The Bantustan State and the South African Transition:
Militarisation, Patrimonialism and the Collapse of the
Ciskei Regime, 1986-1994
EVANS, Laura <http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2471-7439>
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EVANS, Laura (2019). The Bantustan State and the South African Transition:
Militarisation, Patrimonialism and the Collapse of the Ciskei Regime, 1986-1994.
African Historical Review, 50 (1-2), 101-129.
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1
THE BANTUSTAN STATE AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN TRANSITION:
MILITARISATION, PATRIMONIALISM AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE CISKEI
REGIME, 1986-1994
Laura Evans
Sheffield Hallam University; University of the Free State
laura.evans@shu.ac.uk
ORCID 0000-0003-2471-7439
ABSTRACT
This article examines the Ciskei bantustan and processes of state formation during the
transition to democracy. In the Ciskei, the rule of Brigadier Gqozo rested on the continued
support of the South African state: identified as the weakest link in the National Party’s
conservative alliance, the Ciskei became the first target for the African National Congress’
mass action campaign of 1992. The struggle in the Ciskei thus had some significance for the
shape of the transition. While at a constitutional level the National Party eventually conceded
to the re-incorporation of the bantustans in late 1992, it continued to stall change and to
bolster the bantustans through covert military operations and land transfers to bantustan elites.
These dynamics of state formation are critical aspects of the history of the transition and were
at the heart of the emerging political conflict in the Ciskei, which by mid-1992 was escalating
into civil war. This article examines mass mobilisation, political repression and the
consequences of the patrimonial militarisation of the Ciskei state in the Ciskei/ Border region.
By focusing on processes of state formation and struggles over the fabric of the state, this
article provides a corrective to the prevailing academic focus on the elite negotiations and
argues for the value of social histories of the bantustan states for understanding the enduring
legacies of these regimes.
Keywords: Homelands; political violence; Bisho; apartheid; negotiations; ‘third force’
INTRODUCTION
It is well known that the years of South Africa’s transition to democracy witnessed more
intense political violence than at any other time during the apartheid era: between February
1990 and April 1994 some 15,000 people
were killed.
1
Notwithstanding this, South Africa’s
transition to democracy was regularly represented as a “miracle”; a “peaceful revolution”
with only episodic violence, as at Boipatong or Bisho in 1992.
2
Few who had any interest in
1
South African Institute of Race Relations, cited in A. Guelke, “Dissecting the South African Miracle: African
Parallels,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 2, no. 1 (1996): 150.
2
N. Barnard, Peaceful Revolution: Inside the War Room at the Negotiations (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2017); P.
Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1997).
2
reading the South African news during the early 1990s would agree with this representation
of the transition: a miracle “misunderstood.”
3
The National Party (NP) declared the formal end of military repression in 1990, yet critics
such as Chris Hani accused the regime of adopting a “twin-track strategy” of violence and
negotiation, and blamed the state’s shadowy ‘third force’ for precipitating violence.
4
There is
no doubt that violence and negotiation were intertwined during the transition years, and that F.
W. De Klerk’s government was funding and supporting vigilante ‘surrogates’ to undermine
the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies.
5
As Ellis argues, by the mid-1980s, the
South African Defence Force’s (SADF) network of covert operations, initially developed to
undermine political resistance in the Frontline States, had been deployed within South Africa
to damage political mobilisation and erode support for the ANC.
6
De Klerk’s attempts to
exert control over the security state’s fragmented operations were largely (often deliberately)
ineffective. The weight of evidence supports the view that covert repression was sanctioned
by the State Security Council (SSC) until late into the transition.
7
The ANC had also declared
an end to armed resistance in August 1990. In reality, the organisation also struggled to
maintain control over the activities of its own cadres: some Self Defence Units (SDUs) and
other ostensibly Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) groupings refused to demobilise and became
semi-autonomous militias.
8
Much of the political violence of the transition was concentrated in what were then Natal
province and the PWV (Pretoria, Witwatersrand, Vereeniging) region, and the emphasis of
the existing literature reflects this geographic focus.
