Support for this argument is found by comparing Professor Tayyub Mahmud's fascinating study of pre-existing national courts in other formerly British territories faced with new constitutions declared following coups d'etat.(63) Mahmud surveyed judicial responses to coups d'etat in eleven post-colonial common law settings: Pakistan, Ghana, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Uganda, Nigeria, Cyprus, Seychelles, Grenada, Lesotho, Transkei, and
Bophuthatswana. Each of these places had at one time been under the British crown, and each had a written constitution under which judges were appointed who later had to rule on the validity of actions that unquestionably violated those written constitutions: wholesale usurpations of power outside the requirements of the written constitutions.
So I knew the playground of Sun City, a two-hour drive north in
Bophuthatswana, was land-locked.
Sun Air, the profitable airline of the former
Bophuthatswana homeland, will also be sold off, and analysts contend that many profitable, core state firms, Eskom and SAA among them, could be up for sale within two years, if only to reassure investors of the Government's commitment to "reform".
This task was made all the more difficult by the virulent support given to the concept by the homeland authorities of Ciskei and
Bophuthatswana and the self-governing state of KwaZulu which was under the control of the Inkatha Freedom Party.
will have it all." Already, the government's federal option can count on the support of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party and President Lucas Mangope's
Bophuthatswana government, and it is becoming clearer that conservative majorities in the Indian and colored communities will favor it too.
Principal battles: siege of Mafeking (near Mmabatho,
Bophuthatswana) (1899-1900); Ypres II (Ieper) (1915); Messines Ridge (near Ieper), Ypres III (1917); the Lys (1918).
Brigadier Hennie Riekert was
Bophuthatswana's Minister for Defence--a key position that had to be kept well and truly under Pretoria's tacit control.
Indigenous Criminal Law in
Bophuthatswana. Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1980: 97.
Have we forgotten the AWB raid into
Bophuthatswana and the World Trade Centre?
This focus is adopted not because the SADF was the only armed formation guilty of human rights violations (Umkhonto We Sizwe -- MK, the Azanian People's Liberation Army -- APLA and the TBVC armies -- the Transkei Defence Force,
Bophuthatswana Defence Force, Venda Defence Force and Ciskei Defence Force -- were certainly also guilty in this regard) but simply because the sheer scope and scale of their activities was such that it dwarfs those of the other armed forces currently comprising the new SANDF.
In tandem with these developments the `independent homeland' statelets each established their own universities (and gambling casinos which were forbidden outside of their confines): The University of the Transkei (1977); the University of Fort Hare, alma mater to so many luminary African leaders, which had been in existence since 1916 was located within the boundaries of the Ciskei `homeland'; the University of
Bophuthatswana (1980)--in 1995 renamed the University of the North West; and the University of Venda (1982).
(82) The term 'TBVC refers to the former 'homelands' of Transkei,
Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei.