In February 1988 a coup by roughly 250 of his own soldiers removed Bophuthatswana president Lucas Mangope from office, and the South African Defence Force crossed the border and restored him in under 24 hours, without any reference to international law and without consequence. In March 1994, when Mangope invoked Bophuthatswana’s sovereignty to refuse reincorporation…

Between 1976 and 1981 the South African government created armies for the 4 homelands it had declared independent, paying for them through the South African Defence budget, training them at SADF bases and commanding them through seconded South African officers. When a coup toppled Bophuthatswana’s president in February 1988, the SADF crossed the border and…

In 1950 the apartheid government appointed its own commission to determine whether the homelands policy could actually work. The Tomlinson Commission answered after 5 years and 17 volumes: yes, but only at a price of £104 million in the first decade and with white capital operating inside the reserves. Hendrik Verwoerd accepted the diagnosis and…

The Boer people are not simply another name for Afrikaners. They are a distinct people who built internationally recognised sovereign republics, lost them to British force in 1902, were absorbed into a broader political identity they did not fully choose, and were then excluded from the only formal promise of self-determination that post-apartheid South Africa…