A Short History of Apartheid
Apartheid: Afrikaner for separateness; apartness.
Petty Apartheid: Everyday racial discrimination such as marriage restrictions, segregated facilities (including park benches and beaches), jobs, elevators, cinemas, restaurants, housing, and education.
Grand Apartheid: Political and racial discrimination. Four major points: “Separate development” of South Africa’s four racial groups.
Total white control: The overruling of black interests for white interests; The categorization of whites (Dutch/Afrikaner/English/European).
Four racial groups:
- The Africans/Blacks: comprised of nine distinct nations (Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, Tsonga, Pedi, Tswana, Swazi, Ndebele, and Sotho);
- The Coloureds: mixed black, Malayan, and white descent;
- The Asians: Indian in ancestry;
- The Whites: Dutch (Afrikaner/Boer) and British Isles (Anglo) descent.
In 1948 the new race policy, Apartheid, institutionalized and enforced the already racially segregated South Africa. For the next fifty years, South Africans would be forced apart, imprisoned, and murdered in the name of white domination. By the end of apartheid in 1994, hundreds of thousands of South Africans would be detained, tortured, or murdered.
Arriving in South Africa in 1652, the Dutch settlers established the Cape of Good Hope and utilized the Dutch East India Company to import slaves from Malaysia, Madagascar, India, Indonesia, Mozambique, and East Africa. In 1795 when gold was discovered on tribal lands, British forces seized control of the Cape colony. Soon, many citizens of the English Isles were immigrating to South Africa, leaving the Dutch settlers, now renamed Afrikaners, struggling to retain and regain power over their territories, resulting in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). Through a peace treaty, the Boers lost their independence, Britain retained domination, and the British abolished slavery.
The British, who had negotiated with the Boer generals, created the South African Native Affairs Commission, proposing racial segregation in the areas of land, labor, education, and politics. In 1910, South Africa gained dominion status within the British Empire and over the next ten years the Union government passed proposals in to law which instituted several Acts that would keep South Africa’s blacks away from its whites. One Act in particular, the Native Areas Act (passed in both 1913 and 1936), forced native Africans (non-white) to live on less than fourteen percent of the land, even though they made-up roughly eighty-five percent of the country’s population.
By the 1930s the increasingly strong National Party (an all-white party) segregated African natives and used them as a means of cheap labor. Their efforts proved fruitful as the 1940s brought World War II and a boom in urban industrial companies. With the Second World War in full effect, and South Africa joining the Allied forces, jobs, wages, and trade unions were on the rise for both whites and blacks. Consequently, with all South Africans moving toward the cities for work, the rural areas became impoverished; farms and farmers suffered. To retain their income, Afrikaner farmers unified as the Afrikaner Nationalist Alliance, demanding more political control over black South Africans. In 1948, the Afrikaner farmers would get what they wanted.
When the National Party and Daniel F. Malan won the 1948 election (ousting predecessor General Jan Smuts who “undermined” racial segregation), Apartheid’s “total segregation” was enacted. This first period of apartheid, known as baaskap, Afrikaner for mastery and white supremacy, resulted in an all-white South Africa where blacks, coloreds, and Asians were sent out of major cities to ethnic “homelands” and lost all citizenship rights in the “white” areas of South Africa. Once the non-whites were far removed, white miners, farmers, and industries realized that their cheap labor came from those whom they had recently exiled. Greedy for their businesses to continue operations, the white businesses “allowed” the non-white South Africans to return to the “white” areas to work. To keep tabs on the non-whites in white territory, four significant Acts were passed into law: the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages (an amendment to the Immorality Act (1949)), the Population Registration Act (1950), the Group Areas Act (1950) which would forcibly relocate 3.5 million by the late 1980s, and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953).
