Racial Segregation: South African Apartheid
South Africa was a colony of the English and Dutch in the 17th century. The English domination of the Dutch descendants, who were referred to as Boers or Afrikaners, contributed in the formation of new colonies of Orange Free State and Transvaal by the Dutch. After the independence from England, the two groups continued sharing power until 1940s when the Afrikaner National Party gained a strong majority. As a result, the principal strategist in this party invented apartheid as a way of taking over the control of social and economic issues. In Afrikaans apartheid means “separateness” and refers to the systems of racial discrimination and White political domination that were adopted by the National Party when it was in power from 1948 to 1994 (Beck, 2000). This involved a situation where apartheid officials incorporated into law the quality and nature of life for all the people living in South Africa including Whites, Africans, Coloreds, and Indians. Some human rights scholars distinguish between “petty” apartheid and “grand” apartheid where petty apartheid refers to the racist laws that affected people’s lives. There was racial segregation in the medical field where the best hospitals were preserved for Whites. Likewise, there were cemeteries that were used by Whites and other races were prohibited from using them. Furthermore, South Africans lived, worked, and were exposed to racially segregated offices, businesses, schools, colleges, beaches, restaurants, theaters, sports fields, restrooms, transport, and park benches. Ideally, every aspect of life of South Africans was exposed to racial discrimination.
Conversely, grand apartheid is associated to land and political rights. For instance, the apartheid government made an extension of the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts to create ten African homelands as “independent” or some sort of semi-autonomous nations. The main objective of creating these African homelands was to make all South African Africans to be citizens of these homesteads and ultimately to make South Africa a nation with a White majority (Beck, 2000).The policy of grand apartheid also defined where Whites, Africans, Coloreds, and Indians were supposed to live by race. For this to happen, it required millions of South Africans to be relocated to create room for other races. When it came to politics, the rights to vote and hold any public office was only reserved for Whites and hence making only around 13 percent of the population to control the entire political system in South Africa.
In essence, apartheid system operated on four fundamental principles. Firstly, there existed some four official “racial groups” that were identified as White, African, Colored, and Indian. Secondly, Whites were also perceived to be the only civilized race and hence had an absolute political power over all the other racial groups. Thirdly, in every scenario, the interest of the Whites always came before Black interests. Fourthly, all Whites regardless of their European origin were referred to as White. Nonetheless, the government failed to recognize the widespread Bantu-speaking origins of most Africans and instead classified them into nine separate African subgroups namely; Xhosa, Tswana, Zulu, North Sotho, South Sotho, Swazi, Venda, Ndebele, and Tsonga. The Indians were not categorized because they were seen as aliens in South Africa.
For better understanding, the apartheid era can generally be divided into three phases. The first phase started in 1948 after the National party emerged victorious in the elections, and came to an end in 1959 after the government introduced separate development and self-government for the African reserves. Indeed, this period is the classical or baaskap (White Supremacy) phase when the apartheid dogma was enacted into law. The second phase lasted until the early 1970s and it was the period when separate development was implemented. Moreover, this period was regarded as the high point of the apartheid state and Afrikaner nationalism (Beck, 2000). During this phase, most of the anti-apartheid organizations used violent means to advocate for change in South Africa. In the third phase that started in the mid 1970s, there were many anti-apartheid organizations from South Africa and other countries around the world. These organizations continued putting pressure to the government to change their approach of leadership and this paid off when apartheid was ended in 1994 after the election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa.
The enactment of apartheid laws in 1948 led to the institutionalization of racial discrimination in South Africa. Race laws addressed every aspect of social life that included the prohibition of marriage between Whites and non-whites and the categorization of some jobs as “White-only”. As such, all Whites were only allowed to marry among themselves and any marriage with non-whites was considered to be against the law where the non-white partner was always considered to be on the wrong. In 1950, the Population and Registration Act made a requirement for all South Africans to be racially classified into one of the three categories that included White, Black (African), Colored (mixed decent), and Indians. The Colored race was classified as people who were not Whites, Blacks, or Indians. Obviously, this categorization favored Whites because a person could not be considered to be White if one of their parents was non-white (Baker, 2004). In some instances, the legislation ended up splitting families where parents could be categorized as White, while their children were categorized as Colored on non-whites.
