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Apartheid and the project of self-governing bantustans was not a peculiar invention by Afrikaner nationalist ideologues but drew heavily on the prevailing global idioms and state practices of the late colonial period. This chapter locates apartheid in a global perspective. It explores the global circulation of idioms of ‘development’ and trusteeship in the first half of the twentieth century and their significance in shaping segregationist policy in South Africa; it situates bantustan ‘self-government’ in relation to the history of decolonisation and the partitions and federations that emerged as late colonial solutions; and it locates the tightening of rural village planning in the bantustans after 1960 in relation to the elaboration of anti-colonial liberation struggles, repressive southern African settler colonialism and the Cold War. Far from developing policies that were at odds with the global ‘wind of change’, South African apartheid during the 1960s and 1970s reflected much that was characteristic about late colonial strategy.