Apartheid describes a system of laws and policies of total racial segregation in South Africa that began in 1948, when the National Party came to power, and ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected President in the first democratic elections.
1. Colonialism and Segregation: The Origins of Apartheid
Three main, interrelated forces influenced the nature of South African society and economy: colonial conquest, the expansion of mining, and the actions ─ also known as “agency” ─ of individuals. Colonial conquest by the Netherlands and, after 1795, by Britain, stimulated limited if uneven capitalist growth.
The Dutch East India Company established a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. In South Africa, destruction of Khoi societies produced an underclass of domestic and farm workers, but their ability to earn a decent wage was severely curtailed by the Dutch East India Company’s use of slaves imported from Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar, and South East Asia.
The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1867 and of gold on the Witwatersrand (centered on the city of Johannesburg) in 1886 transformed South African from an agrarian society at the edge of world trade into a globally integrated industrial economy. The mineral revolution led to the quick spread of European colonization into the interior. By the end of the 19th century, all the indigenous peoples of South Africa had lost their political and economic independence.
Racist laws enabled the white-owned mining companies to control workers, keep wages very low, and gain immense profits from the diamonds and gold that black miners extracted from the earth. Many African men worked on the mines and farms under dangerous conditions for wages that could not sufficiently feed and clothe their families. The diamond and gold mines also imposed pass laws, a humiliating means of control (that was to continue under apartheid), which required black men to carry documents that identified where they could and could not work and live.
Most African miners became migrant laborers, spending nine to eleven months of the year in the mines while their wives and children remained in the countryside. Racial discrimination in the pre-apartheid era also kept the few Africans who received training as apprentices from finding suitable employment. Such informal “job color bars” ─ limitations on what jobs one could work based on one’s race or ethnicity ─ were a blueprint for later apartheid laws like the Job Reservation Act.
Industrialization and British imperialism in South Africa, driven by economic and political ambitions, and the individual actions of mining magnates like Cecil John Rhodes, resulted in a slow but steady expansion of manufacturing and transport infrastructure.
The Act of Union of 1910 brought together the previously separate colonies of the Orange Free State, Transvaal, Natal, and the Cape to form the Union of South Africa—which later became a white dominion of the British Empire. In response, a group of black South Africans traveled to London to petition Parliament to reject the denial of the vote to Africans in the 1910 Act of Union, but their voices went unheard. In the end, the British and the Boers (Afrikaners) put aside the bitterness of war in order to entrench white power and privilege at the expense of the black South Africans’ civil and human rights.
The most important law passed was the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. This law reserved 93 percent (revised to 87 percent in 1936) of the land in South Africa for whites; it prevented Africans—two-thirds of the population at the time—from freely buying land. The small African “reserves” created by the Land Act were a forerunner of the apartheid-era “Bantustans” or “homelands.” Life in the rural reserves was harsh, with illnesses and malnutrition rife. For many Africans, especially young men and women, migration to wage-earning jobs in cities and mines became one of the only ways to pay colonial taxes and survive.
Massive urbanization was the most important social development between World War I and World War II. The number of city-dwelling Africans more than tripled in thirty years from 1904 to 1936. This urban growth occurred in a context of intensifying segregation. Africans in the cities lived in terrible conditions, with inadequate housing, poor health and transport services, and no electricity for many decades. Along with poverty came crime and fear for personal safety. Segregation also caused unprecedented gender imbalance, with more men working in urban areas than women.
As more blacks moved to urban areas, whites came to view the city as “a European area in which there is no place for the redundant Native,” in the words of the Native Affairs Commission of 1921. The 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act restricted African migration into towns, laying the foundations for urban residential segregation. Whites also sought to tighten control of black workers by passing laws in the 1920s that severely curtailed black economic freedom, including a prohibition on forming unions.
By the 1930s, the government’s segregationist stance hardened further. Amendments to the Masters and Servants’ Act, for instance, legalized whipping. Repressive legislation was also aimed at Indian and Coloured South Africans. Then, in 1936, the Hertzog Bills removed from the voting rolls the few Africans who were still enfranchised in the Cape.
There were important continuities between segregation and apartheid: in both eras, black people faced condescending and restrictive policies, discriminatory residence and labor laws, and denied voting rights. The pre-apartheid period saw considerable enforced racial separation in economy and society. In both periods, the ideology of white supremacy prevailed. These similarities have led some scholars to see apartheid simply as an intensification of segregation. Under apartheid, however, racism and segregation became thoroughly rigid and institutionalized; they permeated all aspects of life, and government repression became more ruthless. Moreover, the world historical context was changing. While white supremacy was common in European colonial empires and the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, after 1945 colonialism and racism were in retreat. This period witnessed the independence of ex-colonies in Asia and Africa and the rise of the American civil rights movement.