Apartheid

• 1. Introduction

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  Apartheid, the Afrikaans word meaning "separateness" or "apart-hood", was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that ruled South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Its first recorded use as a word was in 1929. By the time it ended, between 1990 and 1994 alone, it had produced 14,000 deaths and 22,000 injuries in the transition period. The system sorted every person in the country into one of four racial groups, determined where they could live, whom they could marry, what schools they could attend, and which park benches they could sit on. Between 1960 and 1983, the government forcibly removed 3.5 million black Africans from their homes. What made a system of such scale possible? How did a minority government sustain it for more than four decades against both domestic uprising and international pressure? And what remains when it is finally dismantled?

• 2. Deep Roots

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  Racial discrimination against black people in South Africa traces back to 1652, when the Dutch East India Company established a trading post at the Cape of Good Hope. The company began the Khoikhoi-Dutch Wars, displaced the local Khoikhoi people, replaced them with white-settled farms, and imported enslaved people from across the Dutch Empire. In slavery's early days, passes were required for enslaved people to travel away from their owners. By 1797, local officials in Swellendam and Graaff-Reinet extended pass laws beyond enslaved people, decreeing that all Khoikhoi moving about the country for any purpose must carry passes. The British colonial government confirmed this in 1809 through the Hottentot Proclamation. Ordinance No. 49 of 1828 then restricted prospective black immigrants to passes issued only for the purpose of seeking work. When the British Empire captured the Dutch Cape Colony during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the 1806 Cape Articles of Capitulation required the new rulers to respect prior legislation under Roman-Dutch law. This separated South Africa's legal tradition from English Common Law and gave its colonies an unusually high degree of legislative autonomy. The United Kingdom's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 began the gradual process of ending slavery across the British Empire. South Africa responded with Ordinance 1 in 1835, which reclassified enslaved people as indentured labourers, and then Ordinance 3 in 1848, which introduced an indenture system for the Xhosa that was, in the words of the source, little different from slavery. Discoveries of diamonds and gold later in the 19th century sharpened racial inequality further. The Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892 raised property requirements for voting in the Cape Colony, disenfranchising a disproportionate number of non-white voters; the Glen Grey Act of 1894, under Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes, limited the amount of land Africans could hold. By 1905 the General Pass Regulations Act denied black people the vote and confined them to fixed areas. The peace negotiations for the Treaty of Vereeniging following the Second Boer War demanded "the just predominance of the white race" as a precondition for the Boer republics unifying with the British Empire, establishing a baseline that would shape the political architecture for decades to come.

• 3. The 1948 Election

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  By 1948, black political organisations including the African National Congress and the Council of Non-European Trade Unions were demanding political rights, land reform, and the right to unionise. The Herenigde Nasionale Party, known as the HNP, persuaded a large share of white voters that the United Party under Jan Smuts had fallen under the influence of Western liberals and could not protect white dominance. Smuts had also lost domestic support when South Africa faced criticism at the United Nations over its colour bar. The HNP, drawing on a theory drafted by Hendrik Verwoerd and presented through the Sauer Commission, offered a single, named policy in reply: apartheid. The commission's goal was the complete removal of black people from areas designated for whites, including cities, except as temporary migrant labour. Apartheid would be the ideological and practical foundation of Afrikaner politics for what the HNP promised would be a new era. The voting system was disproportionately weighted toward rural constituencies, particularly the Transvaal. The HNP won eight constituencies in the mining and industrial centres of the Witwatersrand and five more in Pretoria. The United Party was defeated in almost every rural district outside Natal, and its urban losses in the Transvaal proved decisive. The HNP took parliament with an eight-vote lead. Daniel Francois Malan became the first nationalist prime minister, with an explicit mandate to implement the apartheid philosophy and silence liberal opposition. Within the HNP itself, three factions immediately disputed how far to go. The "baasskap" faction, dominant in the party and in state institutions, favoured systematic segregation while still using black labour to advance Afrikaner economic gains. The "purists" wanted complete vertical separation, with blacks confined to native reserves with their own political and economic structures. Hendrik Verwoerd, who would become prime minister in 1958, occupied a third position: he sympathised with the purists but allowed black labour to continue while pursuing their long-term separation goals, calling this a policy of "good neighbourliness".

