The Nationalist party government announced its intention to consolidate the total number of separate 'homeland' areas from 113 to 36.
The homelands were officially instituted in the 1950s as a form of apartheid separate development and a way to strip Black South Africans of their South African citizenship. The argument from the point of view of the Apartheid government was that Black South African people would be given the benefit of being able to self govern. The reality was that they became impoverished as cheap labour pools ruled by chiefs controlled by the apartheid state.
