(before 1948)
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After its victory the National Party rapidly consolidated its control over the state and in subsequent years won a series of elections with increased majorities. Parliament removed Coloured voters from the common voters’ rolls in 1956. By 1969 the electorate was exclusively white: Indians never had any parliamentary representation, and the seats for white representatives of Blacks and Coloureds had been abolished.
One plank of the National Party platform was for South Africa to become a republic , preferably outside the Commonwealth . The issue was presented to white voters in 1960 as a way to bring about white unity, especially because of concern with the problems that the Belgian Congo was then experiencing as it became independent. By a simple majority the voters approved the republic status. The government structure would change only slightly: the governor-general would be replaced by a state president, who would be chosen by Parliament. At a meeting in London in March 1961, South Africa had hoped to retain its Commonwealth status, but, when other members criticized it over its apartheid policies, it withdrew from the organization and on May 31, 1961, became the Republic of South Africa.
The government vigorously furthered its political goals by making it compulsory for white children to attend schools that were conducted in their home language, either Afrikaans or English (except for the few who went to private schools). It advanced Afrikaners to top positions in the civil service , army, and police and in such state corporations as the South African Broadcasting Corporation. It also awarded official contracts to Afrikaner banks and insurance companies. These methods raised the living standard of Afrikaners closer to that of English-speaking white South Africans.
Following a recession in the early 1960s, the economy grew rapidly until the late 1970s. By that time, owing to the efforts of public and private enterprise, South Africa had developed a modern infrastructure , by far the most advanced in Africa. It possessed efficient financial institutions, a national network of roads and railways, modernized port facilities in Cape Town and Durban , long-established mining operations producing a wealth of diamonds, gold, and coal, and a range of industries. De Beers Consolidated Mines and the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa , founded by Ernest Oppenheimer in 1917, dominated the private sector, forming the core of one of the world’s most powerful networks of mining, industrial, and financial companies and employing some 800,000 workers on six continents. State corporations (parastatals) controlled industries vital to national security. South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation (SASOL) was established in 1950 to make South Africa self-sufficient in petroleum resources by converting coal to gasoline and diesel fuel . After the United Nations (UN) placed a ban on arms exports to South Africa in 1964, Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) was created to produce high-quality military equipment.
The man who played a major part in transforming apartheid from an election slogan into practice was Hendrik F. Verwoerd . Born in the Netherlands, Verwoerd immigrated with his parents to South Africa when he was a child. He became minister of native affairs in 1950 and was prime minister from 1958 until 1966, when Dimitri Tsafendas, a Coloured man, assassinated him in Parliament. (Tsafendas was judged to be insane and was confined to a mental institution after the murder.) Verwoerd’s successor, B.J. Vorster , had been minister of justice , police , and prisons , and he shared Verwoerd’s philosophy of white supremacy . In Verwoerd’s vision, South Africa’s population contained four distinct racial groups—white, Black, Coloured, and Asian—each with an inherent culture . Because whites were the “civilized” group, they were entitled to control the state.
The all-white Parliament passed many laws to legalize and institutionalize the apartheid system. The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every South African by race. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) prohibited interracial marriage or sex. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined communism and its aims broadly to include any opposition to the government and empowered the government to detain anyone it thought might further “communist” aims. The Indemnity Act (1961) made it legal for police officers to commit acts of violence, to torture, or to kill in the pursuit of official duties. Later laws gave the police the right to arrest and detain people without trial and to deny them access to their families or lawyers. Other laws and regulations collectively known as “petty apartheid” segregated South Africans in every sphere of life: in buses, taxis, and hearses, in cinemas, restaurants, and hotels, in trains and railway waiting rooms, and in access to beaches. When a court declared that separate amenities should be equal, Parliament passed a special law to override it.
“Grand apartheid,” in contrast, related to the physical separation of the racial groups in the cities and countryside. Under the Group Areas Act (1950) the cities and towns of South Africa were divided into segregated residential and business areas. Thousands of Coloureds, Blacks, and Indians were removed from areas classified for white occupation.
Blacks were treated like “tribal” people and were required to live on reserves under hereditary chiefs except when they worked temporarily in white towns or on white farms. The government began to consolidate the scattered reserves into 8 (eventually 10) distinct territories, designating each of them as the “homeland,” or Bantustan , of a specific Black ethnic community . The government manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Arguing that Bantustans matched the decolonization process then taking place in tropical Africa, the government devolved powers onto those administrations and eventually encouraged them to become “independent.” Between 1976 and 1981 four accepted independence— Transkei , Bophuthatswana , Venda , and Ciskei —though none was ever recognized by a foreign government. Like the other homelands, however, they were economic backwaters, dependent on subsidies from Pretoria .
Conditions in the homelands continued to deteriorate, partly because they had to accommodate vast numbers of people with minimal resources. Many people found their way to the towns; but the government, attempting to reverse this flood, strengthened the pass laws by making it illegal for Blacks to be in a town for more than 72 hours at a time without a job in a white home or business. A particularly brutal series of forced removals were conducted from the 1960s to the early ’80s, in which more than 3.5 million Blacks were taken from towns and white rural areas (including lands they had occupied for generations) and dumped into the reserves, sometimes in the middle of winter and without any facilities.
