Apartheid

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Apartheid is a word in Afrikaans that originally meant “apartness” or “separateness.” Now it is the internationally recognized term for the policies of strict racial segregation and political and economic domination of blacks (Africans, “Coloreds,” and Asians) pursued by the National Party government of South Africa from 1948 until its exit from power in the early 1990s.

Apartheid catapulted to prominence as a catchword used by the National Party in its successful 1948 electoral campaign to oust Prime Minister Jan Smuts and his United Party, who were accused of undermining racial segregation. The National Party, headed successively by Prime Ministers D. F. Malan, J. G. Strydom, H. F. Verwoerd, B. J. Vorster, P. W. Botha, and F. W. deKlerk, implemented an interlocking set of policies that together comprised apartheid: intensified segregation, “separate development,” and harsh political repression.

Intensified segregation was manifested in a plethora of new laws. Starting with the prohibition of marriage and sexual liaisons between races (Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949, and Immorality Act, 1950), the National Party government defined criteria for racial categorization of individuals (Population Registration Act, 1950), mandated racially based residential segregation (Group Areas Act, 1950), required segregation of public facilities (Separate Amenities Act, 1953), established separate education for Africans (Bantu Education Act, 1953), banned trade unions from representing Africans in labor negotiations (Native Labour Act, 1953), and empowered government to reserve specific jobs for particular racial groups (Industrial Conciliation Amendment Act, 1956). State power confronted blacks at almost every turn.

“Separate development” distinguished post-1948 National Party policies from previous segregation in South Africa. All blacks were segregated residentially and commercially under the Group Areas Act. Millions of blacks were forcibly removed from urban “white” areas into crowded “black” areas. Additionally Africans were assigned to ten ethnic “homelands” (based upon existing “tribal reserves”) that were to be the sole legitimate space for black political expression and representation under the Bantu Authorities Act (1951) and the Promotion of Bantu Self Government Act (1959). From 1976 onward four “homelands” (Transkei, Bophututswana, Venda, and Ciskei) were granted fictive independence, recognized only by South Africa. “Coloreds” and Asians were granted nominal representation in separate political bodies.

Opposition to apartheid in the 1950s centered around the African National Congress (ANC), led by Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo. The ANC organized nonviolent campaigns of defiance and boycott in alliance with the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People’s Organization, and radical whites in the Congress of Democrats. In 1955 representatives of the congresses, led by the ANC, adopted the Freedom Charter, a document demanding full civil rights for all South Africans, an end to racial discrimination, and major economic reform, including selected nationalization. In 1959 the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) broke from the ANC, accusing it of subservience to non-Africans and insufficient militancy. It echoed the ANC in calling for demonstrations against passes, the hated government control document carried by all Africans.

Following widespread demonstrations protesting the Sharpeville massacre of 1960—in which sixty-nine unarmed Africans were shot after responding to a PAC call to turn in passes and submit to arrest—the government embarked on sustained repression of opposition. Prior to 1960 it had generally respected legal norms, relying upon the Riotous Assemblies Act (1914) and its amendments (1927, 1929), under which the government could declare a state of emergency and ban individuals from political activity, and the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), which granted additional powers to block political activity deemed communist under a broad definition. In 1960 the government enacted the Unlawful Organizations Act, under which it banned the ANC and the PAC. It followed with General Laws Amendment Acts in 1962 and 1963 and the Terrorism Act of 1966, which legalized house arrest and detention without habeus corpus and provided greater penalties up to death for sabotage and terrorism. Concomitantly police adopted the practices of solitary confinement, physical and mental torture, and assassination.

In the view of the government, harsh police state measures were a necessary response to the decision of the ANC in 1961 to abandon nonviolence for armed struggle—to be led by Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), a military organization jointly directed by leaders of the banned ANC and the clandestine South African Communist Party (SACP)—and to attacks on whites by POQO, an offshoot of the PAC, in 1962–1963. Relentlessly deploying its strengthened arsenal of repression, the government successfully decimated its internal opposition, as symbolized by the imprisonment in 1964 of ANC leaders, including Mandela and Sisulu, on Robben Island. Tambo, who had left the country in 1960, peripatetically undertook the difficult creation of ANC and MK structures in exile.