Land Acts were also adjusted to favor the Whites where majority of the country’s land was reserved for the White minority. Moreover, laws were also passed necessitating all non-whites to carry documents that allowed them to visit controlled areas. As a way of minimizing the contact between the races, the government created public facilities for Whites and non-whites and restricted the activities of non-white labor unions. Likewise, these laws banned the inclusion of non-whites in the national government.
When Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd became the prime minister in 1958, he refined apartheid policy to include a system that was referred to as “separate development.” Indeed, the endorsement of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 led to the formation of 10 Bantu homelands that were known as “Bantustans.” The sole objective of these homelands was to separate the South African Blacks from each other and hence allow the government to make claims that they were not the majority (Kirkman, 1990). This was also used as a strategy to reduce the possibility of Blacks coming together to form one nationalist organization that would be difficult to tame. Although the Bantustans supposedly gave the black South Africans some political rights, they also managed to keep off the Blacks from participating in any national politics. In one of the negative aspects of apartheid, the Black South Africans were forced to move out of rural areas and the government sold their land to White farmers. From 1961 to 1994, there were more than three million people who were forcibly evicted from their homes and moved to “homelands” where they lived in poverty and misery.
As African resistance to racial discrimination escalated, the achievements that had been realized by the white minority since the beginning of the 20th century were seriously under threat. This crisis was further enhanced by the turn down of the reserve economies that were introduced during the apartheid period. Human rights activism from organizations that were against racial segregation was also threatening the migrant labor system that was relied upon by the Whites as a source of income. In addition, the protests also came at a time when secondary industrialization, the growth of the African populations, and African working class militancy were rampant in South Africa. When nationalist regime came into power in 1948, it developed some measures to handle the existing crisis (Christopher, 1990). Instead of addressing the problem of racial segregation in South Africa, the nationalist opted to convert the existing systems of segregationist into apartheid. Therefore, apartheid was introduced in order to maintain migrant labor and extend the benefits associated with cheap and controlled labor for farms, mines, and the growing manufacturing industry.
The nationalists, who had come to power due to a strong rural vote, initiated a process of trying to remove the few African workers that had remained in White farming districts. Likewise, the nationalists also had plans to transform labor tenancy into wage labor. As a result, most of the farmers who supported the unlimited supply of labor in 1930s and 1940s viewed labor tenancy as being economically devastating. The mutual agreement was that labor tenancy had to be stopped if agriculture was to modernize. Eventually, calls by White farmers were considered through the 1964 Bantu Laws Amendment Act (Martine, 2012). This Act repealed the 1932 Native Service Contract Act and also amended the tenancy provisions in the Land Act of 1936 which technically had a negative impact on labor tenancy. Thereafter, labor tenancy was gradually eliminated prompting evictions by farmers or Bantu Administration officials.
After the ban on labor tenancy was achieved, Africans were no longer needed to work in the agricultural sector and the 1964 legislation was used to remove them from the farms owned by Whites. Between 1960 and 1982, around one million people had been evicted from White rural areas and moved to the reserves that had been structured as ethnic “homelands” by the apartheid administration. One of the main features of apartheid was to re-engineer the traditional African leadership and function of the reserves. To assist in this, the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 welcomed a system that resulted in a formal separation of the Black majority from Whites living in the countryside. The establishment of separate “homelands” to fit various ethnic groups was a system that was administered by traditional authority through the use of Chiefs (Beinart & Dubow, 2013). This system left a legacy that South Africa is still fighting to overcome. In the meantime, poverty and landlessness were being experienced in the reserves due to the collapse of agriculture. To salvage the situation, Betterment or Closer Settlement Schemes were introduced and hence threatening the system of cheap labor. In essence, the main reason for doing this was to increase crop production and introduce animal husbandry. However, the Betterment Schemes did not make the situation in homelands any better but instead continued causing suffering and misery to the Africans. Furthermore, under the Betterment Schemes, the land sizes were significantly reduced causing people to be forcibly evicted.
Additionally, the National Party made some effort to enhance economic development in the “homelands” for them to become self-sufficient regardless of the fact that the reserves did not have access to natural resources and lacked basic infrastructure and industries. Using this approach, the White South Africa transferred the responsibility of its citizens into a system that could not sustain itself. Chiefs situated in homelands were on the payroll of the apartheid regime as the system tried to legitimize the oppression of the people.