The government also established direct control over the education of Blacks. The Bantu Education Act (1953) took Black schools away from the missions, and more state-run schools—especially at the elementary level—were created to meet the expanding economy’s increasing demand for semiskilled Black labor. The Extension of University Education Act (1959) prohibited the established universities from accepting Black students, except with special permission. Instead, the government created new ethnic university colleges—one each for Coloureds, Indians, and Zulus and one for Sotho , Tswana , and Venda students, as well as a medical school for Blacks. The South African Native College at Fort Hare, which missionaries had founded primarily but not exclusively for Blacks, became a state college solely for Xhosa students. The government staffed these ethnic colleges with white supporters of the National Party and subjected the students to stringent controls.
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Updated: April 20, 2023 | Original: October 7, 2010
Apartheid, or “apartness” in the language of Afrikaans, was a system of legislation that upheld segregation against non-white citizens of South Africa. After the National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, its all-white government immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation. Under apartheid, nonwhite South Africans—a majority of the population—were forced to live in separate areas from whites and use separate public facilities. Contact between the two groups was limited. Despite strong and consistent opposition to apartheid within and outside of South Africa, its laws remained in effect for the better part of 50 years. In 1991, the government of President F.W. de Klerk began to repeal most of the legislation that provided the basis for apartheid.
Racial segregation and white supremacy had become central aspects of South African policy long before apartheid began. The controversial 1913 Land Act , passed three years after South Africa gained its independence, marked the beginning of territorial segregation by forcing Black Africans to live in reserves and making it illegal for them to work as sharecroppers. Opponents of the Land Act formed the South African National Native Congress, which would become the African National Congress (ANC).
Did you know? ANC leader Nelson Mandela, released from prison in February 1990, worked closely with President F.W. de Klerk's government to draw up a new constitution for South Africa. After both sides made concessions, they reached agreement in 1993, and would share the Nobel Peace Prize that year for their efforts.
The Great Depression and World War II brought increasing economic woes to South Africa, and convinced the government to strengthen its policies of racial segregation. In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party won the general election under the slogan “apartheid” (literally “apartness”). Their goal was not only to separate South Africa’s white minority from its non-white majority, but also to separate non-whites from each other, and to divide Black South Africans along tribal lines in order to decrease their political power.
By 1950, the government had banned marriages between whites and people of other races, and prohibited sexual relations between Black and white South Africans. The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided the basic framework for apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race, including Bantu (Black Africans), Coloured (mixed race) and white.
A fourth category, Asian (meaning Indian and Pakistani) was later added. In some cases, the legislation split families; a parent could be classified as white, while their children were classified as colored.
A series of Land Acts set aside more than 80 percent of the country’s land for the white minority, and “pass laws” required non-whites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas.
In order to limit contact between the races, the government established separate public facilities for whites and non-whites, limited the activity of nonwhite labor unions and denied non-white participation in national government.
Hendrik Verwoerd , who became prime minister in 1958, refined apartheid policy further into a system he referred to as “separate development.” The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantu homelands known as Bantustans. Separating Black South Africans from each other enabled the government to claim there was no Black majority and reduced the possibility that Black people would unify into one nationalist organization.
Every Black South African was designated as a citizen as one of the Bantustans, a system that supposedly gave them full political rights, but effectively removed them from the nation’s political body.
In one of the most devastating aspects of apartheid, the government forcibly removed Black South Africans from rural areas designated as “white” to the homelands and sold their land at low prices to white farmers. From 1961 to 1994, more than 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes and deposited in the Bantustans, where they were plunged into poverty and hopelessness.
Resistance to apartheid within South Africa took many forms over the years, from non-violent demonstrations, protests and strikes to political action and eventually to armed resistance.
Together with the South Indian National Congress, the ANC organized a mass meeting in 1952, during which attendees burned their pass books. A group calling itself the Congress of the People adopted a Freedom Charter in 1955 asserting that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black or white.” The government broke up the meeting and arrested 150 people, charging them with high treason.
In 1960, at the Black township of Sharpeville, the police opened fire on a group of unarmed Black people associated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an offshoot of the ANC. The group had arrived at the police station without passes, inviting arrest as an act of resistance. At least 67 people were killed and more than 180 wounded.
The Sharpeville massacre convinced many anti-apartheid leaders that they could not achieve their objectives by peaceful means, and both the PAC and ANC established military wings, neither of which ever posed a serious military threat to the state.
By 1961, most resistance leaders had been captured and sentenced to long prison terms or executed. Nelson Mandela , a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the military wing of the ANC, was incarcerated from 1963 to 1990; his imprisonment would draw international attention and help garner support for the anti-apartheid cause.
On June 10, 1980, his followers smuggled a letter from Mandela in prison and made it public: “UNITE! MOBILIZE! FIGHT ON! BETWEEN THE ANVIL OF UNITED MASS ACTION AND THE HAMMER OF THE ARMED STRUGGLE WE SHALL CRUSH APARTHEID!”