The Soweto uprising of June 1976 and the nationwide unrest that followed exploded the government’s hopes that blacks might acquiesce to apartheid. The government responded with both reform and repression. African trade union rights were recognized in 1980 and 1981, a new constitution was enacted in 1984 granting subordinate voting privileges to “Coloreds” and Asians, and there was selective relaxation of rigid segregation, including the abolition of the pass system in 1985. Repression of opposition was intensified, however, as symbolized by the 1977 death in police custody of Steve Biko, the charismatic leader who founded the Black Consciousness movement in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, opposition inside the country grew. Post-1976 boycotts, strikes, and township demonstrations metamorphosed in the 1980s into open nationally organized opposition, led by the ANC-oriented United Democratic Front (UDF), a burgeoning trade union movement, and prominent church leaders, most notably the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Numerous acts of sabotage and armed attacks—organized by the resurgent ANC/MK underground and the ANC mission in exile—were carried out, complementing the external opposition of the worldwide antiapartheid movement and increasingly extensive economic sanctions.

On February 11, 1990, the newly elected president deKlerk freed Mandela and other ANC leaders from prison and legalized the PAC, ANC, and SACP. Negotiations between the National Party, headed by deKlerk, and its erstwhile antiapartheid opponents led by the ANC, headed by Mandela, commenced in mid-1990, leading in late 1993 to agreement upon a new nonracial democratic constitution. In 1993 the last apartheid laws were repealed.

In South Africa’s first election under the new constitution in April 1994, the ANC won a majority of votes, and Mandela became president. Mandela vigorously pursued a policy of reconciliation with those who had supported apartheid. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Tutu, exposed the workings of the apartheid police state. The ANC-led government adopted policies to reverse the consequences of decades-long apartheid, but apartheid’s entrenched legacies of inequality and black poverty proved hard to overcome.

SEE ALSO African National Congress; Boer War; Coloreds (South Africa); Discrimination; Discrimination, Wage, by Race; Inequality, Racial; Mandela, Nelson; Mandela, Winnie; Nobel Peace Prize; Racism; Separatism; Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam, Heribert. 1971. Modernizing Racial Domination: South Africa’s Political Dynamics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Beinart, William, and Saul Dubow, eds. 1995. Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa. London and New York: Routledge.

MacDonald, Michael. 2006. Why Race Matters in South Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Price, Robert M. 1991. The Apartheid State in Crisis: Political Transformation in South Africa, 1975–1990. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sheridan Johns

apartheid (‘apartness’) A racial policy which dominated South African culture, politics, society, and economics during the twentieth century. Officially established by Malan in 1948, it had emerged from policies of segregation which had been progressively introduced in the different parts of the country before the creation of South Africa, and were continued by the unified state from 1910, with the support of every Prime Minister and every White political party. It became a cornerstone of the politics of the National Party (NP) governments from 1948, taking segregation to new, unparalleled levels. Its official justification was that each race (White, mixed-race (Coloured), Indian, and Black (Bantu)) would prosper most if it developed separately. Harmony would be possible through the races living peacefully side-by-side, while tension would result from them being mixed together in the same environment, competing for the same resources.

In fact, apartheid served to maintain the political and economic supremacy of the White minority, which comprised less than 20 per cent of the total population. By keeping other races apart, poor, and uneducated, the system was designed to prevent them from developing a sense of solidarity and demanding the same rights and benefits which the Whites enjoyed from South Africa's natural wealth and industrialization. The enactment of apartheid was made possible through the 1950 Population Registration Act, which made compulsory the carrying of a pass to identify the racial group of each holder. In 1951, the Bantu Authorities Act was the first of a series of acts designed to create separate and distinct areas in which Blacks would live separately, without intruding into White neighbourhoods (see bantustans). The 1952 Native Law Amendment Act established the close control of the movement of urban Blacks in particular. The 1953 Bantu Education Act for the first time created a national education system for Blacks. Yet through taking education away from the independent churches this increased state control over Blacks, providing inferior education to prepare Blacks for an inferior role in apartheid society. Discrimination in the workplace was enhanced, and sexual relationships between Whites and non-Whites were forbidden.

In 1953 ‘petty apartheid’ began, whereby public amenities (restaurants, lavatories, beaches, post offices, etc.) were set apart for Whites. This was relaxed and gradually abolished under Vorster and P. W. Botha. Apartheid itself, however, did not come to an end until 1993, after a referendum in the previous year in which two-thirds of White South Africans approved its abolition. This was caused by a combination of the protest of the Black majority, international isolation, and the burden of a vast security apparatus on the resources of a White minority whose relative size was declining. (Comprising almost 23 per cent of the population in 1921, Whites made up 12.8 per cent of the population in 1994, as a result of a comparatively low birth-rate.) In 1996, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to deal with the moral and social effects of apartheid.

satyagraha

Bantustan Separate Black homelands in South Africa whose creation from 1951 formed the cornerstone of apartheid as realized by the National Party and the relentless Verwoerd. They built on the existing ‘reserves’ for Blacks (Bantus), which had been established to segregate them from Whites in 1913 and in 1936. The 1951 Bantu Authorities Act set up a hierarchical structure of authority in each reserve, which corresponded to different ethnic groups. Tribal chiefs who did not cooperate were deposed. The 1959 Bantu Self-Government Act provided mechanisms for these territories to achieve self-government, which was granted in 1963 for the first time to the Transkei, the largest single homeland territory.

