What Was Apartheid? A System of Law Built to Separate People

The architecture was legislative and it was built quickly, with the essential framework in place within six years:

• •The Population Registration Act of 1950 required every person to be classified as White, Native, Coloured or Indian, with the determination made by officials using appearance, descent and social acceptance, and appeals heard by boards that examined hair and features
• •The Group Areas Act of 1950 assigned residential and business zones by race, under which around three and a half million people were forcibly removed from areas reassigned to others
• •The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 criminalised marriage and sexual relations across racial lines
• •The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953 segregated public facilities and explicitly provided that they need not be equal
• •The Bantu Education Act of 1953 placed African schooling under a separate department, with the minister stating in parliament that there was no place for the African above certain forms of labour
• •Pass laws required African adults to carry a document showing where they were permitted to be, and hundreds of thousands were arrested each year for pass offences
• •The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 and successive security laws allowed banning, house arrest and eventually indefinite detention without charge

The system did not appear from nowhere. Colonial land dispossession and segregation ran back through the Dutch and British periods, and the Natives Land Act of 1913 had already restricted African land ownership to a small fraction of the country. What the National Party added was ideology and completeness. The party drew its support from Afrikaners, descendants of Dutch settlers, whose own history included defeat by Britain in a war in which tens of thousands of Afrikaner women and children died in camps, and whose nationalism combined grievance, a theology of separate peoples drawn from a strand of Calvinism, and an economic interest in protecting white workers from competition. The word is Afrikaans for apartness, and the policy was presented as separate development, a claim that the country contained distinct nations each of which should develop in its own territory, which was contradicted by the fact that the economy depended entirely on African labour in white areas.

The most far-reaching piece of the design was the attempt to strip African South Africans of citizenship altogether. Ten territories, called Bantustans or homelands, were designated as the national states of particular ethnic groups, comprising about thirteen percent of the land for around three quarters of the population, on fragmented and generally poor ground. Four were declared independent between 1976 and 1981, and every African assigned to one lost South African citizenship, becoming legally a foreign migrant in the country of their birth. No other state recognised these territories. The system converted a majority into a population of guest workers with no political rights where they lived and nominal rights in places many had never seen, and it required a vast administrative apparatus of permits, endorsements and removals to operate. Its economic logic collapsed as industry needed a settled, skilled and permanent urban workforce, which the design forbade.

Opposition ran throughout and changed form under pressure. The African National Congress, founded in 1912, pursued non-violent campaigns through the 1950s, including a defiance campaign and the drafting of the Freedom Charter in 1955. That approach ended after 21 March 1960, when police at Sharpeville opened fire on a crowd protesting the pass laws and killed sixty-nine people, most shot in the back. The ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress were banned, and both formed armed wings; Nelson Mandela and others were convicted at the Rivonia trial in 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Black Consciousness movement led by Steve Biko grew through the early 1970s, and Biko died in police custody in 1977 after being driven a thousand kilometres naked in the back of a van with severe head injuries. The Soweto uprising began in June 1976 when schoolchildren protested a requirement to be taught in Afrikaans and police shot at them, and the images of that day changed international opinion decisively. From the mid-1980s the country was ungovernable in many townships and under a state of emergency, with international sanctions, disinvestment and a sporting and cultural boycott tightening throughout.

The transition was negotiated rather than won militarily. F. W. de Klerk, who became president in 1989, unbanned the ANC and other organisations in February 1990 and released Mandela nine days later, and four years of talks followed against a background of severe violence. The first election with universal franchise was held in April 1994 and the ANC won; Mandela became president and he and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Desmond Tutu from 1996, took testimony in public from victims and offered amnesty to perpetrators who made full disclosure of politically motivated acts, an arrangement that was criticised from both directions and has been widely studied as an alternative to prosecution. What was not resolved was the economic structure: land ownership, wealth and access to good schooling remain heavily skewed along the old lines, South Africa has among the highest measured income inequality in the world, and the spatial arrangement of its cities, designed to put townships far from workplaces, is still in place because moving millions of people costs more than any government has been willing to spend.

After 1948 South Africa turned existing segregation into a complete legal system, classifying every person by race at birth, assigning residence by race and forcibly removing three and a half million people, criminalising mixed marriage, segregating education and amenities, and requiring African adults to carry passes. Ten homelands were designated to strip the majority of citizenship. Resistance moved from non-violent campaigns to armed struggle after Sharpeville in 1960, and the system was negotiated away between 1990 and 1994, leaving its economic and spatial structure largely intact.