Given the central role of rural missions in the development of black resistance during the colonial era, many were mandated to close by the apartheid state. The Bantu Education Act also impacted rural mission schools, as many maintained integrated student populations despite the entrenchment of racial segregation during the colonial period. For example, the aforementioned Lovedale Missionary Station was forced to close its doors by the apartheid state. The closure of rural mission stations also affected access to health care. For many black South Africans, rural mission hospitals were the closest source of Western biomedical treatment. As the missions closed, so too did access to basic medical treatment for rural black South Africans.
The apartheid state also halted the development of innovative new solutions to rural health delivery that were implemented during the interwar period. Dr. Sidney Kark developed community-oriented primary health care, a groundbreaking approach to health in the ethnic homeland that was then known as Zululand. At the Pholela Health Centre, Kark and several colleagues trained black South Africans living in a rural community in basic epidemiological methods, data-gathering techniques, and clinical assessment. The project produced startling improvements in community health, particularly in the area of child health and nutrition (Geiger 1987; Tollman 1994). Kark’s aim was to empower rural communities through education and training to improve local health outcomes. The project was an undoubted success, and it formed the backbone of a new rural health system proposed in the Gluckman Report (1945).51 However, empowering black South Africans in rural communities was not a precedent that the apartheid state sought to reproduce. To the contrary, the National Party expanded the power and control of traditional authorities and limited access to health care and education for black South Africans.
The expansion of state control over black South Africans during apartheid was contingent on the complicity of rural traditional authorities, the foundation on which the National Party developed the apartheid state. The logic of racial “separateness” reinforced the power of traditional elites, while ordinary black South Africans saw their rights, mobility, and ability to access resources limited. Once enemy combatants against colonial states, traditional authorities became local power brokers and political intermediaries. Regional kings, chiefs, and local headmen secured access to laborers for the mines and farms and maintained patriarchal sociopolitical relations, while men engaged in wage labor via circular patterns of migration (Vail 1989). An important component of the transition to rural traditional authority across Africa was the cessation of traditional institutions for women’s political influence. Reflecting the patriarchal terms on which European colonial administrators articulated with African social formations, leadership positions and traditional law were transformed to focus on male roles in regulating traditional societies (Van Allen 1982). Therefore, in addition to ossifying customary law, the development of native reserves also introduced new limits to women’s power and autonomy that were actively upheld by traditional authorities.
Influx control, or the movement of black South Africans from rural to urban areas, was contingent upon the cooperation of the “decentralized despots” that maintained political authority in the reserves (Mamdani 1996). However, the symbolic role of traditional leaders shifted during the apartheid era due to the cultural underpinnings of “separate development.” Cultural explanations rationalized intensified racial inequality during apartheid, and the discipline of anthropology played a central role in buttressing the National Party’s claims to essential and incommensurable cultural differences between people of European and African descent. The volkekunde school of anthropology gathered ethnographic evidence and developed conceptual models at South Africa’s leading Afrikaner universities, supplying the cultural grist for the apartheid state machinery (Sharp 2001). Critically, the volkekunde school marked a sharp break with leading scholarship in South African anthropology, which had historically studied social change, urbanization, and the formation of ethnic identity in a critical manner (Bank 2013). The cultural explanation for racial segregation was deployed to rationalize the political separation of society and augment the authority of traditional leaders.
The process of shifting the designation and function of the reserves began in 1951 with the adoption of the Bantu Authorities Act. The policy expanded the power of traditional leaders based on ethnic and territorial lines. As with the Group Areas Act, political change was gradual, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) established the former reserves as quasi-autonomous ethnic homelands. The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (1970) further concretized the power of traditional leaders over their growing numbers of black South African subjects.52 The Citizenship Act transformed passes into passports between societies that had autonomous governments, however few states recognized them as such, other than the apartheid state. The National Party also sought to develop the infrastructure necessary to rationalize “separate development” with quasi-state institutions such as regional parliamentary buildings in the homelands. Of course, political representation was limited to the homelands themselves, which did not correlate to voting rights in the broader political context of apartheid South Africa.
Intensified racial segregation exacerbated underlying inequities in South African social organization. Forced removals from urban to rural areas intensified an emerging crisis of social reproduction for black South Africans living in the rural reserves. As discussed above, the Land Act (1913) had sequestered 87 percent of South African land for whites, which resulted in increasing numbers of black South Africans engaging in subsistence agriculture in the rural Bantustans. Growing demand for land and increasing densification in the rural reserves led to soil degradation and lower agricultural yields, placing additional pressure on migrant wage earners.53 The apartheid state sought to address the crisis by shifting industrial production from urban areas to the rural Bantustans (Wolpe 1972). However, the industrial sector developed during apartheid largely sacrificed efficiency for the racial logic of separate-but-unequal development. The consequences of inefficient import-substitution industrialization during the apartheid era would come full circle years later, following the negotiated political transition out of apartheid.
As a social reproduction crisis escalated in rural areas, black South Africans responded with increasing levels of self-organization and resistance to apartheid. The violence of forced removals concentrated the black urban population into periurban townships, but it also led to increased levels of political organization and opposition.54 A long-standing source of opposition to white rule, the ANC had lost standing among black urban residents due to ineffectual leadership amid growing state violence. The ANC’s “young Turks,” led by Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu, revitalized the ANC by working with the SACP to challenge the implementation of apartheid laws. Walter Sisulu’s election as secretary general reflected a shift within the ANC away from an approach based on moderation to direct action and civil disobedience. The Defiance Campaign (1952) built upon growing opposition to apartheid in urban areas and consisted of nonviolent protests.55 Critically, the South African Indian Congress aligned with the ANC to build a nonracial platform for the campaign. Strikes, boycotts, and nonviolent resistance were the responses of an emerging alliance of anti-apartheid activists.
A significant development for the anti-apartheid campaign was the adoption of the Freedom Charter by the ANC, the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the South African Congress of Democrats in 1955. The Freedom Charter set the foundations for a nonracial mass movement to end apartheid, and it formalized several demands: a democratic political system, equality in political rights, equality in human rights, the equitable allocation of the country’s wealth, freedom of movement, access to land, and the nationalization of the country’s banks, mines, and industry. The aims of the anti-apartheid movement set out in the Freedom Charter were highly influential for the subsequent emergence of a broad-based movement to end apartheid that transcended the lines of race and class. The ANC played a leading role in formulating the Freedom Charter, but it did so in a consultative manner. Approximately fifty thousand ANC volunteers canvassed the townships and rural areas, gathering input from black South Africans on how the anti-apartheid movement