When Hendrick Verwoerd, Apartheid’s chief architect, became South Africa’s Prime minister in 1958, Verwoerd rephrased Apartheid from the crass baaskap to the more sophisticated “separate development.” Through “separate development” non-whites could lead socially, economically, and politically free lives within their assigned “homeland,” but this systemized segregation also made every part of a South African’s life determinable by race. Africans, Coloreds, and Asians still could not vote, own land, move freely from one country to another, or choose their employment. Those who were able to live on “white” land as a result of work had to do so with a permit and without their family, thus breaking down the “races’” strength in numbers. Passbooks or “Books of Life” were mandatory for all non-whites to carry, and consisted of marriage and driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and work permits. To be caught without ones passbook was punishable by imprisonment and in extreme cases torture and beatings.
The 1950s also saw anti-Apartheid growth. The African National Congress (ANC), an organization whose members included Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and 1961 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Albert Luthuli, focused on the political and social conditions of South Africa’s black community and staged the peaceful Defiance Campaign of Unjust Laws. During this campaign, the ANC adopted the Congress of the People’s Freedom Charter (notable for its opening phrase “The People Shall Govern!”) which demanded full civil rights and equality for all South Africans. In December 1956, after several protests in addition to the Defiance Campaign, more than one hundred activists were arrested and charged with high treason in the “Treason Trial” of 1961; all of the accused were acquitted.
The newly formed Pan Africanist Congress (PAC; known for its African nationalism, socialism, and continental unity) soon began its anti-Pass Laws campaign against Apartheid. Their first attack resulted in March 1960’s Sharpeville Massacre, where sixty-nine people were shot after responding to a PAC call to turn in passes and submit to arrest. By 1963, the African National Congress had formed its military,Umkonto we Sizwe or “Spear of the Nation,” Nelson Mandela and other leading activists had been imprisoned or exiled and anti-Apartheid resistance was outlawed under the Unlawful Organizations Act.
South Africans in defiance of Apartheid’s laws were now kept in custody without trial or assassinated. As protests grew, so did the world’s interest in Apartheid. In response to South Africa’s call for emergency help to the rest of the world, many countries began challenging South Africa’s regime. As a result, Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Verwoerd withdrew South Africa from the United Nations in 1961, left the British Commonwealth, and South Africa was banned from the Olympic Games. In 1966, Verwoerd was assassinated and succeeded by John Vorster who relaxed some of Apartheid’s petty laws; this did not stop protest, violence or brutality during the 1970s.
With Peiter Willem Botha’s 1978 election to prime minister, Apartheid laws relaxed even more, granting Asians and Coloureds limited political rights and abolishing the long-standing pass system. While these restrictions were lessened, Botha continued to condemn any opposition to the government and wanted white power to remain dominant in South Africa.
By 1983, six hundred South African organizations had come together to create the United Democratic Front, an alliance of trade unions and organizations endorsing the Freedom Charter and eliminate “homelands.” As anti-Apartheid activities increased, in 1986 Botha declared a state of emergency and deployed five thousand soldiers to ban, arrest, and detain tens of thousands of South Africans, many of which were tortured and murdered. Foreign countries began pulling their business transactions, trades, and investments with South Africa by the end of the 1980s, leaving the country in a state of economic depression.
In 1989, National Party leader Frederik Willem de Klerk became prime minister and released many of Apartheid’s black political prisoners. He declared to Parliament that Apartheid had failed and all bans on political parties would be immediately lifted. But race relations continued to retain tension until 1993, and more than ten thousand South Africans were killed due to political violence. Criminal activity like murders, beatings, and explosions were on the rise. In February 1990, anti-Apartheid organizations were un-banned, political prisoners were freed (including Nelson Mandela), and resolution was in the air. Apartheid officially ended in 1994 with the democratic election, abolition of “homelands,” and new interim (1994) and final constitutions (1996), all apartheid laws were repealed and South Africa laid is foundations for a multiracial and multiparty transitional government, Nelson Mandela became the first freely elected, majority president, setting into action equality for all South Africans and the reclamation of native lands by its once native inhabitants.
–Kelli Marino, Production Dramaturg