• 4. The Architecture of Control

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  The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 made it illegal to marry across racial lines. The Immorality Act of 1950 made sexual relations between whites and other races a criminal offence. The Population Registration Act of 1950 required every person over the age of 18 to carry an identity card stating their racial classification. Where that classification was unclear, official teams were established to determine it. Among the methods they used was the pencil test: a pencil was pushed into a person's hair, and they were told to shake their head. If the pencil stayed in place, the person was deemed black; if it fell out, they were pronounced Coloured. Other tests involved examining jaw lines, buttocks, and asking someone to react to a pinch to hear what language they would say "ouch" in. The Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952 tightened pass laws so that black people could not stay in urban areas for more than 72 hours without a permit. The pass itself, nicknamed the dompas, from the Afrikaans "verdomde pas" meaning accursed pass, was issued only to a person with approved employment. A pass was valid for a single magisterial district, usually one town. Spouses and children had to be left behind in the homelands. Police vans patrolled white areas to arrest those without valid passes. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953 created separate beaches, buses, hospitals, schools and universities. Signboards reading "whites only" appeared in public spaces, including park benches. The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 banned the Communist Party of South Africa and defined Communism so broadly that anyone who opposed government policy risked being labelled a Communist. After the Defiance Campaign, the act was used to arrest and ban leaders of the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions. After the release of the Freedom Charter, 156 leaders of these groups were charged in the 1956 Treason Trial. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 established a separate education system for black students. By the 1970s, the state was spending ten times more per child on the education of white children than on black children within that system. Television was not introduced into South Africa at all until 1976, because the government viewed English programming as a threat to the Afrikaans language.

• 5. The Homeland System

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  Under the homeland system, the government divided South Africa and South West Africa into a series of separate territories, each nominally assigned to a different ethnic group as its own nation-state. Just 13 percent of South Africa's land was reserved for black homelands, generally in economically unproductive areas. The Tomlinson Commission of 1954 justified this system but stated that additional land should be given to the homelands, a recommendation the government simply did not follow. In total, 20 homelands were allocated across South Africa and South West Africa. Four of them were declared nominally independent by the South African government: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981. These four became known as the TBVC states. Once a homeland received nominal independence, its designated citizens had their South African citizenship revoked and replaced with homeland citizenship. In reality, these territories had no significant economic infrastructure and their borders often encompassed disconnected pieces of land. South Africa remained the only country in the world to recognise their independence. The Swiss-South African Association, for example, lobbied the Swiss government to recognise Transkei upon its foundation, and the South African government intensely lobbied United States lawmakers ahead of a 1976 House of Representatives resolution urging the President not to recognise the territory. Between 1960 and 1983, 3.5 million black Africans were removed from their homes and forced into segregated neighbourhoods in some of the largest mass evictions in modern history. In Johannesburg, the removal of Sophiatown began on the 9th of February 1955 under the Western Areas Removal Scheme. In the early hours of that morning, heavily armed police forced residents from their homes and loaded belongings onto government trucks. Sophiatown, which had been one of the oldest black settlements in Johannesburg and the only swimming pool for black children in the city, housed 50,000 people. Its residents were taken 19 km from the city centre to a tract of land called Meadowlands that the government had purchased in 1953. Sophiatown was then demolished by bulldozers and replaced by a white suburb renamed Triomf, the Afrikaans word for Triumph. In Cape Town, 55,000 Coloured and Indian people were forced to move from District Six to new townships on the Cape Flats under the Group Areas Act of 1950. In total, nearly 600,000 Coloured, Indian, and Chinese people were moved under that single act.

