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Poverty and the politics of survival bolstered the making of the bantustan state in Sada and Ilinge. Given the upheavals of relocation, the terrible living conditions that prevailed in the townships and the deep poverty experienced by the majority of residents, the limited resources that the state provided underpinned the production of new regimes of state power. Amid agrarian change and widespread farm evictions, the movement of former farm dwellers to the Ciskei was a key dynamic in making of new matrices of power in the Ciskei. This chapter shows how the racist, modernist project of the apartheid state translated into everyday administrative interventions in the Ciskei’s relocation townships. It traces the expanding reach of the apartheid state in Sada and Ilinge, first under the Department of Bantu Administration and Development and later under the Ciskei regime. The extension of the state’s territorial power through relocation and the patronage of rations, pensions, housing and the allocation of work contracts played key roles in extending the presence of the Ciskei state on the ground. While bantustan elites may have sought legitimation from the performance of ‘tradition’, however invented, their authority stemmed more from their status as clientelists of a modern colonial state.