Veronica Ehrenreich-Risner's Bantu Authorities: Apartheid's System of Race and Ethnicity uses the Mthunzini District in South Africa's former KwaZulu homeland as a case study to explore Bantu Authorities, an elaborate form of indirect rule created by the apartheid state to govern South Africa's rural Black population. With the passing of the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act, a three-tiered governance system was established, empowering African chiefs to rule ethnically defined subjects, and ultimately leading to the creation of the KwaZulu homeland and nine other pseudostates, which the anti-apartheid movement often referred to as bantustans.

At its core, the book's major claim is that the establishment of the Bantu Authorities system was central to the maintenance of apartheid and without it, apartheid would have crumbled far earlier (12). As a subsidiary claim, Ehrenreich-Risner also insists that the establishment of Bantu Authorities was primarily geared towards the needs of white capitalism; that it served the interests of racial segregationists was of secondary importance to apartheid's officials. This claim however is mostly built on Harold Wolpe's 1972 ‘Cheap labour thesis’, not significant new primary research.Footnote ¹ Rather, it is another argument she makes, that the Bantu Authorities system coopted the institution of the chieftaincy, perverting ‘traditional’ forms of rule, that is most explicitly discussed and woven throughout the book, demonstrating a key mechanism used by the white state to try secure African acceptance and the longevity of the system. Though the book would have benefitted from more careful editing, the range of archival sources and oral histories relating specifically to Mthunzini District means Bantu Authorities offers readers local insights into a complex governance structure implemented across the country.

Bantu Authorities is split into four parts, ‘Acceptance', ‘Consolidation', ‘Devolution’, and ‘Transition'. In Part One, Ehrenreich-Risner examines the Department of Native Affairs’ various efforts to secure Africans’ acceptance of the Bantu Authorities system. In the back and forth between white Native Commissioners, chiefs, and ordinary Africans we get a feel for the realpolitik and compromises made in the day-to-day efforts to implement the structures of Bantu Authorities. While the rural revolts in Mpondoland, Sekhukhuneland, Zeerust, and elsewhere dominate the historiography on the introduction of Bantu Authorities, Ehreneich-Risner's counter-examples give insights into less dramatic forms of resistance to the system.Footnote ²

In Part Two Ehrenreich-Risner explores two processes she deems central to the Bantu Authorities system in Mthunzini: the financing of Bantu Authority governance structures and the forced removals of Zulu communities as part of the social engineering central to the bantustans. The careful unpacking of budgets and financial regulations offer fine-grained detail into the constraints and incentives shaping chiefs’ responses to the implementation of the 1951 act. Exploring two case studies of forced removals in the Mthunzini District, Ehrenreich-Risner then goes on to demonstrate that the Bantu Authority system did not produce a uniform response from chiefs: in 1959 the interim chief in KwaDlangezwa worked with the white state to facilitate the removal of his subjects to make space for the construction of the University of Zululand; in the 1970s, the interim chief in Mangete resisted the removal of the residents settled on the land known as Reserve 7A.

Parts Three and Four take the story of Bantu Authorities system into the last two decades of apartheid. These two sections offer far less to scholars already well versed in the history of KwaZulu and late apartheid South Africa. While, for example, in Chapter Five, readers get some interesting glimpses into the complex efforts at Africanizing the Bantustan administration (225), much of the original material here is overshadowed by a broad overview of national-level politics. In a separate chapter, the career of the controversial Chief Minister of KwaZulu, Mangosutho Buthelezi, is used as a vehicle to explore the Bantu Authorities system as experienced from within, but the heavy reliance on secondary literature means that Ehrenreich-Risner opens no new lines of inquiry. The book closes with a lament about the 2003 Traditional Governance and Leadership Framework Act, which gave chiefs similar authoritarian powers to those they received from the apartheid-era Bantu Authorities system. In this epilogue chapter, Ehrenreich-Risner implies that compromises made at the negotiating table in the early 1990s paved the way for the regressive 2003 legislation. While there may be some truth to this, careful historical work is required to build on what we already know about the African National Congress’ changing approach to the chieftaincy in the 1990s and the link between decisions made in the dying days of apartheid and laws passed a decade into democratic rule.Footnote ³

Parts Three and Four notwithstanding, the empirical detail laid out, especially in the first half of the book, sheds light on variations in the Bantu Authorities system and the state's attempts at walking the fine line in ‘gaining … African compliance without consent’ (9). These insights are not sustained as an analytic framework, however, and instead the overarching arguments of the book present a familiar picture of twentieth century South African history. The book's main claim, that Bantu Authorities were central to rural apartheid governance, is well known by historians of South Africa. Though Ehrenrich-Risner says that ‘[a]cademic writings touched on Bantu Authorities but never identified it as the template for rural apartheid or acknowledged the system's influence on urban apartheid’ (xiv), she also cites — albeit just a fraction of — the key literature that points to this exact fact (11).

There is also already an extensive literature on how the institution of the chieftaincy was shaped by the apartheid state.Footnote ⁴ Some of the most cutting-edge scholarship on this topic complicates the concepts of tradition and ethnicity, showing how African elites and chiefs were often active participants in what Ehrenreich-Risner refers to as ‘the colonial distortion of ubukhosi (chieftaincy)’ (15).Footnote ⁵ While none of the major historical actors in Bantu Authorities are presented without agency, closer attention to the complexities of Zulu identity and ethnicity may have opened up new avenues to explore the legimitizing tools used by white and Black officials to keep Bantu Authorities in place for over 40 years. Ultimately then, while Bantu Authorities offers interesting and lesser-known details about the eponymous system, for most scholars, the book's main arguments will come as no surprise.