Apartheid (meaning “apartness” in Afrikaans) was the legal system for racial separation in South Africa from 1948 until 1994. Racial discrimination against Black people in South Africa dates to the beginning of large-scale European colonisation of South Africa with the Dutch East India Company's establishment of a trading post in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, which eventually expanded into the Dutch Cape Colony.
The dismantling of apartheid began in the early 1990s, when South African President F. W. de Klerk legalized formerly banned political parties and released political prisoners.
Sign segregating beach access during apartheid. Image source: Wikipedia
The Roots of Apartheid
During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire captured and annexed the Dutch Cape Colony. Under the 1806 Cape Articles of Capitulation the new British colonial rulers were required to respect previous legislation enacted under Roman-Dutch law, and this led to a separation of the law in South Africa from English Common Law and a high degree of legislative autonomy.
The United Kingdom's Slavery Abolition Act 1833 provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in most parts of the British Empire. The trade of slaves was made illegal throughout the British Empire by 1837, with Nigeria and Bahrain being the last British territories to abolish slavery. The act overrode the Cape Articles of Capitulation.
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In the Cape Colony, which previously had a liberal and multi-racial constitution and a system of Cape Qualified Franchise open to men of all races, the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892 raised the property franchise qualification and added an educational element, disenfranchising a disproportionate number of the Cape's non-White voters, and the Glen Grey Act of 1894 instigated by the government of Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes limited the amount of land Africans could hold. Similarly, in Natal, the Natal Legislative Assembly Bill of 1894 deprived Indians of the right to vote.
During the Second Boer War, the British Empire cited racial exploitation of Blacks as a cause for its war against the Boer republics.
Beginning in 1906 the South African Native Affairs Commission under Godfrey Lagden began implementing a more openly segregationist policy towards non-Whites.
The United Party government of Jan Smuts began to move away from the rigid enforcement of segregationist laws during World War II, but faced growing opposition from Afrikaner nationalists who wanted stricter segregation. Post-war, one of the first pieces of segregating legislation enacted by Smuts' government was the Asiatic Land Tenure Bill (1946), which banned land sales to Indians and Indian descendant South Africans.
Amid fears that integration would eventually lead to racial assimilation, the Opposition Herenigde Nasionale Party (HNP) established the Sauer Commission to investigate the effects of the United Party's policies. The commission concluded that integration would bring about a "loss of personality" for all racial groups.
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Afrikaner nationalists proclaimed that they offered the voters a new policy to ensure continued white domination. This policy was initially expounded from a theory drafted by Hendrik Verwoerd and was presented to the National Party by the Sauer Commission. It called for a systematic effort to organise the relations, rights, and privileges of the races as officially defined through a series of parliamentary acts and administrative decrees. The party gave this policy a name - apartheid.
When the National Party came to power in 1948, there were factional differences in the party about the implementation of systemic racial segregation. NP leaders argued that South Africa did not comprise a single nation, but was made up of four distinct racial groups: white, black, Coloured and Indian. Such groups were split into 13 nations or racial federations.
The Pillars of Apartheid Legislation
The state passed laws that paved the way for "grand apartheid", which was centred on separating races on a large scale, by compelling people to live in separate places defined by race. As the NP government's minister of native affairs from 1950, Hendrik Verwoerd had a significant role in crafting such laws, which led to him being regarded as the 'Architect of Apartheid'. In addition, "petty apartheid" laws were passed.
The second pillar of grand apartheid was the Group Areas Act of 1950. Until then, most settlements had people of different races living side by side. This Act put an end to diverse areas and determined where one lived according to race. Under the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, municipal grounds could be reserved for a particular race, creating, among other things, separate beaches, buses, hospitals, schools and universities.
Further laws had the aim of suppressing resistance, especially armed resistance, to apartheid. The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 banned the Communist Party of South Africa and any party subscribing to Communism. The act defined Communism and its aims so sweepingly that anyone who opposed government policy risked being labelled as a Communist.
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The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 created separate government structures for blacks and whites and was the first piece of legislation to support the government's plan of separate development in the bantustans. The Bantu Education Act, 1953 established a separate education system for blacks emphasizing African culture and vocational training under the Ministry of Native Affairs and defunded most mission schools.
The Promotion of Black Self-Government Act of 1959 entrenched the NP policy of nominally independent "homelands" for blacks. The Black Homeland Citizenship Act of 1970 marked a new phase in the Bantustan strategy. It changed the status of blacks to citizens of one of the ten autonomous territories. The government tightened pass laws compelling blacks to carry identity documents, to prevent the immigration of blacks from other countries. To reside in a city, blacks had to be in employment there.
In 1955 the Strijdom government increased the number of judges in the Appeal Court from five to 11, and appointed pro-Nationalist judges to fill the new places. In the same year they introduced the Senate Act, which increased the Senate from 49 seats to 89. Adjustments were made such that the NP controlled 77 of these seats. The parliament met in a joint sitting and passed the Separate Representation of Voters Act in 1956, which transferred Coloured voters from the common voters' roll in the Cape to a new Coloured voters' roll.
The 1956 law allowed Coloureds to elect four people to Parliament, but a 1969 law abolished those seats and stripped Coloureds of their right to vote. Separate representatives for coloured voters were first elected in the general election of 1958. Even this limited representation did not last, being ended from 1970 by the Separate Representation of Voters Amendment Act, 1968.
