The Word That Became a Legal Category

In South Africa the word Bantu has a second history, and it is the reason a term that is neutral in a linguistics seminar is offensive in Johannesburg. Under apartheid it became the state's official designation for black South Africans: the Bantu Education Act of 1953 established a separate and deliberately inferior school system, the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 built the machinery of the homelands, and a Department of Bantu Administration and Development governed the lives it classified.

A scholarly label was taken up by a government and made an instrument of law. That history is why the term was abandoned in South African public use after 1994, and it is why the atlas states the basis of this grouping on the row itself rather than assuming a reader will supply the context. There is a general lesson in it for this whole type. A classification drawn for one purpose does not stay in that purpose. Groupings drawn by linguists, by missionaries, by census officials and by anthropologists have all been picked up by administrations and turned into things that determined where people could live and what schooling they could receive. Recording who drew a grouping and why is not pedantry about terminology. It is part of the fact.