Students and pupils in schools and colleges in the bantustans taking part in the protests against apartheid education have found themselves attacked by the bantustan authorities just as students elsewhere have been attacked.
University students at the University of Zululand picketed the entrance in protest at a visit by Buthelezi, and were dispersed by police with teargas and batons. This was a few days after a 200 strong group of supporters of Inkatha (the political movement led by Buthelezi), armed with knobkerries, spears and knives, confronted 500 boycotting school children in Kwamashu and were prevented from attacking them by a police intervention.
During the last few days of May - a phase of more intense repression with a wave of detentions and threats to expel students - a similar tough line was taken in the bantustans.
In the Ciskei a wave of detentions of school pupils took place on 21 May, followed by a news blackout on what had happened.
Then on 26 May students at a high school near the Ciskeian Legislative Assembly were baton-charged by Ciskeian police when they refused to leave the school. They had been told either to write their half-year exams or go away. The next day the Ciskei Chief Minister claimed the anti-apartheid education protest was "a militant campaign of hate directed against South African whites by radical blacks".
Chief Buthelezi stated that boycotting students should be expelled if they were not back in class by the end of the month and threatened to close all schools under his control if the boycott continued.
In Witsieshoek, in the QwaQwa bantustan, 2,000 high school students staging a protest were dispersed by police.
Drastic measures were taken in the Transkei where a state of emergency was declared by means of a promulgation confining all students, scholars and other "affected persons" to their schools or homes in terms of a 24-hour curfew invoked in terms of the Transkei Public Security Act. Those covered by the promulgation could only leave their homes or school hostels between 6 a.m and 6 p.m if they were going to attend classes. The promulgation outlawed virtually any expression of support for the boycott, any "shouting or displaying slogans or making any gestures or signs likely to incite affected persons to absent themselves from classes". Education authorities drew up a questionnaire to university students and post-primary school pupils, containing such questions as "what guarantee can you give that you will not be a trouble-maker when you become a teacher?"
In July, with the boycott still continuing, the action against the students went on. More than 700 secondary school students in Zwelitsha near King Williams Town were baton-charged by Ciskeian police when they refused to attend classes after the morning coffee-break. They were boycotting the classes and demanding that the education system be scrapped and replaced by an integrated one. Later the head of the Ciskeian Intelligence Service said that seven pupils had been detained.
