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Chapter 30
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Long Walk to Freedom, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Division
Negotiation, Democracy, and Progress
Nonviolent Protest vs. Violent Protest
The Value of Optimism
Summary
Analysis
In 1959, the government implements the Promotion of Bantu Self Government Act, which separates people into eight separate “bantustans” based on ethnic group. This is part of groot, a state policy that means “grand apartheid.” Under the bantustan policy, 70 percent of South Africa’s people must live on 13 percent of the land. The policy leads to violence as people are forced to move from their homes.
Bantustan was a word invented to describe a Black ethnic state within South Africa under apartheid (most ethnic groups of Black South Africans fall under the larger category of being Bantus). Although the government promised homelands for these people, the policy had the effect of displacing Black South Africans from their old homes and giving their land to White South Africans.
Themes