Thereafter, self-governing homelands were encouraged to opt for independence, since the more Blacks belonged to an independent homeland, the fewer could claim South African nationality. Thus, the 1970 Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act ruled that all Blacks would assume the nationality of one of the homelands, even if they had never set foot in it. This would ensure that, in the long run, there would be no Black South Africans. Transkei accepted independence in 1976, followed by Bophuthatswana (1977), Venda (1979), and the Ciskei (1981). As creations of apartheid, these ‘countries’, whose territories were widely interspersed throughout the eastern part of South Africa, were not internationally recognized. With the notable exception of Bophuthatswana, their governments were corrupt, and their single most important ‘independent’ revenue came from the ability to run casinos, as gambling was forbidden in South Africa.

In reality, they were vast slum areas without industry or fertile soil for agriculture. The majority of their populations depended on jobs in South Africa (e.g. 65 per cent of the working population in Bophuthatswana), while most of their governments' income depended on direct transfer payments from the South African government (e.g. 80 per cent in Transkei, 1985). The ‘independent’ bantustans were reintegrated into South Africa in 1994, sometimes, as in the case of Bophuthatswana, against the will of the local governing elites.

apartheid (Afrikaans, ‘separateness’) A racial policy in South Africa. It depended on the Population Registration Act (1950) that assigned every person to initially three racial groups, Bantu (Black), White, and Coloured (mixed race); a fourth category, Asian, was added later. These groups were kept separate regarding land ownership, residence, marriage and other social intercourse, work, education, religion, and sport. The word apartheid was first used politically in 1943, but as a concept it goes back to the rigid segregation practised by the settlers since the 17th century. From 1948 onwards, it was expressed in statutes, in job reservation and trade union separation, and in the denial of the vote and parliamentary representation for Black people. In accordance with it BANTU HOMELANDS were created, mostly in areas of poor land and scant resoures, depriving the Bantu-speaking peoples of South African citizenship in return for an illusory and unworkable independence.

From 1985 certain restrictions began to be mitigated by creating subordinate parliamentary chambers for Asians and Coloureds, by relaxation of rules for sport and leisure, by modifying the Group Areas Act that restricted particular areas to certain races, and by abolishing the Pass Laws that forced non-Whites to carry documentation to allow them to move through restricted areas. Increasing internal unrest along with international pressure for its abolition eventually swayed the government and in July 1991 President DE KLERK repealed all remaining apartheid legislation, including the Population Registration Act. In December 1991 a Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) was established, comprising the government and 18 political groups, including the AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS and the INKATHA FREEDOM PARTY. In 1993 a new transitional constitution, drafted by CODESA, was ratified by the government. The constitution gave the vote to all South African adults and the first multiracial elections were held in 1994.

apartheid Policy of racial segregation practised by the South African government from 1948 to 1990. Racial inequality and restricted rights for non-whites were institutionalized when the Afrikaner-dominated National Party came to power in 1948. Officially a framework for “separate development” of races, in practice apartheid enforced white-minority rule. It was based on segregation in all aspects of life including residence, land ownership, and education. Non-whites, c.80% of the population, were also given separate political structures and quasi-autonomous homelands or bantustans. The system was underpinned by extensive repression, and measures such as pass laws which severely restricted the movements of non-whites. In 1990 the South African government, increasingly isolated internationally and beset by economic difficulties and domestic unrest, pledged to dismantle the system. Elections in April 1994 completed the transition to a nonracial democracy. See also African National Congress (ANC)

bantustan in 20th-century South African history, territory that was set aside under apartheid for black South Africans and slated for eventual independence. Ten bantustans (later generally referred to as homelands), covering 14% of the country's land, were created from the former "native reserves." Four were proclaimed independent— Transkei (1976), Bophuthatswana (1977), Venda (1979), and Ciskei (1981)—but no foreign government recognized them as independent nations. Citizens of independent homelands lost the limited rights they had as South Africans. Under the South African constitution that was approved in 1993 and ended white rule, South African citizenship was restored to homeland residents, and the homelands were abolished.

a·part·heid / əˈpärtˌ(h)āt; -ˌ(h)īt/ • n. hist. (in South Africa) a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race. ∎  segregation in other contexts: sexual apartheid.

Apartheid (policy of separate development): see DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH.

apartheid See SEGREGATION.

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