Introduction

As a project, the creation of homelands, masterminded by apartheid architecture, posed a significant threat to social cohesion in South Africa. Arguably, albeit inadvertently, the demise of apartheid in 1994 led to the assumption that the homelands were defunct. Yet they were not, when it came to people's mindsets. Psychosocially, the victims of the apartheid system still harboured horrible memories of the past and there was no closure in their lives. Hence, the psychosocial consequences of apartheid homeland manifestations were abandoned and left unaddressed—a missed opportunity at the time when the democratically elected government assumed power in 1994. A case in point is the situation in Limpopo, in which ethnicity and tribalism born out of the homeland system, which sowed the seeds of hatred and disparity, remain unresolved to this day. The issues of ethnicity and tribalism were not flagged or tackled as they should have been—as was done with issues of colonialism, race and racism, post- 1994. Instead, they were neglected and now these issues are backfiring, serving as a poisoned chalice and a ticking time bomb for the current generation.

Vuwani today, for example, is known as a community of violence and strife, due to the sociocultural dynamics between the Venda and Tsonga people, where infighting is at play. The vast disparities that exist in terms of social cohesion are critical, as the former homelands still face the consequences of ethnicity and tribalism which manifest themselves across various government departments. Provinces with defunct homelands are characterised by, and still bear traces of, the legacies of poverty and inequality. Most communities in these provinces are led by traditional leaders who are not sufficiently competent to dismantle the legacies of the past and bring hope to the disgruntled. The same can be said of municipalities which bear the burden of the past, and are struggling to turn around service delivery and develop their communities.

The manifestations of the Gazankulu, Lebowa and Venda homelands (in Limpopo province), along with the Ciskei and Transkei (in the Eastern Cape) as identity symbols of ethnicity, tribalism, poverty and inequality, along with Bophuthatswana (in North West) and KwaNdebele and Kangwane (in Mpumalanga) including QwaQwa (in the Free State) and KwaZulu (in KwaZulu-Natal), are sensitive symbols which evoke memories of a past that must be exposed and addressed.