Once South Africa became a republic, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd called for improved relations and greater accord between people of British descent and the Afrikaners. He claimed that the only difference was between those in favour of apartheid and those against it.
The Role of Race Classification
South Africa is still under apartheid | AJ+
Apartheid, a political and economic system built on race, required laws and administrative authorities to determine each person's racial identity. Race is never an objective, biological characteristic; in any society, race is a socially constructed concept.
The Popular Registration Act of 1950 classified all South Africans into three categories: bantu (blacks), coloureds (those of mixed race), and white. Later, a fourth category, “Asians,” was added. The Population Registration Act of 1950 required that each citizen be issued an identity document stating his or her race as either White, Native [African], or Coloured. "Coloured" was used to define people who were neither white nor “native,” a catch-all category primarily for people of mixed race. A category for Indians was created by other legislation.
Local Race Classification Boards had the power to determine an individual's race. In a society with so many people of mixed ethnic background, these decisions were based as much on people's social status as on their physical appearance or descent.
Apartheid can be inconvenient, and even dangerous. The Native Affairs Department official tried to pacify them.
The books were over fifty pages long. The books are a reliable record of many of these facts. The books were of little help.
The legal apparatus enforcing separation was originally developed in the natural sciences. Dr. M. conceded that there was not any uniform or scientific basis of race classification. Suzman stated that no satisfactory classification has as yet been devised by man.
The Nationalist Party used race classification to justify the apartheid system.
The case of Mr. T. illustrates the difficulties that could arise. Mr. T. had been classified in the army. But Mr.T. wanted to continue doing so. Mr. T. was classified White.
The Group Areas Acts forced many families to split races and moved to different neighborhoods, preventing them and their children from living together.
The architecture of a residual category provided infrastructure of both the formal and the informal to those in power, creating a form of evil of which Arendt wrote. These practices are analogous to formal rules found in Heller's Catch -22 (1961).
Under The Population Registration Act, 1968, the onus was on the person concerned to be unambiguously categorizable by race. The direction of the changes remained the same. 5 Coloured people became African (Ormond, 1986).
The reclassification process caused much anxiety and hardship before their cases are settled. In 1961 a family in Cape Town was classified Coloured. Their second daughter had to leave a white school. The family tried to appeal their case by sending her to a Coloured school. The family was threatened. The family did not get the classification altered.
The reclassification ordeal was crude. Combs were used to test how curly a person's hair was. The texture of the person's hair was an important factor, and some were even asked 'Do you eat porridge?' The shape of "ear lobes" was also considered (Sunday Times, 1955). Investigators might ask which soccer club he belonged to.
The South African case represents an extreme example of how such a classification system is enforced and policed.
Resistance and International Pressure
The nonviolent resistance of anti-apartheid demonstrators was often met with government brutality, including the massacre of 72 demonstrators in Sharpeville in 1960. King called the massacre “a tragic and shameful expression of man’s inhumanity to man” and argued that it “should also serve as a warning signal to the United States where peaceful demonstrations are also being conducted by student groups.
Shortly after the Sharpeville massacre, the African National Congress (ANC) abandoned its adherence to nonviolence and created an armed wing, conducting acts of sabotage against the apartheid regime.
Although the struggle against apartheid lasted for more than four decades, the United States and Great Britain did approve economic sanctions against South Africa in 1985.
The Aftermath and Lingering Effects
The ANC’s most celebrated document was the Freedom Charter of 1955. The inability of the African National Congress (ANC) to provide a clean, effective government for South Africans comes as little surprise to anyone who has followed the story. Nelson Mandela himself pointed to this scourge back in 2001, when he remarked: “Little did we suspect that our own people, when they got a chance, would be as corrupt as the apartheid regime.
A complex system known as “broad-based black economic empowerment” (BBBEE) was introduced. Every South African is racially categorized and a system of incentives is applied across government and the private sector.
At the same time, South Africa’s ethnic minorities face racial abuse and racial threats unchecked by the state. The radical populist Julius Malema made singing “Kill the Boers” a trademark of his rallies. Malema is now on trial. Yet far from the state prosecuting him for stirring up race hate (a crime in South Africa), it was left to an Afrikaans trade union to take him to court.
Malema has attacked South African “Indians” as an ethnic group, accusing them of failing to treat their African employees fairly. “Indians are worse than Afrikaners,” he declared in 2017.
Glen Snyman - himself a “colored” or a mixed-race South African - has founded People Against Racial Classification to campaign against discrimination. Kganki Matabane, who heads the Black Business Council, says that even though “democratic rule is nearly 27 years old, it is still too soon to ditch the old categories,” the BBC reports. “We need to ask: Have we managed to correct those imbalances?
One might have assumed that this madness was scrapped when white rule was eliminated in 1994 - or so one might have thought. Take one case. Anyone wanting to lease a state farm in August 2021 would be warned that: “Applicants must be Africans, Indians or Coloureds who are South African citizens. ‘Africans’ in this context includes persons from the first nations of South Africa.” No “white” South African - no matter how impoverished - would have the right to apply. Poverty is not a criterion; only race is considered.
Here is an example of how it applies in one sector. The Amended Marketing, Advertising and Communications Sector Code of 1 April 2016 specifies a black ownership “target of 45% (30% is reserved for black women ownership) which should be achieved as of 31 March 2018.
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| African | Persons from the first nations of South Africa |
| Indian | South African citizens of Indian descent |
| Coloured | South African citizens of mixed race |
| White | South African citizens of European descent |
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