2. THE RISE OF APARTHEID
There is no place for him [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor. Within his own community, however, all doors are open. For that reason it is to no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community, where he cannot be absorbed.
Hendrik F. Verwoerd (1954)
In 1948, the National Party, representing ethnic nationalist Afrikaners, won the national election on a platform of racism and segregation under the slogan of “apartheid”- or “apartness” in the Afrikaans language. Apartheid built upon earlier laws, but made segregation more rigid and enforced it more aggressively. It significantly extended the reach of the racist state and led to a systematic and fundamental deterioration of the position of black people in South Africa for the next four decades.
The rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s was a critical factor in the electoral victory of the National Party. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa provided a theological justification for apartheid. Alongside cultural and political mobilization, Afrikaner economic power also developed significantly in the 1930s.
National Party leaders D. F. Malan and Hendrik F. Verwoerd were the architects of apartheid. Malan used the term “apartheid” from the 1930s as he distanced his party from British traditions of liberalism and the earlier policy of segregation, which he saw as too lenient towards blacks. Verwoerd, educated in the Netherlands, the United States, and Germany, was the main ideologue of apartheid. He became Native Affairs Minister in the early 1950s and Prime Minister in 1958.
Economic causes for the rise of apartheid complemented political and ideological ones. The mines, factories, and farms all depended on cheap black labor. As a result, white-owned businesses accumulated huge profits by supporting a government that denied blacks the vote and paid artificially low wages. In addition to capitalist employers, white factory workers and World War II veterans voted for apartheid in 1948 to protect their economic advantages and to oppose black urbanization and social welfare. Furthermore, many white families benefited from the work of black domestic servants who provided childcare, cooking, and house care. In order to enforce a supply of cheap and servile black labor the apartheid regime made passes, common under segregation, more restrictive; it was a criminal offense for Africans to be without a pass and made movement and residence dependent upon a pass.
The 1950s can be described as the era of “petty apartheid,” when the Nationalists passed many new racist laws similar to Jim Crow in the United States in order to enforce a racially separate and unequal social order. The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, for instance, imposed segregation on all public facilities, including post offices, beaches, stadiums, parks, toilets, and cemeteries, and buses and trains as well.
Two pillars of apartheid became law in 1950: the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act. The former classified all South Africans as members of the White, African, Coloured, or Indian racial groups. Because racial identities were (and are) historically and socially constructed, the government created Racial Classification Boards to officially determine a person’s “race.”
The Group Areas Act imposed strict residential racial segregation. Apartheid social engineering irreparably damaged countless families, communities, and livelihoods, as the government forcibly removed blacks to African, Coloured, or Indian “townships” (also known as “locations”) on the outskirts of cities and towns. In the process of enforcing this plan, government bulldozers destroyed vibrant, racially mixed neighborhoods, such as Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town. Township residents tried to rebuild their lives despite inadequate housing, material poverty, and, for Africans, the constant danger of arrest for not carrying a pass book.
The impact of apartheid on black education was profound. Verwoerd’s 1953 Bantu Education Act established an inferior education system for Africans based upon a curriculum intended to produce manual laborers and obedient subjects. Similar discriminatory education laws were also imposed on Coloureds, who had lost the right to vote in 1956, and Indians. The government denied funding to mission schools that rejected Bantu Education, leading to the closure of many of the best schools for Africans. In the higher education sector, the Extension of University Education Act of 1959 prevented black students from attending “white” universities (except with government permission) and created separate and unequal institutions for Africans, Coloureds, and Indians respectively. The apartheid government also undermined intellectual and cultural life through intense censorship of books, movies, and radio and television programs. Censorship reached absurd proportions, exemplified by the banning of the children’s book Black Beauty and the tardy introduction of television in 1976. After that date, government-controlled broadcast media regularly disseminated apartheid propaganda. Educational ties with the rest of the world gradually diminished as countries applied a cultural boycott to South Africa.
In the 1960s the pursuit of white domination led to a new policy of “Grand Apartheid.” As a massive social engineering project, grand apartheid created ethnically defined “Bantustans” (or “Homelands”) out of the “Tribal Reserves” carved out by the 1913 Land Act. Between 1960 and 1985, approximately 3.5 million Africans were forcibly removed to alleged “homelands.” These rural dumping grounds functioned as reservoirs of cheap black labor for white employers, but the apartheid regime also envisioned them as “independent” territories that would ensure the denial of South African citizenship to millions of Africans. Situated in the most unproductive regions of the country, Bantustans were inhabited largely by poverty-stricken women and children since men migrated annually to work in South African cities and towns, and farms as well. Generally, government-approved “tribal” leaders ruled over the Bantustans in violent and corrupt fashion with the full support of the South African government, which was responsible for their entire budgets and provided military assistance. Transkei (1976), Boputhatswana (1977), Venda (1979), and Ciskei (1981) accepted “independence” from South Africa, although no foreign government recognized them.
In spite of the white minority’s enormous financial, political, and military power, it never gained absolute control over South Africa. In reality, the daily suffering and humiliations brought about by apartheid, and the systematic and brutal repression of human and civil rights, did not prevent millions of black (and even some white) men, women, and youths from defiantly challenging apartheid in South Africa. This popular resistance, and the apartheid state’s repressive response, will be the focus of the next section.