Ciskei’s Demise and the Tricky First Decade of Reintegration into the Eastern Cape Province

Studying the end years of South Africa’s black homelands and their enduring legacies is essential to grasping some of the governance challenges and socio-political obstacles that have characterised the foundational years of the nine post-1994 provinces in a newly democratic South Africa. The establishment of the Province of the Eastern Cape is emblematic of these trials. Early challenges in the formation of provincial administration played out at two main levels. At the upper tier of newly formed provincial management were the related tests of establishing legitimacy out of discrete accretions of the apartheid order, alongside the imperative to merge with and leverage forms of authority associated with previously exiled and home-front liberation movements. On another, more localised, level were difficulties related to establishing just and equal mechanisms of administrative control in an environment shaped by histories of dispossession, resettlement and conflicts over homeland governance. Instigated by a series of rural and urban protests which fuelled a surge of civic movements in the Ciskei by 1990, the collapse of the homeland regime reflected the Ciskei’s growing alignment with the African National Congress and the realigning politics of its rural and urban constituencies in the critical transitional period. This article outlines the trials that faced the Ciskei homeland in the democratic transition through to the first decade of its reintegration into the ‘new’ South Africa and its incorporation into the Eastern Cape Province. It argues that the formation of an inclusive and coherent administration and local authority system was profoundly shaped, and hampered, by the same forces which had contributed to the Ciskei’s demise.