Apartheid

I

Introduction

Apartheid, policy of racial segregation formerly followed in South Africa. The word “apartheid” means “separateness” in the Afrikaans language, and describes the rigid racial division imposed by the governing white minority on the black (African, Coloured, and Indian) population in South Africa. An agreement was reached in November 1993 pledging an end to apartheid, and South Africa held its first non-racial elections in 1994. Apartheid was much criticized and vilified internationally, and many countries imposed economic sanctions on South Africa because of it. Despite the end of legal apartheid, the vast social, economic, and political inequalities it established between white and black South Africans continue to exist; these concerns are now beginning to be addressed.

II

Introduction of Apartheid

The National Party (NP) introduced apartheid as part of its campaign in the 1948 elections. With its victory, apartheid became the governing political policy for South Africa until the early 1990s. Although the official policy of apartheid is generally associated with the NP victory, and especially with its chief architect, Dr H. F. Verwoerd, who was Minister of Native Affairs (1951-1958) and later Prime Minister (1958-1966), it built on a long history of racial segregation and discriminatory laws intended to ensure white supremacy. Thus, the migrant labour system, based on special land reserves and highly restrictive pass laws; masters’ and servants’ laws which hampered African trade union organization; the job colour bar, which reserved work defined as skilled for whites only; and urban influx control were all established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the wake of the discovery and exploitation of South Africa’s vast mineral resources.

III

Exclusion

In terms of the Population Registration Act of 1951 all South Africans were classified by race: “European” (white); “Native”, later “Bantu” (African); “Coloured”; and “Indian” (Asian). These racial definitions determined every aspect of life: where individuals lived, what jobs they held, what type of education they received, whom they could marry, even where they were buried. Apartheid laws prohibited most social contact between races, and authorized segregated public facilities (such as reserving certain beaches for the use of whites only, or stipulating separate entrances in post offices).

Underpinning the institutions of apartheid was the exclusion of blacks from any share in political power, and economic control by the white minority. A complex network of laws sustained a hierarchical structure of discrimination, exploitation, and deprivation, in which Coloureds and Indians formed oppressed minorities in relation to whites, but had considerable privileges compared to black Africans. Occupying an intermediate socio-economic status, they were segregated in specifically defined suburbs in the so-called white or common areas, in terms of the Group Areas Act.

IV

The Migrant Labour System

Central to the development of apartheid for Africans was a migrant labour system based on the division of South Africa into two sectors: so-called white areas, which comprised some 87 per cent of the land and included all the major industrial and mining centres, and the so-called “Bantu homelands”, comprising 13 per cent of the land. The homelands, dubbed Bantustans by their opponents, formed impoverished labour reserves for the white economy. In them African tribal authority was bolstered, and customary law practised, regardless of the wishes of the people. Only those black Africans needed in the white-controlled economy were allowed into the urban areas.

Every year, many tens of thousands of black Africans were arrested and imprisoned under pass laws that controlled movement into the towns, and were returned to the poverty-stricken and overcrowded reserves. Only those who were born in a town, had lived there for 15 years, or had worked continuously for the same employer for ten years (and their dependants), were entitled to remain in town.

Those who openly opposed apartheid were considered communists and the government passed draconian security legislation that, in effect, turned South Africa into a police state.