Yeah, fair enough.
The map is just a bit misleading though, the area could hardly be considered a white majority area.
WI: Larger bantustans?
- Thread starter abc123
- Start date
Yeah, fair enough.
The map is just a bit misleading though, the area could hardly be considered a white majority area.
The area on the southern edge of North West province, on the northern border of the Free State, also seems unlikely to be a white majority area.
Comparing the population density and racial maps I'm pretty sure it to is a case of the area being sparsely populated; looking at Google Earth, the area in question only has one settlements entirely within it, that being Hartswater (which is 56% Black and 12% White) while the cities of Christiana (77% White) and Bloemhof (62% White) are very near-by, so it might be including parts of them as well, which would overall give it a small majority (IE probably 53%) White.
Also, after looking at it, the map is'nt using Census tracts, but electoral wards.
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That Limpopo ward is a DA ward, so is probably predominantly white.
Useful reference website too.
http://maps.elections.org.za/lgeresults/
abc123
Banned
It's a rough map, but I plan on eventually making a high-quality map once I got all of the details sorted out
1. Ciseki
2. Transeki
3. Lesotho
4. Kwazulu
5. Swaziland
6. Lebowa
7. Gazankulu
8. Venda
9. South Ndebele
10. Botswana
This is what I expect a partition to look like (assuming the South Africa government is in the position of strength, which they are likely to be in), as the South African government is likely going to want to keep any major city with a White population above 25-30%, along with retaining as much mineral resources as possible, and important ports, roads, etc.
Does anyone think the Zulu and Northern Sotho homelands could be split in two Bantustans like the Xhosa were?
Also, to any South Africans / South Africa experts, are there any areas I give to the Bantustans that the South Africa government would be very unlikely to yield?
Good map. It seems pretty logical. Only a few remarks:
a) You gave too small teritory to Bophutswana, IMO almost all that territory north of Pretoria, up tu territory No 6 should be a part of it. Also that black part SW of Bophutswana could be a part of it.
b) area east of No 7 territory should IMO be a part of that territory, I don't see any real reasons to keep that
c) I was been thinking that you will give more territory to Lesotho ( SE part of Orange FS )
That area is Pedi, not Tswana.
If you're creating ethnically-based homelands it's pointless lumping Pedis in with Tswanas.
abc123
Banned
Divide et impera?
But yes, so they can give that to Lebowa, so that they are with the ret of Northern Sotho people.
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That thought occured to me as well, and it also leaves me wondering if National Route 4 and the border station at Komatipoort would be in the Bantustan. Considering that the route from the Witwatersrand cities to Zimbabwe and Durban are all inside SA I would bet on that NOT being the case. It also leaves me wondering if the road from Maputo to Richards Bay and Durban would not be something SA would want to keep in their own hands. It's not like Swaziland is gonna have a hard time exporting anything with that border with Mozambique and the proximity to the big port at Maputo.
One other thought occured to me here: If SA is able to make this dividing up territory thing work (not betting on it, but for the sake of the argument), what happens in Namibia? Do they do the same there with the Ovamboland and Kavangoland territories and formally annex the rest? This would have the effect of considerably increasing the country's already-massive mineral wealth.
@abc123: I don't see any more territory for Bopthutswana there, because that part of the Northern Cape is fairly mineral-rich and I highly doubt SA would want to give up too many of the big mining regions to the bantustans. The region east of Gazankulu is Kruger National Park, SA DEFINITELY will want to keep that.
White supremacists sure like nature.
It's funny that South African territory keeps panhandles just to encompass the Kruger and now also Etosha National Park. Funny but plausible.I wouldn't see the Northern states integrated in a unified state with Cuando-Cubango, I'd see them all in a South African's Puppets Community. All weak, all economically dependent.
The panhandle is mainly to keep Otavi, Tsumeb, and Grootfontein, which collectively contain about 1/4th of the White population. Ethosa is nearby, so why not add it?
Sure... I don't know if those parks are a source of revenue but IOTL they went even farther than you: they kept the Skeleton Coast which is a natural park and a thin a looong panhandle.
Perhaps that was one of the OTL motivations to keep it in the first place. In reality I believe the main reason why a natural park is a good candidate to keep is more a "mheh, almost no-one lives there, why give it away?" rather than a "let's milk that land with safaris and ecotourists".
abc123
Banned
Compare that map with this one:
http://kora.matrix.msu.edu/files/101/596/65-254-108-168-overcoming_apartheid-a0a8b3-a_3272.jpg
As you can see, a lot of mines allready is in Bantustan territories, and the area in question mainly has no major mineral riches ( except of some coal near Botswana border ).
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katchen
Banned
I took a graduate level course in Political Science on Southern African politics and international relations in the 1970s. My professor at the time, James Scaritt at University of Colorado at Denver (interestingly, one of my colleagues and classmates was the Iranian studies expert Faradi Fardhi) believed that partition based on larger bantustans (or one African State in a crescent tying the bantustans together) was probably the most viable solution to the South African conundrum. At the time, he never expected the sanctions regime to be as effective as it was. Then again, the South African Nationalists threw in the towel during the time of the Clinton Administration after the fall of the USSR when the world appeared to be becoming unipolar with the US as sole hegemon....
