mamdani 1996). However, the symbolic role of traditional leaders shifted during the apartheid era due to the cultural underpinnings of “separate development.” Cultural explanations rationalized intensified racial inequality during apartheid, and the discipline of anthropology played a central role in buttressing the National Party’s claims to essential and incommensurable cultural differences between people of European and African descent. The volkekunde school of anthropology gathered ethnographic evidence and developed conceptual models at South Africa’s leading Afrikaner universities, supplying the cultural grist for the apartheid state machinery (Sharp 2001). Critically, the volkekunde school marked a sharp break with leading scholarship in South African anthropology, which had historically studied social change, urbanization, and the formation of ethnic identity in a critical manner (Bank 2013). The cultural explanation for racial segregation was deployed to rationalize the political separation of society and augment the authority of traditional leaders.
The process of shifting the designation and function of the reserves began in 1951 with the adoption of the Bantu Authorities Act. The policy expanded the power of traditional leaders based on ethnic and territorial lines. As with the Group Areas Act, political change was gradual, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) established the former reserves as quasi-autonomous ethnic homelands. The Bantu Homelands
