Thirty years of democracy in a former homeland: insights, experiences, transitions and contestations of development in QwaQwa

The declaration of QwaQwa as a self-governing nation occurred on 1 November 1974. This declaration had internal and external socio-political ramifications in South Africa of the day. Firstly, externally, it resulted in the continuation of an apartheid system of homelands, which were geographical spaces for ethnic and cultural encirclement. Timothy Gibbs (2014) argues that the bantustan (or homeland) political strategy was a continuation of the divideand-rule tactic of the apartheid government to maintain its hegemonic position of ‘separate development’. Internally, though, this resulted in the formation of a bantustan that was inherently designed for Southern Sotho-speaking people living in South Africa, in line with the ethnic divisions of the apartheid state. Secondly, it also witnessed the establishment of a local government with Chief Prime Minister TK Mopeli (1954–1914), who had governance and administrative responsibility over this new self-ruled territory. Until 1994, this territory could, to some extent, decide its development fate, despite being intricately linked, as will be shown in this chapter, to the circumstances and the situation in the rest of South Africa. Using a multi-method qualitative approach, we seek to explore narratives rooted in locality experiences and unpack continuities and discontinuities in the experiences of democracy in contemporary QwaQwa post-1994. By emphasising the development experiences of QwaQwa at the grassroots, this chapter discusses the tensions between memory and nostalgia, service delivery and self-directed development, as well as between traditional and democratic governance systems, to analyse key transitional shifts influencing the development prospects of QwaQwa in the 30-year democratic period.