The Apartheid State

The Apartheid State. Apartheid, meaning separateness in Afrikaans, was the system of racial rule imposed on South Africa after the National Party won the all-white election of 1948. Racial segregation was nothing new in South Africa, but the Nationalists made it total. Laws classified every person by race, forbade marriage and intimacy across the color line, reserved jobs by race, and separated schools, hospitals, transport, and whole neighborhoods. At its heart lay the land: Africans, the overwhelming majority, were confined to thirteen percent of the country.

The system was enforced with relentless machinery. Every African had to carry a pass, and hundreds of thousands were arrested each year for being without one. The 1950s saw the Group Areas Act uproot whole communities, Bantu Education degrade black schooling, and the creation of the bantustans, ethnic homelands meant to strip Africans of South African citizenship altogether. The African National Congress answered with the Defiance Campaign and the Freedom Charter of 1955, and after police killed sixty-nine peaceful protesters at Sharpeville in 1960, the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress were banned and their leaders, Nelson Mandela among them, turned to underground struggle and eventually imprisonment on Robben Island.

Resistance and repression deepened together. The 1976 Soweto uprising of schoolchildren against Afrikaans schooling was met with gunfire and inspired a new generation; strikes, boycotts, and township revolts in the 1980s made the country increasingly ungovernable, while worldwide sanctions and isolation squeezed the economy. The white state fought back with emergency rule, death squads, and wars against its neighbors, but it could not win.

In 1990 President F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC and freed Mandela, and after years of negotiation South Africans of all races voted in April 1994 in the election that made Mandela president. Apartheid left South Africa with deep wounds of inequality, but its defeat, by the people it oppressed, remains one of the great moral victories of the twentieth century.

To read more about this topic:

South African History Online: Apartheid South Africa, 1940s-1960s History.com: Apartheid: Definition and History UK National Archives: Apartheid in South Africa Wikipedia: History of South Africa, 1948-1994