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Why Africa Should Dismiss Moscow’s ‘Homelands’ — and their Moochers
It was with an obvious lack of irony that this past December the Pan-African Parliament dispatched a 17-strong delegation to the unrecognised Donetsk People’s Republic carved out of Ukrainian territory in the east and occupied by Russia in contravention of international law.
Member of the Ukrainian Parliament (Rada)
Director, The Brenthurst Foundation
At the height of “grand apartheid”, the South African government under HF Verwoerd produced a diabolical scheme to grant independence to 10 “homelands” — Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Venda, Gazankulu, KaNgwane, KwaNdebele, KwaZulu, Lebowa and QwaQwa.
You have probably never heard or read of these territories. That is because they disappeared almost as quickly as they appeared, even though the damage done still lingers.
Known also as “Bantustans”, the homelands were established under South African law as the centrepiece of “separate development”, the idea being to establish states where black South Africans were forced to take citizenship. Each of these areas was supposedly tribally or linguistically based: KwaZulu for the Zulus, Transkei for the Xhosa, Bophutatswana for the Tswana nation, QwaQwa for the Basotho, Venda for the Venda, Lebowa for the Pedi speakers, and so on. Not only would this scheme supposedly link with a nationalistic urge for self-determination, but these homelands would conveniently excuse the racist character of rule in apartheid South Africa.
It was never going to work, and of course it didn’t.
Only four of the 10 ever became nominally independent: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979 and Ciskei in 1981.
No country, save South Africa, recognised these Potemkin states, despite their possession of the symbols of statehood in flags, armies and uniforms, various levels of administration and their elaborate trappings, and even their own stamps. Not to mention unrecognised “embassies” all over the world.
Set up on parcels of land, sometimes discontiguous for a single Bantustan, Bophuthatswana being the notable example, no matter the vast amounts of money South Africa threw at them and the development of “border industries” to create employment in these territories, they remained development backwaters and sources of instability (with frequent coups in Transkei, Ciskei and Venda) and weak governance.
While a few ex-Rhodesian military desperados established the army in Transkei and the homeland attracted a sprinkling of Ghanaian émigrés fleeing serial instability in their country, no African government diplomatically touched the Bantustans.
The Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor of today’s African Union, in its resolution of its 27th ordinary session of June-July 1976 condemned and rejected “the Bantustan policy” and urged its member states “to refrain from establishing contact with the emissaries of the so-called Bantu homelands” and invited “all states and in particular member states of the OAU in their totality not to accord recognition to any Bantustan”.
Instead of taking off economically, these Bantustans proved an economic drag on South Africa, one of the key reasons apartheid eventually became as unaffordable as it was morally indefensible.
Lack of irony
It was thus with an obvious lack of irony that this past December the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) unhesitatingly dispatched a 17-strong delegation to the unrecognised Donetsk People’s Republic carved out of Ukrainian territory in the east and occupied by Russia in contravention of international law.
Headed by the second vice-president of the Pan-African Parliament, Ashebir Woldegiorgis Gayo, the members of this delegation included Don Manuel Doria Bochoboto from Equatorial Guinea, Welcome Siyabonga Dlamini (Eswatini), Mohamed Ahamada Baco (Comoros), Victoria Kingstone (Malawi), André Joaquim Magibire (Mozambique), Emmanuel LoWilla (South Sudan), Patrick Nsamba Oshabe (Uganda), Anatropia Lwehikila Theonest (Tanzania) and three representatives from Zambia, Newton Samakayi, Menyani Zulu and Miles Sampa, along with citizens of Djibouti and Somalia.
On 21 February 2022, just three days before he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree recognising the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. To date they have been “recognised” additionally by South Ossetia and Abkhazian authorities (themselves unrecognised internationally), Ba’athist Syria and North Korea in an alliance of demagogues.
At the outcome of the visit, on 20 December 2024, Putin said, “I recently spoke with [Denis] Pushilin, the leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic. He told me about how he received a delegation from Africa. I am delighted to have our friends and guests. And I am planning to go to Africa myself. This is very good and right. We must maintain relations.”
Earlier, Gayo, in an interview with the Russian News Agency said the “legislative body would invite the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin, to the South African city of Johannesburg”.
Miles Sampa, a Zambian parliamentarian, has defended the trip, whose purpose, he says, “was fact finding and ways [sic] how as Africa MPs we can then advocate or influence for the end of war given the negative economic impact it’s having on Africa due to the trade embargo … [with] cheaper fertiliser, grain, oil, etc into Africa.” Sampa added, correctly, that “as MPs who represent Africa we can’t afford to be mute and do nothing about that war”.
Yet this is precisely not the way to positively influence a peaceful outcome to this war. Exactly how this group was going to do this by tacitly providing recognition to what is effectively a terrorist pseudo-state is unclear, particularly in the light of subsequent statements.
As the Ukrainian government observed, “The statements made by them during this visit about opposing colonialism, made on Ukrainian land illegally seized by Russia during the neocolonial war of aggression against Ukraine, are entirely absurd.”
Egregious expediency
This trip and the support lent as a consequence to Russia’s imperial ambitions is akin to a visit by leading Africans to the Bantustans in the 1980s premised on the argument that this would help to end apartheid. It’s pure political fantasy and egregious expediency.
Even if one forgives these parliamentarians for their hapless understanding of international and Ukrainian law, they display a recklessness with their own circumstances. Gayo might like, for a moment, to consider the implications of his words and deeds on his own country, Ethiopia, currently embroiled in a series of regional conflicts. Breaking off bits of African states to satisfy imperial ambitions would create havoc, stitched together as the continent’s states are across a tapestry of peoples, tribes and religions.
There are differences of course between the Russian creations and the Bantustans. Ethnic criteria form no legal basis, however flimsy, of their creation by Putin, no matter his attempted justification about the freedom to use the Russian language. Unlike the Bantustans, which formed part of South African territory, the Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” were the product of a violent military annexation.
If this trip was not paid for by Russia, which is problematic in itself, African taxpayers should ask for their money back from their PAP contribution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the PAP delegation are from countries commonly judged as authoritarian. Equatorial Guinea ranks a lowly 5/100 on Freedom House’s index of political rights and civil liberties, where 100 is judged as perfectly free, Eswatini is at 17/100, Ethiopia 20/100, Uganda 34/100 and South Sudan at the bottom of the pile on 1/100. Russia is also, no surprise, judged at 13/100, below Burundi, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Presumably the citizens of Tanzania, Comoros, Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia, which all make Freedom House’s “partly free” roster, might have something to say at the next ballot about this use of their hard-earned tax dollars.
With the advent of democracy, South Africa’s Bantustans ceased to exist on 27 April 1994, and were reincorporated into the country’s nine provinces. Inevitably, the same fate will befall Russia’s version of the Bantustan in Ukraine’s east.
History will remember the names of Moscow’s moochers and opportunistic fellow travellers.
This article originally appeared on the Daily Maverick