The attempts to reshape and re-engineer the rural villages were resisted through the rise of aggressive Afrikaner nationalism. As a result, violence was started against Chiefs who were collaborating with the apartheid government and for the disruption of rural African life. In addition, the period also experienced rural resistance and the economic struggle in the urban areas. Africans who were retrenched from plantation participated in demonstrations and uprisings. For instance, the Pondoland revolt was mainly dominated by immigrants who were retrenched from Natal sugar plantations between 1959 and 1960 (Clark & Worger, 2013). Conversely, Tembuland resistance was initiated by migrants who had been relocated from the Western Cape. Essentially, migrants took part in these struggles by funding them and appointing lawyers to represent them. Despite the connection to the urban areas, these struggles were only contained within the rural areas where they also remained isolated from each other. As a result, they were unsustainable since they were not supported by national campaigns that only addressed urban issues.
The widespread resistance to apartheid in South Africa was done in various forms that included non-violent demonstrations, strikes, protests, political action and armed resistance. For instance, ANC and the South Indian National Congress organized for a major meeting in 1952 where they persuaded the attendees to burn all their pass books. Another group, which was referring to itself as Congress of the People, approved a Freedom Charter in 1955 to assert that South Africa was owned by all those who lived in it regardless of their race. The government was not pleased with this meeting and broke it up and arrested more than 140 attendees and charged them with betrayal. Similarly in 1960, police opened fire to some unarmed Blacks who were associated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC). The group had gone to Sharpesville police station without their passes as a way of resisting racial segregation. Instead of listening to their grievances, the police opted to kill more than 65 Blacks, and wounded more than 170 people (Clark & Worger, 2013). Thereafter, many of the anti-apartheid leaders convinced their followers that it was not feasible to attain their goals through peaceful means. For this reason, both PAC and ANC established some military wings that posed a serious threat to the state. The state could not tolerate this and by 1961 most of the resistance leaders had been arrested and punished with long prison terms or even executed. Nelson Mandela, who founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the military wing of the ANC, was arrested and imprisoned for 27 years from 1963 to 1990. It was his imprisonment that drew a lot of international attention and global support for anti-apartheid.
In 1976, when many Black children in Soweto held a demonstration against the elementary requisite for Black students to use Afrikaans language, the police used tear gas and live bullets to disperse the protests. After these demonstrations, there were numerous government crackdowns and economic recession that drew world’s attention to South Africa. This crushed the fantasy that apartheid had enhanced peace and prosperity in the country. In 1973, the UN General Assembly was totally against apartheid prompting the UN Security Council to call for a mandatory restriction towards the sale of arms to South Africa. Other countries also followed suit led by United Kingdom and the United States that imposed economic sanctions on South Africa in 1985.
Due to the demands from various global leaders, the National Party that was led by Pieter Botha initiated some reforms that included elimination of the pass laws and the interdiction on interracial sex and marriage. However, these reforms failed to bring any substantive change and pressure was put on Botha to step aside for F.W. De Klerk in 1989 (Lowenberg & Kaempfer, 1998). De Klerk’s government succeeded in revoking the Population Registration Act and other legislation that had been enacted to support apartheid. Indeed, the new constitution that was enacted required South Africans to participate in elections that formed a coalition government with the non-white majority. Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa and he vowed to advocate for equality among the Whites and non-whites. This officially marked the conclusion of apartheid, but racial segregation remains a major concern in South Africa to date.
References
Baker, D. (2004). South Africa’s Racial Past: The History and Historiography of Racism, Segregation, and Apartheid. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 27 (1), p. 194.
Beck, R. (2000). The History of South Africa. Boston: Greenwood Publishing.
Beinart, W. & Dubow, S. (2013). Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa. New York: Routledge.
Christopher, A. (1990). Apartheid and Urban Segregation Levels in South Africa. Urban Studies, 27 (3), pp. 421-421.
Clark, N. & Worger, W. (2013). South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. New York: Routledge.
Kirkman, W. (1990). Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa. International Affairs, 66 (2), p. 427.
Lowenberg, A. & Kaempfer, W. (1998). The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid: A Public Choice Analysis. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.
Martine, M. (2012). Labour Markets during apartheid in South Africa. The Economic History Review, 65 (3), pp. 1100-1122
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