Looking back on the apartheid issue, I suspect that the real reason for apartheid (and apartheid's defeat) was the central fact of white South Africa, namely the victory of the Dutch Afrikaners over the British South Africans in the 1948 Election that catapulted Malan to power and democratically undid the Boer War. South Africa pulled out of the British Commonwealth as a result of this election. Great Britain found this election and it's results totally unacceptable, especially since the Nats became more and more authoritarian in their bid to cement power not only against Africans but against fellow whites who came from the UK.
Suffrage and equal rights for Africans came to be seen as valuable for unseating the Afrikaners a lot earlier than it became acceptable for it's own sake. I think that the British antipathy to Afrikaners helps to explain why the British offered no cooperation with South Africa when it came to the obvious "answer" of redrawing the borders of British colonies to put many "bantustans" within them. Such as Venda, Lebowa and Gazankulu within Rhodesia, Bophutatswana within Botswana (along with the Namibian bantustans), Swaziland getting part of what was Kwazulu and Transkei and perhaps Ciskei merged with Lesotho.
The British refused to cede Botswana (then called Bechuanaland), Lesotho and Swaziland to South Africa and refused to merge Rhodesia with South Africa--which would have given South Africa definite options as far as giving independence to bantustans as part of larger states. Nor did the British permit the Bantustans to become part of the three British enclaves upon independence. (Though this would not have stopped South Africa from giving independence to the Bantustans in `1964 when those nations went independent anyway and had they done so, despite Great Britain, it is likely that those "homelands" would have world diplomatic recognition IOTL--despite Great Britain. Attempting to retain the status quo of white baaskaap (literally "boss-ship) beyond when it would do the Afrikaners any good was Veroerd's (and Vorster's and Botha's) big mistake IOTL.
Looking back on the apartheid issue, I suspect that the real reason for apartheid (and apartheid's defeat) was the central fact of white South Africa, namely the victory of the Dutch Afrikaners over the British South Africans in the 1948 Election that catapulted Malan to power and democratically undid the Boer War. South Africa pulled out of the British Commonwealth as a result of this election. Great Britain found this election and it's results totally unacceptable, especially since the Nats became more and more authoritarian in their bid to cement power not only against Africans but against fellow whites who came from the UK.
Suffrage and equal rights for Africans came to be seen as valuable for unseating the Afrikaners a lot earlier than it became acceptable for it's own sake. I think that the British antipathy to Afrikaners helps to explain why the British offered no cooperation with South Africa when it came to the obvious "answer" of redrawing the borders of British colonies to put many "bantustans" within them. Such as Venda, Lebowa and Gazankulu within Rhodesia, Bophutatswana within Botswana (along with the Namibian bantustans), Swaziland getting part of what was Kwazulu and Transkei and perhaps Ciskei merged with Lesotho.
The British refused to cede Botswana (then called Bechuanaland), Lesotho and Swaziland to South Africa and refused to merge Rhodesia with South Africa--which would have given South Africa definite options as far as giving independence to bantustans as part of larger states. Nor did the British permit the Bantustans to become part of the three British enclaves upon independence. (Though this would not have stopped South Africa from giving independence to the Bantustans in `1964 when those nations went independent anyway and had they done so, despite Great Britain, it is likely that those "homelands" would have world diplomatic recognition IOTL--despite Great Britain. Attempting to retain the status quo of white baaskaap (literally "boss-ship) beyond when it would do the Afrikaners any good was Veroerd's (and Vorster's and Botha's) big mistake IOTL.
The Boers had won the peace in 1910 already, not 1948. From union in 1910, South Africa had Afrikaner leaders and Afrikaner governments and the Nationalists were in power from 1924 till 1933 (and a Nationalist PM, Hertzog served from '24 to '39, resigning over the question of South African neutrality in the war).
The 1948 election was not the reason SA pulled out of the Commonwealth, South Africa becoming a republic was the reason. SA only left the Commonwealth in the early '60s.
You say the British refused to merge Rhodesia with South Africa. This is also not true. The Rhodesians were given an option in 1922 about joining the Union or getting self-government and they chose self-government.
Your proposed merging of some of the homelands into other African states are also a non-starter. Most of your proposed mergers would put people of different ethnic groups together, for not sensible reason, and would legitimate apartheid by taking away the South African citizenship of those that live in the homelands.
I've always found the idea of merging a larger/contiguous (as in the core, not the whole of the OTL Bantustan) Bophuthatswana with Botswana to be an interesting idea.
Alex Richards
Donor
Heck, Lesotho, Swaziland, Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesia were all closely involved in the process by which the Southern African Customs Union* partially merged to form the Union of South Africa, and could all have ended up as part of the Union.
*Still going BTW, it's the oldest customs Union in the world.