The negotiations of the 1990s promised a long-delayed liberation from all apartheid had stood for, for black South Africans and, indeed, for all South Africans. The writing of a new Constitution was an opportunity to finally establish the grounds for an inclusive ‘moral community between rulers and ruled’ (Fields, 1982). Why, then, did the negotiators come to recognise the institution of chieftainship within their vision of a postapartheid society and an otherwise liberal Constitution? Why, in other words, was this element of indirect rule maintained over the threshold of apartheid? And what does this mean in terms of South Africa's secularism?

The situation of the apartheid homelands is critical to an explanation of the recognition of traditional leadership. It was in these homelands that chieftainship endured and where a political imaginary of customary leadership was kept alive by subjects and chiefs as much as by apartheid administrators.

THE VIOLENCE OF THE HOMELANDS

Barbara Oomen (2005) estimates that by 1990 about forty-four per cent of the population, nearly 17 million people, lived in a meagre fourteen per cent of South Africa in areas called homelands or bantustans. These territories were an apartheid intensification of earlier colonial and Union segregationist policies. Reserve lands were set aside for occupation by black people from the early 1900s and from 1951 the ambitious new apartheid government grouped them into territories that became objects of contradictory interventions. They were ‘developed’ through modernising ‘betterment schemes’ to improve their carrying capacity as reserves for ‘surplus people’, that is, people surplus to the requirements of South Africa's white economy.