South African Apartheid

Apartheid was a period of institutional racial segregation that took place in South Africa between 1948 and 1991. Some aspects of apartheid led to parks and other public spaces in South Africa that were designated for white people only, hospitals that would turn you away if you were black, and separate educational institutions for children. It was separate and it was far from equal. For example, the government spent 10 times more money on white schools than it did on others, and the threshold for taxes was much higher for white people than it was for blacks. Apartheid not only kept people apart on the basis of their skin, it was designed in order to maintain a status quo, a system that subjugated and exploited an entire people based on the color of their skin and kept the minority race in power.

South Africa is a former major British colony. During the late 19th century the discovery of diamonds and gold in the region led to a series of wars between the British and earlier settlers known as Boers, and both groups had a history of conflicts with the indigenous population. These earlier settlers, South Africans of Dutch or English origin, controlled these riches and resources that were mined by tens of thousands of black natives.

To safeguard the extracted precious metal and gems, the white entrepreneurs herded the African laborers into special quarters or townships where they could be kept under rigid round-the-clock surveillance — thereby setting a precedent for the rules and laws through which the white supremacist governments dominated not just the mine workers, but most of the 40 million non-white South Africans.

In 1910, Great Britain unified four South African colonies into a dominion and formalized its racist system. This act gave the whites the near-exclusive right to vote and placed them, though only 13 percent of the population, in complete control of not only the blacks, but also the Indians and other Asians living in the South Africa. From then on, the system, originally run by whites of British origin, only became more abhorrent.

In 1913, South African blacks were banned from buying land in certain areas; in 1923, they were limited to living in segregated residential sections; in 1926, black mine workers were prohibited from practicing skilled trades, and in 1927, the British Crown officially replaced the tribal chiefs as the supreme authority for all native African affairs.

Other non-whites were not treated much better. In 1946, for example, the South African parliament deprived the country’s Asians of their communal representation and took away their right of land ownership and choice of occupation.

But what gave the apartheid system its ugly name and brutal form was the 1948 elections, which brought in power the National Party of South Africa, a party of Afrikaners — whites of Dutch origin — headed by Daniel Malan. A populist and a zealous nationalist, Malan ushered in a racist system that sought to totally dominate not just the livelihood, but the personal lives of all non-white South Africans.

The Apartheid System

The first major law passed by Malan’s government, the 1949 "Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act" outlawed marriages between "Europeans" (white people) and "non-Europeans.” Next, the Afrikaner-dominated parliament prohibited extra-marital sex between white people and people of other races, and it legalized the segregation of public premises, vehicles, facilities and services.

New laws enforced racial separation of educational facilities; cut off financial support for missionary and other non-segregated schools; and even prohibited teaching of math to black children to make sure they could not aspire to non-menial jobs. By the time apartheid collapsed, in 1991, the Afrikaner legislatures churned out 42 laws that regimented, inhibited, and insulted every non-white South African.            

The system entered its most far-reaching stage in the 1950s when the Afrikaners enacted laws that disregarded the basic human rights and dignity of non-white South Africans.

They classified each South African as either European (white), Bantu (black), Colored (mixed race), or Asian. Next, they designed areas where members of each of the four groups was allowed to live. Black people, who made up 80 percent of the population, were assigned to 13 percent of the country’s land area, and that small area was divided into 10 black homelands called Bantustans.

The residents of these “stans” were denied South African citizenship and had to apply for special passes to enter or work in the large and economically most important areas set aside for the whites.

The new restrictions ignited the long-smoldering resentments of blacks belonging to two grass-root organizations: the African National Congress (ANC), a group whose leaders included a young lawyer and outstanding organizer named Nelson Mandela, and the Pan-African Congress (PAC), whose leadership was more radical than the ANC.

Separately but imbued with the same zeal and with the same goals in mind, the two groups set out to defeat the apartheid system through strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience. It was a strategy that was bound to lead to violence, and it did.

The first explosion took place on March 21, 1960 when the PAC organized a rally or about 5,000 blacks outside the police station in Sharpeville, to protest against the Pass Law. The police started a stampede when they fired into the crowd. They killed 69 people and 180 others suffered bullet wounds — almost all in the back.

