Apartheid

(from the Encarta Encyclopedia Africana)

The term apartheid (Afrikaans for "apartness") was coined in the 1930s and used as a political slogan of the National Party in the early 1940s, but the practice of segregation in South Africa extends to the beginning of white settlement in South Africa in 1652. After the Afrikaner-dominated National Party came to power in 1948, regionally varied practices of racial segregation were intensified and made into a uniform set of national laws. Scholars disagree over why apartheid was adopted in South Africa. Some argue that apartheid was at its root a policy that served businesses by creating a large pool of low-cost labor. Other scholars dispute this, claiming that apartheid was adopted because of deep racism among most white South Africans, and that the policy actually damaged the economy.

MAJOR ELEMENTS  

The implementation of the apartheid policy, later referred to as "separate development," was made possible by the Population Registration Act of 1950, which put all South Africans into three racial categories: Bantu (black African), white, or Coloured (of mixed race). A fourth category, Asian (including Indians, Pakistanis, and Chinese), was added later. The system of apartheid was further elaborated by a series of laws in the 1950s: The Group Areas Act of 1950 assigned races to different residential and business sections in urban areas, and the Land Acts of 1954 and 1955 restricted nonwhite residence to specific areas. These laws further restricted the already limited right of black Africans to own land, entrenching the white minority's control of over 80 percent of South African land. One of the most repressive apartheid restrictions was the law requiring that blacks and other nonwhites carry a "pass book" stating their legal residence and workplace. Those without the proper papers could be stopped by police and summarily expelled to the countryside. In 1952 the government passed the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act. The new law tightened pass regulations, renamed the passes reference books, and required women to carry them for the first time.

Other laws prohibited most social contacts between the races. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 barred interracial marriage, and the Immorality Act of 1950 prohibited sexual relations between different races. The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act permitted the systematic segregation of train stations, buses, movie theaters, hotels, and virtually all other public facilities, and barred the courts from overturning such restrictions. Opponents of apartheid referred to these rules as "petty apartheid." The Bantu Education Act of 1953 closed private schools for Africans and forced them to attend a separate, inferior education system. Labor regulations in the 1950s all but outlawed the formation of trade unions except by whites, and reserved most skilled occupations for whites. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 furthered geographic divisions between the races by creating ten so-called homelands or bantustans for the black population.

The government continued to implement new apartheid regulations in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The Bantu Laws Amendment Act of 1964, for example, gave the government complete authority to banish blacks from any urban area and from white agricultural areas. During the 1970s the government stripped thousands of blacks of their South African citizenship when it granted nominal independence to their homelands. Most of the homelands had few natural resources, were not economically viable, and being both small and fragmented, lacked the autonomy of independent states. In the 1980s the government eased some apartheid regulations such as pass laws, but then ordered more systematic enforcement of restrictions on squatting, which had the same effect of restricting black residence in the cities.

Apartheid extracted a huge human cost. In its efforts to create completely segregated residential areas, the South African government destroyed thousands of houses in racially mixed areas. With their homes destroyed, tens of thousands of people were forced into small, substandard houses located in bleak townships and neighborhoods with poor services. Limits on black residence in urban areas also broke apart families in cases where one parent obtained a residence permit but the other did not. Restrictions on the size and location of black businesses squelched the economic aspirations of many blacks, preventing them from competing effectively with white-owned businesses. Apartheid educational policies condemned black South Africans to a severely overcrowded school system with educational policies designed to limit achievement. Indians and Coloureds had somewhat better schools and business opportunities, but they still lagged behind whites.