All of the Bantustans were wholly dependent on the South African government, but they still possessed all the trappings of states—local rulers, administrations, security forces, etc.

The sorts of people who would participate in the oppression and exploitation of their own people on behalf of the apartheid regime, in exchange for a measure of (localized, subordinate) power and wealth, were not very good people, as you’d might expect. Virtually all of the Bantustans functioned internally as dictatorships.

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By 1994, apartheid was in its death throes (good things can actually happen!) and South Africa was preparing for its first all-race elections. All of the homelands were to be officially dissolved and reincorporated into the larger state.

One of these homelands was Bophuthatswana, set up to alienate members of the Tswana ethnic group from South African politics. Lucas Mangope, the “president” of Bophuthatswana, objected, preferring to maintain his local rule over an impoverished apartheid statelet rather than become a regular person in a desegregated South Africa.

So Mangope, who had been in power since 1977, declared that Bophuthatswana would remain independent and that elections would not be held.

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But members of the Bophuthatswana security forces *did* want apartheid to end, so they mutinied. Mangope put out a public call to save his regime.

Responding to his call was South Africa’s far right movement, which was devoted to maintaining apartheid. This eventually included members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), a Nazi Afrikaner militia, who deployed to suppress unrest against Mangope’s rule.

But the Nazis of AWB, unsurprisingly, overplayed their hand, engaging in random violence against the locals. On 11 March, members of an AWB convoy began shooting any Tswana they saw, which one member described as “a kaffir-shooting picnic.”

So local Bophuthatswana police staged an ambush, killing several AWB members and wounding others. The convoy fled, but one car was left behind with three wounded AWB members.

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The AWB members, who had just been engaged in random mass murder, begged for their lives. A Bophuthatswana police officer approached them and, in what might truly be one of the world’s greatest one-liners, asked “what are you doing in my country?” before shooting them dead.

All of this was recorded by journalists present to document the unfolding crisis. You can, if you want, find both still photos and video footage of the incident.

The deaths of the AWB members completely collapsed both AWB morale and Mangope’s political aspirations. Both the Afrikaners and Mangope fled Bophuthatswana and the regime collapsed, being reincorporated into South Africa shortly thereafter.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_B…

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I find this incident so fascinating for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is how well it illustrates this critical point: rulers (and anyone really) do not intrinsically represent the demographic or political communities from which they emerge, even if they drape themselves in the trappings of that community and claim to embody that community.

There are too many people in the world for our limited brains to be able to talk about, much less think about, all of them as individuals all of the time. I’ve done precisely this throughout this thread. “Tswana” and “Afrikaners” and the like. This heuristic, however clumsy, is necessary for our finite brains to make sense of an infinitely complex world.

(Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” addresses our dependence on metaphor to make sense of the world far better than I could so I’ll just leave that here.)

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The problem with this kind of generalization emerges when it leads to bigotry or to our exploitation by rulers who do drape themselves in the pretense of representing or embodying some larger group, with an implicit or explicit claim to legitimate or justified rule by virtue of that representation.

There’s a reason the country is called “Germany,” the land of the Germans. The polity is making a claim to being the natural, true, organic home of people who are German. Nevermind the existence of Austria. It is an immensely common and immensely successful strategy for state elites to claim to organically represent some demographic group.

(This is, of course, one of the reasons genocide is such a common state behavior—if the state claims to organically represent some demographic group, it often has to trim and prune the population under its control to maintain that fiction.)

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