Apartheid
The National Party wins power and builds apartheid, "separateness", a system that classifies every South African by race and controls where they live, work, study, love and vote.
- Apartheid, 1948–1994 — Saul Dubow, Oxford University Press (2014)
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- Forced Removals in South Africa: The SPP Reports — Surplus People Project (1983)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- Apartheid — Encyclopaedia Britannica
South Africa was already deeply segregated by 1948, through the 1913 Land Act, pass laws and job reservation. But in the general election of May 1948 the National Party of D. F. Malan, campaigning on the slogan of apartheid (“separateness”), won a majority of seats, though not of votes, in an all-white electorate. It drew on Afrikaner resentment of British dominance, memories of the Boer War camps, the poverty of many Afrikaners who had moved to the cities, and fear of the Black majority.
- Apartheid, 1948–1994 — Saul Dubow, Oxford University Press (2014)
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
Building the system
A torrent of laws followed. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act banned marriage and sex across racial lines. The Population Registration Act (1950) assigned every person to a racial group, sometimes by humiliating tests such as running a pencil through someone’s hair. The Group Areas Act (1950) zoned cities by race. The Bantu Education Act (1953) gave Black children a deliberately inferior education; its architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, said there was no place for them “above the level of certain forms of labour”. Separate amenities laws segregated buses, beaches, benches and toilets.
- Apartheid, 1948–1994 — Saul Dubow, Oxford University Press (2014)
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
Under Verwoerd, prime minister from 1958, apartheid became “grand apartheid”, or “separate development”. Black South Africans were assigned to ten ethnic “homelands”, and four of them (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei) were declared “independent”, stripping their people of South African citizenship. No other country recognised them. Pass laws controlled movement; millions were arrested for pass offences over the decades.
- Apartheid, 1948–1994 — Saul Dubow, Oxford University Press (2014)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
Forced removals
To make apartheid’s map real, the state moved people on a vast scale. The Surplus People Project estimated that some 3.5 million people were forcibly removed between 1960 and 1983. Sophiatown in Johannesburg, a lively mixed community, was bulldozed from 1955 and rebuilt as a white suburb named Triomf (“triumph”). District Six in Cape Town was declared white in 1966 and its Coloured residents scattered to the Cape Flats. Rural Black communities were dumped in barren resettlement camps in the homelands.
- Forced Removals in South Africa: The SPP Reports — Surplus People Project (1983)
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
Resistance and repression
Resistance began at once. The ANC’s Defiance Campaign of 1952 saw thousands deliberately break apartheid laws. In 1955 the Congress of the People adopted the Freedom Charter, declaring that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white”. On 9 August 1956 about 20,000 women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria against pass laws, singing “you strike a woman, you strike a rock”. The state responded with treason trials, bannings, detention without trial and, after Sharpeville in 1960, the banning of the ANC and PAC.
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- Long Walk to Freedom — Nelson Mandela, Little, Brown (1994)
In the 1980s P. W. Botha’s government tried reform, including a 1983 constitution giving Coloured and Indian South Africans their own parliamentary chambers, while still excluding the Black majority. The result was the United Democratic Front, township uprisings, states of emergency, tens of thousands of detentions, international sanctions and sporting boycotts. By the end of the decade apartheid was failing economically, politically and morally.
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
- Apartheid, 1948–1994 — Saul Dubow, Oxford University Press (2014)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
Apartheid was a system of humiliation and theft: passes demanded at any moment, families torn apart by migrant labour and forced removals, inferior "Bantu Education" designed to train servants, and police terror against any resistance. Its injustice was total, and its legacy is not over.
- South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid — Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, Routledge (2016)
- Long Walk to Freedom — Nelson Mandela, Little, Brown (1994)
- Forced Removals in South Africa: The SPP Reports — Surplus People Project (1983)
Its architects presented apartheid as "separate development", a way for a small, recently poor and conquered Afrikaner people to survive among a Black majority, with each "nation" to have its own homeland. Many Afrikaners have since rejected it; the Dutch Reformed Church, which had given it theological support, declared it a sin in the 1980s.
- The Afrikaners: Biography of a People — Hermann Giliomee, University of Virginia Press (2003)
- Apartheid, 1948–1994 — Saul Dubow, Oxford University Press (2014)
The UN General Assembly condemned apartheid repeatedly and a 1973 UN convention declared it a crime against humanity; historians see it as an intensification of earlier segregation, distinctive in its scale and its ambition to engineer society entirely by race.
- Apartheid, 1948–1994 — Saul Dubow, Oxford University Press (2014)
- Apartheid — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Why it matters today
Apartheid shaped every South African alive today. Its racial categories are still used to measure redress; its townships, homelands and segregated cities still define where people live; and its gaps in wealth, land and schooling are why South Africa remains so unequal. Memory of it differs: for most Black South Africans it was a crime against humanity they lived through; many white South Africans now say it was wrong, though some recall those years as more orderly and safe.