The difference in the West Bank is that whereas South African
Bantustans were spread in the two large countries, all the
Bantustans of the West Bank are small sets of city centers, townships and villages within the tiny 5,655 square kilometres area dissevered by a network of walled passages and checkpoints that make it practically impossible for a person living in one locality to enter another without passing through humiliating obstacles erected by alien Israeli forces.
History and geography played a pivotal role in shaping the Eastern Cape first into
Bantustans and later the Eastern Cape Province in a democratic South Africa (SA) (Figs.
The concept of
Bantustans was envisioned to have a double effect over the intra and interracial group dynamics.
In one part of the former homeland, none other than Chief Matanzima, the former and considerably-hated
Bantustan leader, headed a tribal court where people appeared before him as "Transkei citizens," citizens of a polity that no longer existed.
While
Bantustans were unilaterally declared and no country ever recognized their independence--except Israel, to a degree, as it allowed Bophutatswana to open a diplomatic office in Tel Aviv--the effective sovereignties of these entities have had some common social and political consequences: instability and coups, military interventions, overpopulation, lack of access to sustainable resources, including water, demilitarization, and, finally, as already noted, the creation of a captive market for the protector country's businesses.
That means destruction of the institutions of the potential
Bantustan that was planned by Clinton and his Israeli partners.
Under apartheid, hereditary traditional leaders and their councils in the former
Bantustan communities were responsible for allocating land held in trust by the state.
Chiefs came to be seen more as coercive agents of the
bantustan regimes.
And we are to surrender that remembrance, delivered by our fallen patriots into our fragile trust -- as it will be into our children's -- for "economic prosperity" in an autonomous
Bantustan in our usurped homeland?
A Palestine which ends up a
Bantustan hotchpotch of mushrooming occupation is not viable.
When the Oslo Document was originally presented by the Israeli government to the Palestinian delegation to the Middle East peace negotiations in the fall of 1992, it was rejected by the delegation because it obviously constituted a
bantustan. This document carried out Menachem Begin's disingenuous misinterpretation of the Camp David Accords - expressly rejected by US President Jimmy Carter - that all they called for was autonomy for the people and not for the land too.