Introduction

During the 1970s, the National Party set in motion its plans for the creation and then consolidation of the Bophuthatswana homeland on the basis that its black inhabitants were culturally and politically homogeneous. All the land comprising the western Transvaal bushveld and the former Bechuanaland reserves was to be incorporated into the nascent ‘state’. Apart from a few urban nodes, such as some townships around Pretoria and Brits, the homeland comprised predominantly rural people. This chapter examines how the occupants of Bophuthatswana were affected by and reacted to this development. From the outset, the period witnessed a good deal of civil conflict between the various African communities occupying the area and the Bophuthatswana state, as well as internal disputes within several merafe.

Like all the homelands, Bophuthatswana was created on the platform of what the government interpreted as ‘traditional’ leadership. Through elections, political parties and a presumed democratic process, the homelands were provided with the illusion of independence. As indicated in Chapter Four, like his father before him, Lucas Mangope was the government's preferred candidate to lead the Tswana people to independence and had been to some extent groomed to take over. This meant that he had to establish dominance over those rivals whom he saw as a threat to his authority. It was ‘a particularly sore point with Mangope, as his own traditional authority over others was widely refuted, and he depended to a large extent on the support of the South African state’. One of those who contested the elections to the Tswana Territorial Authority, the precursor to the Bophuthatswana Legislative Assembly, was the Kgatla kgosi, Tidimane Pilane. Pilane's conception of a Tswana homeland was that it should at a later stage amalgamate with other homelands. He claimed that his party, the National Seoposengwe Party, stood for African, as opposed to narrowly Tswana, unity, and espoused a form of ‘federalism’. The National Seoposengwe Party wanted a full referendum to gauge the support for independence. In contrast, Mangope's Bophuthatswana National Party ‘embraced a far narrower ethnic and chiefly constituency’.