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in a less confrontational manner. However, the new NP government went
further than previous segregation policies with declared “apartheid”
doctrine and abandoned all pretences and applied rigid racial separation,
even on land matters. By 1948, the Black population living in reserves
had dropped from 50 per cent in 1916 to 40 per cent because many
Blacks were becoming permanent inhabitants next to towns as reserve
lands were deteriorating 498 . One of the remarkable innovations of the
apartheid government was the homeland system in which Black
communities were artificially divided into “political units”. Each tribal unit
of the Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Tswana, Swazi, Tsonga, Venda,
Xhosa and Zulu (and later Ndebele) was given its homeland. The
boundaries of these “national units”, not surprisingly, coincided with the
reserve boundaries defined by the 1913 and 1936 land acts. The initial
homeland legislation, the Native Authorities Act of 1959, therefore
perpetuated the policies of the previous land acts.
The ultimate size of the land allocated to homelands according to the
1954 Commission for the Socio-Economic Development of Bantu Areas,
known as the Tomlinson Commission, was about 17 million hectras 499 .
The Commission was concerned that the quality of the land in the
498 J. van Zyl et al(ed), Agricultural Land Reform in South Africa: Policies, Markets and
Mechanisms, p.51.
499 J. van Zyl et al (ed), Agricultural Land Reform, p. 53.
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