The areas of South Africa which as part of the apartheid system were imposed on South Africa’s African people as their ‘homelands’, to which their political rights were to be restricted and which the regime planned to declare ‘independent states’ and were demarcated along ethnic lines. The areas were: Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei which were declared ‘independent’- but not recognised as such outside South Africa – and KwaZulu, Lebowa, KwaNdebele, Kangwane and QwaQwa. When South Africa achieved democracy in 1994 the bantustan administrations were integrated into the new state.