9
In contrast, scholars have tended to
3
A. Guelke, South Africa in Transition: The Misunderstood Miracle (London: IB Tauris, 1999).
4
C. Hani (September 1992), cited in J. Kane-Berman, Political Violence in South Africa (Johannesburg: South
African Institute of Race Relations, 1993), 16.
5
I. Liebenberg, “Unconventional Intervention During Transition,” in C. Shutte, I. Liebenberg and A. Minnaar
(eds), The Hidden Hand: Covert Operations in South Africa, Second Edition (Pretoria: HSRC, 1998), 137-151.
6
S. Ellis, “The Historical Significance of South Africa’s Third Force,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 24,
no. 2 (1998): 261-299.
7
R. Taylor and M. Shaw, “The Dying Days of Apartheid,” in D. Howarth and A. Norval (eds), South Africa in
Transition: New Theoretical Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 13- 30; K. O’Brien, The
South African Intelligence Services: From Apartheid to Democracy, 1948-2005 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011),
172- 203.
8
G. Kynoch, “Crime, Conflict and Politics in Transition-Era South Africa,” African Affairs, 104, no. 416
(2005): 493-514.
9
See, for example, A. Guelke, “Interpretations of Political Violence during South Africa’s Transition,”
Politikon, 27, no. 2 (2000): 239- 254; G. Kynoch, “Reassessing Transition Violence: Voices from South Africa's
Township Wars, 1990–4,” African Affairs 112, no. 447, (2013): 283–303; Mathis, “From Warlords to Freedom
Fighters.”
3
represent the transition years in the Eastern Cape as a time of relative peace.
10
It has been
argued that the region experienced comparatively little political violence, owing to the
overwhelming support of the local population for the ANC and the well-established networks
of civic and labour organisation in the region.
11
More recently, historical work has begun to
address this gap in the literature, by examining the military operations of the SADF and MK
in the Transkei and Ciskei during the 1980s and 1990s.
12
There is substantial evidence to support the view that in the Border and Ciskei region of the
Eastern Cape during the early 1990s a virtual civil war was unfolding, precipitated by an
aggressive and repressive bantustan regime in hand with the covert military operations of the
South African security apparatus: the SADF and its Military Intelligence wing (SADF-MI).
While the significance of the state’s covert operations and the extent of violence in the Ciskei
were revealed in a series of contemporary media exposes, not least in the wake of the
shooting at the Bisho stadium on the 7th September 1992, they have remained largely absent
from subsequent academic accounts of the transition.
13
Throughout the late-apartheid period
(c.1986-1994), the security state funded covert operations and private front companies to
escalate existing political competition between Africanists and Charterists, supporting and
arming opposition groups to terrorise United Democratic Front (UDF) and ANC supporters,
while seeking to establish an alternative ‘Xhosa Resistance Movement’ in the Eastern Cape.
14
During the 1990s these operations were unleashed on the rural areas of the Ciskei to bolster
the bantustan state and its networks of patronage under Brigadier ‘Oupa’ Gqozo.
10
M. Shaw, “The Bloody Backdrop: Negotiating Violence,” in S. Friedman and D. Atkinson (eds), The Small
Miracle: South Africa’s Negotiated Settlement, South African Review 7 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1994), 183;
Guelke, South Africa in Transition; Guelke, “Interpretations of Political Violence”.
11
P. Gibbs, “Political Identity and Democracy Formation in the Eastern Cape, 1990-1994,” in South African
Democracy Education Trust (SADET), The Road to Democracy in South Africa, Volume 6, Part 1 (1990-1996)
(Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2013), 317-321.
12
D. Douek, “‘They Became Afraid When They Saw Us’: MK Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in the
Bantustan of Transkei, 1988–1994,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 39, no. 1, (2013): 207-225; P.
Mangashe, “Operation Zikomo: The Armed Struggle, the Underground and Mass Mobilisation in South Africa’s
Border Region, 1986-1990, through the Experiences of MK Cadres,” South African Historical Journal, 70, no. 1
(2018): 42-55.
13
The few accounts that do mention this history include J. Peires, “The Implosion of Transkei and Ciskei,”
African Affairs 91, no. 364 (1992): 365- 387; R. Taylor and M. Shaw, “The Dying Days of Apartheid.” See also
L. Flanagan, “Covert Operations in the Eastern Cape,” in Shutte et al., The Hidden Hand, 191-282; C. White,
“The Rule Of Brigadier Oupa Gqozo in Ciskei: 4 March 1990 To 22 March 1994” (MA Thesis, Rhodes
University, 2008).
14
Flanagan, “Covert Operations,” 192.
4
The future of the bantustans, or ‘homelands’,
15
was a pivotal issue throughout the
negotiations.
16
Reshaping and limiting the role of ‘traditional authorities’ in the new South
Africa was critical for the possibilities of democracy in South Africa’s rural areas.
17
While
some of the more recent historiography on the bantustans in the transition focuses on the
actions of homeland leaders as they sought to secure their own futures, work by Mathis and
Gibbs examines the critical local dynamics of mobilisation, repression, political violence and
state formation.
18
Accounts that address these local dynamics and thereby augment the
prevailing focus on the elite-level negotiations are critical for the development of a more
nuanced historical understanding of processes of state formation in the bantustans during the
transition and, indeed, their afterlives. This paper examines the relations through which the
Ciskei state was sustained during the late apartheid period: it explores political violence,
patrimonialism and their connections.
19
The bantustans were patrimonial regimes, with a fragile legitimacy dependent on their
relationship with Pretoria. Their leaders were “state managers”: reliant on funding from the
central state, their power rested on their ability to garner support through the patronage of
state resources and the decentralisation of control over local governance.
20
Political power
was built around the gate-keeping of access to limited state resources, including land,
pensions, labour contracts, state funds and employment in the bureaucracy. Amid the scarcity
15
The term ‘bantustan’ has historically been preferred by critics of the apartheid regime, while the government
employed the term ‘homelands’, laden with the discourse of ethnic self-determination. I thus follow this usage:
when referring to these entities in descriptive or general terms I use ‘bantustan’. I employ the term ‘homeland’
with reference to government policy and the nominally independent political regimes. For ease of reading I have
omitted quotation marks hereafter.
16
Peires, “The Implosion”; J. Peires, “Transkei on the Verge of Emancipation,” in P. Rich, Reaction and
Renewal in South Africa (London: Macmillan, 1996), 192-221; P. S. Jones, “From ‘Nationhood’ To
Regionalism To The North West Province: ‘Bophuthatswananess’ And The Birth Of The ‘New’ South
Africa,” African Affairs 98, no. 393 (1999): 509–534; M. Lawrence and A. Manson, “The ‘Dog of the Boers’:
The Rise and Fall of Mangope in Bophuthatswana,” Journal of Southern African Studies 20, no. 3 (1994): 447-
461; A. Manson, “‘Punching Above its Weight’: The Mafikeng Anti-Repression Forum (Maref) and the Fall of
Bophuthatswana,” African Historical Review 43, no. 2 (2011): 55-83. Various authors, Special Issue on
Transkei, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 11, no. 2 (1992); J. Cherry and L. Bank, “A Tale of Two
Homelands: Transkei, Ciskei,” Southern Africa Report 9, no. 1 (1994), 25- 30.
17
L. Ntsebeza, Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of Land in South Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
18
J. Robinson, “Fragments of the Past: Homeland Politics and the South African Transition, 1990–2014,”
Journal of Southern African Studies 41, no. 5 (2015): 953-967; S. M. Mathis, “From Warlords to Freedom
Fighters: Political Violence and State Formation in Umbumbulu, South Africa,” African Affairs 112, no. 448
(2013): 421-439; T. Gibbs, Mandela’s Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid’s First Bantustan (James
Currey: Woodbridge, 2014), 131- 175.
19
It thus complements new work by Wotshela that examines local mobilisation in the Ciskei and Border during
the late apartheid period and the transition to democracy. L. Wotshela, “The Fate of Ciskei and Adjacent Border
Towns’ Political Transition in a Democratising South Africa, 1985 -1995” in SADET, The Road to Democracy
in South Africa, Volume 8 (forthcoming).
20
J. Graaff, “Towards an Understanding of Bantustan Politics,” in N. Nattrass and E. Ardington (eds), The
Political Economy of South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): 67.