South African homelands as frontiers : apartheid's loose ends in the postcolonial era / edited by Steffen Jensen and Olaf Zenker.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

South African homelands as frontiers: apartheid's loose ends in the postcolonial era - an introduction / Steffen Jensen and Olaf Zenker -- Fragments of the past: homeland politics and the South African transition, 1990-2014 / Jason Robinson -- Material remains: artifice versus artefact(s) in the archive of bantustan rule / Shireen Ally -- This house is not my own...! Temporalities in a South African homeland / Steffen Jensen -- Custom, normativity and authority in South Africa / Hylton White -- South African land restitution, white claimants and the fateful frontier of former KwaNdebele / Olaf Zenker -- 'Women use their strength in the house': savings clubs in an Mpumalanga village / Deborah James -- Moralising magic? A brief history of football potions in a South African homeland area, 1958-2010 / Isak Niehaus -- City slums, rural homesteads: migrant culture, displaced urbanism and the citizenship of the serviced house / Leslie Bank -- 'Keeping land for their children': generation, migration and land in South Africa's Transkei / Derick A. Fay -- Epilogue: on the frontiers of time / Joost Fontein.

This book explores what happened to the homelands - in many ways the ultimate apartheid disgrace - after the fall of apartheid. The nine chapters contribute to understanding the multiple configurations that currently exist in areas formerly declared "homelands" or "Bantustans". Using the concept of frontier zones, the homelands emerge as areas in which the future of the South African postcolony is being renegotiated, contested and remade with hyper-real intensity. This is so because the many fault lines left over from apartheid (its loose ends, so to speak) - between white and black; between different ethnicities; between rich and poor; or differentiated by gender, generation and nationality; between "traditions" and "modernities" or between wilderness and human habitation - are particularly acute and condensed in these so-called "communal areas". Hence, the book argues that it is particularly in these settings that the postcolonial promise of liberation and freedom must face its test.0As such, the book offers highly nuanced and richly detailed analyses that go to the heart of the diverse dilemmas of post-apartheid South Africa as a whole, but simultaneously also provides in condensed form an extended case study on the predicaments of African postcoloniality in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of the 'Journal of Southern African Studies'.