• 6. Resistance and Repression

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  In 1949, the youth wing of the African National Congress took control of the organisation and launched a radical African nationalist programme. In 1950 this produced the Programme of Action, a series of strikes, boycotts, and acts of civil disobedience. In 1959, a group of ANC members broke away to form the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, which organised a demonstration against pass books on the 21st of March 1960. One of those protests was held in the township of Sharpeville, where police killed 69 people. In the wake of the Sharpeville massacre, the government declared a state of emergency and arrested more than 18,000 people. The ANC and PAC were both banned. The ANC then established a military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, which carried out its first acts of sabotage on the 16th of December 1961, the anniversary of the Battle of Blood River. In 1976, secondary students in Soweto took to the streets to protest against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974, which had required the use of Afrikaans on an equal basis with English in high schools outside the homelands. On the 16th of June, police opened fire on students protesting peacefully. Official reports recorded 23 deaths; the number more commonly given is 176, with some estimates reaching as high as 700. In the 1970s the Black Consciousness Movement, led by Steve Biko, built black pride and challenged the feelings of inadequacy that the apartheid system had worked to instil. Biko was taken into custody on the 18th of August 1977 and was beaten to death in detention. In 1983, anti-apartheid leaders formed the United Democratic Front to coordinate domestic activism. Its first presidents were Archie Gumede, Oscar Mpetha, and Albertina Sisulu. Its patrons included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr Allan Boesak, Helen Joseph, and Nelson Mandela. Parliamentary opposition was galvanised by Helen Suzman, Colin Eglin, and Harry Schwarz, who formed the Progressive Federal Party. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found 21,000 deaths from political violence across the entire apartheid period, with 7,000 occurring between 1948 and 1989.

• 7. International Pressure

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  British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan delivered his Wind of Change speech in Cape Town in 1960, publicly criticising South Africa's racial policies before its own parliament. Weeks later the Sharpeville massacre produced a further wave of international condemnation. South Africa subsequently held a referendum on the 5th of October 1960 asking white voters whether the country should become a republic, and 52 percent voted yes. As a consequence, South Africa needed to reapply for Commonwealth membership. African and South and Southeast Asian member states made clear they would oppose its readmission over apartheid. South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth on the 31st of May 1961, the day the Republic came into existence. The Organisation of African Unity, created in 1963, censured apartheid and demanded sanctions from its outset. In 1969-14 nations from Central and East Africa gathered in Lusaka, Zambia, and signed the Lusaka Manifesto on the 13th of April, condemning racism and calling for black majority rule. Malawi was the only country at the assembly that did not sign. South Africa's rejection of the manifesto brought about the 1971 Mogadishu Declaration, which stated that because South Africa had refused negotiations, black South Africans could only be freed through military means. Sport became a particularly visible front. The International Table Tennis Federation cut ties with the all-white South African table tennis body in 1956. The International Olympic Committee barred South Africa from the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo and then from the 1968 Mexico City Games after protests from anti-apartheid movements and African nations. In a 1977 survey, white South Africans ranked the loss of international sport among the three most damaging consequences of apartheid. In 1986, during a Commonwealth mini-summit involving seven countries including the United Kingdom, a tough programme of economic sanctions was agreed. FIFA finally welcomed South Africa back into international football on the 3rd of July 1992.

• 8. Dismantling and Legacy

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  Between 1987 and 1993, the National Party entered bilateral negotiations with the African National Congress to end segregation and introduce majority rule. In 1990, prominent ANC figures including Nelson Mandela were released from prison. Apartheid legislation was repealed on the 17th of June 1991. Non-racial elections were held in April 1994. Mandela's support of the predominantly white rugby fraternity during the 1995 Rugby World Cup was widely seen as instrumental in bringing together South African sports fans of all races, an emblem of what the country was reaching toward. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented the full human cost: 21,000 deaths from political violence, with 14,000 of those and 22,000 injuries occurring in the transition years from 1990 to 1994 alone. The economic legacy of apartheid persists into the present. Town planning measures deliberately introduced industrial and infrastructural buffer zones between townships and economic centres; those physical barriers continue to hinder economic integration in the twenty-first century. A 2016 study in The Journal of Politics found that disenfranchisement in South Africa had a significant negative effect on basic service delivery to the communities that had been excluded from the vote. The creation in December 1991 of a unified, non-racial South African Football Association, and the country's return to international sport, marked not just a sporting milestone but the visible confirmation that a system built on classification and exclusion was giving way to something else.