The Sharpeville massacre triggered angry reactions not only in Africa but throughout the world. The Afrikaner regime put up a stiff front; in October, 1960, it pulled out of the British Commonwealth and proclaimed South Africa a republic. But from Sharpeville on, apartheid came under increasing rebukes from observers abroad.

The British, in particular, denounced apartheid as an unacceptable system of governance; United Nations passed resolutions excoriating the South African government; a Norwegian committee awarded the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize to Albert Luthuli, the president of ANC; and South Africa was not allowed to participate in the Olympics.

Mandela and his fellow ANC leaders used the world-wide focus on apartheid to lobby against it abroad, and to step up the resistance at home. In 1964, Mandela and seven other activists were sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. The verdict backfired: it added to the great prestige of Mandela, who was the group’s spokesman and it left the Afrikaner government sitting on a volcano of hostility and disobedience.

In mid-1970s, the ruling Afrikaners took a step too far. They decreed that black children may not go to schools outside their Bantustans, and that certain subjects must be taught only in Afrikaans, the language of the whites of Dutch origin. The Bantustans’ schools were an educational atrocity: 30 percent of them had no electricity, 25 percent had no running water, and less than half had plumbing.

The ruling that they must attend these decrepit facilities so inflamed the youngsters in Soweto, a township near Johannesburg, that in 1975 and 1976 they staged a violent uprising. As had happened in Sharpeville, the police opened fire, killing two students, whereupon the uprising spread to other Bantustans. By the time it ended, in 1977, 575 people had been killed and 3,389 wounded. 

This time, the overseas response was vehement. European and American firms broke their commercial ties with South Africa and many governments began imposing trade sanctions on the regime in Pretoria. Equally as important, Soweto gave the anti-apartheid forces an issue behind which millions rallied around the world: a call for the release of Nelson Mandela.

Faced with growing global isolation and rising opposition from its own white constituency, the South African government had no choice but to yield. In 1989, the South African president, F. W. de Klerk, released a number of ANC activists from prison, and allowed them to legally represent their organization. By the end of the year, he met with the rest of the ANC leadership, including Mandela, and two months later announced in the parliament that he would free all political prisoners not convicted of violence. By 1991, most of the apartheid laws were abolished.

On February 11, 1990, Mandela was released from the prison looking — despite his 27 years behind the bars — healthy and vigorous. He and de Klerk shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and the next year Mandela became the ANC’s candidate in the country’s first free elections. On May 10, 1994 he was inaugurated as the president of South Africa.

Over the next five years, Mandela used his formidable energy and leadership to try and heal the wounds of apartheid. He included in his cabinet South Africans of all races; urged the Afrikaners and other whites to remain in the country; and together with the prominent archbishop Desmond Tutu established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate crimes committed by both whites and blacks during the racist era.

When he stepped down in 1999, Mandela — despite his best efforts — left behind one major issue: resolving the legacy of frequently violent land dispossession carried out by the whites long before and during the apartheid. Mandela’s government tackled the issue soon after his election by announcing a land reform and creating a special Commission on Restitution of Land Rights to move the ambitious project forward.

The system was intended to register land claims by the dispossessed (almost invariably black) farmers and resolve them through expropriation, redistribution and restitution. The job of the special Commission was to help the claimants submit their requests and check on their processing, and the goal was to redistribute 30 percent of land to black people by 2014.

In 1998, Mandela presided over the return of 600,000 hectares of land to its rightful owners, but that was a rare success of a venture that otherwise has failed. Despite the efforts of Mandela’s successors, land seizures and land reform has slowed down to a near halt. There have been decades of tangled land deals; excessive demands for indemnities; disuse of expropriated land and large-scale illegal squatting. In 1999 the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights resolved only 41 of the 63,500 land claims, and by 2013, the South African parliament was still trying to develop new legislative formula to revive the dormant redistribution of land. In 2016, a major government survey found the land reform had decreased food production by 79 percent.

It has been 20 years since apartheid was abolished in South Africa, but its vile legacy remains in a country still trying to come to terms with its past.