Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Bantustans were rooted in Land Actspromulgated in 1913 and 1936, which defined a number of scattered areas as “native reserves” for Blacks. Some expansion, consolidation, and relocation of these areas occurred in the following decades. By the 1950s the combined areas of the reserves amounted to 13 percent of the total land area of South Africa, while Blacks made up at least 75 percent of the total population. The 1959 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act relabeled the reserves as “homelands,” or Bantustans, in which only specific ethnic groups were to have residence rights. Later, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 defined Blacks living throughout South Africa as legal citizens of the homelands designated for their particular ethnic groups—thereby stripping them of their South African citizenship and their few remaining civil and political rights. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the white-dominated South African government continuously removed Black people still living in “white areas”—even those settled on property that had been in their families for generations—and forcibly relocated them to the Bantustans.