A combination of internal and international resistance to apartheid helped dismantle the white supremacist regime.
Read excerpts from letters, speeches and memoirs reflecting on each stage of his life—from the innocence of a tribal village boy to the triumphs and pressures of being South Africa's first black president.
In a nation bitterly divided by apartheid, Mandela used the game to foster shared national pride.
In 1976, when thousands of Black children in Soweto, a Black township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the Afrikaans language requirement for Black African students, the police opened fire with tear gas and bullets.
The protests and government crackdowns that followed, combined with a national economic recession, drew more international attention to South Africa and shattered any remaining illusions that apartheid had brought peace or prosperity to the nation.
The United Nations General Assembly had denounced apartheid in 1973, and in 1976 the UN Security Council voted to impose a mandatory embargo on the sale of arms to South Africa. In 1985, the United Kingdom and United States imposed economic sanctions on the country.
Under pressure from the international community, the National Party government of Pieter Botha sought to institute some reforms, including abolition of the pass laws and the ban on interracial sex and marriage. The reforms fell short of any substantive change, however, and by 1989 Botha was pressured to step aside in favor of another conservative president, F.W. de Klerk, who had supported apartheid throughout his political career.
Though a conservative, De Klerk underwent a conversion to a more pragmatic political philosophy, and his government subsequently repealed the Population Registration Act, as well as most of the other legislation that formed the legal basis for apartheid. De Klerk freed Nelson Mandela on February 11, 1990.
A new constitution, which enfranchised Black citizens and other racial groups, took effect in 1994, and elections that year led to a coalition government with a nonwhite majority, marking the official end of the apartheid system.
The End of Apartheid. Archive: U.S. Department of State . A History of Apartheid in South Africa. South African History Online . South Africa: Twenty-Five Years Since Apartheid. The Ohio State University: Stanton Foundation .
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Updated on August 03, 2019. South Africa's Population Registration Act No. 30 (commenced on July 7) was passed in 1950 and defined in clear terms who belonged to a particular race. Race was defined by physical appearance and the act required people to be identified and registered from birth as belonging to one of four distinct racial groups ...
The Population Registration Act of 1950 required that each inhabitant of South Africa be classified and registered in accordance with their racial characteristics as part of the system of apartheid. [ 1][ 2][ 3] Race classification certificate issued in terms of the Population Registration Act. Explanation of South African identity numbers in ...
The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every South African by race. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) prohibited interracial marriage or sex. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined communism and its aims broadly to include any opposition to the…. Read More.
Learn about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, racism, human evolution and Apartheid in South Africa. This web page covers the key events and concepts from 1948 to 1990 that shaped the country's history and identity.
Population Registration Act, no. 30Introduction: Voted into South African law in 1950, the Population Registration Act, no. 30 was not repealed until 1991. All South African citizens were required to register according to racial characteristics; this classification then helped in the enforcement of other laws prohibiting mixed-race activities.
in 1948. The Population Registration Act of 1950, which preceded both Group Areas and the Bewysburo (Bureau of Proof), required every South African to secure an Identity Card - a laminated certificate that contained a photograph submitted by the applicant, recorded an address, a simple identity number and a racial classification.
The Population Registration Act of 1950 required that each inhabitant of South Africa be classified and registered in accordance with their racial characteristics as part of the system of apartheid. [1] [2] [3] Social rights, political rights, educational opportunities, and economic status were largely determined by the group to which an ...
The Population Registration Act of 1950 was the foundation that allowed the South African Government to make laws in the future that caused certain racial groups to lose rights. If there weren't official race classifications given to each citizen, individuals could have disagreed with the government as to whether they were personally affected ...
Racial segregation had long existed in South Africa, but the rise of the National Party—a political party dedicated to policies of white supremacy that held executive power from 1948 until 1994—greatly extended the enactment and enforcement of racial segregation with its apartheid policies, the Group Areas Act being among the most significant. The act used the Population Registration Act ...
The Population Registration Act and Popular Understandings of Race: A case study of Sydenham - Vashna Jagarnath, June 2005 This paper seeks to build on Deborah Posel's1 analysis of the social impact of the Population Registration Act by adding a more socially based history that takes into
Thesis. The Population Registration Act of 1950 affected the rights of specific racial groups living in South Africa during the apartheid era because this act was the foundation for future laws and other government actions that only affected certain racial groups, whose members were classified by the Population Registration Act of 1950.
The Population Registration Act (Act No. 30 of 1950) was a South African law which from the apartheid era which required every citizen and resident to be classified according to their race and ethnic group, and recorded in the population register. It was one of the foundations of legislative apartheid, with all the subsequent segregation legislation being based on the classification it ...
To search the O'Malley archive please click here. 1950. Population Registration Act No 30. This "provided for the compilation of a register of the entire South African population" (Dyzenhaus 1991: 40). The South African population now became divided into three racial groups: 'White', 'Black' ('African', 'Native' and/or 'Bantu') and 'Coloured ...
Population Registration Act, Act No 30 of 1950. Date of Publication: 1990-07-00. The Act was to make provision for the compilation of a Register of the Population of the Union; for the issue of Identity cards to persons whose names are included in the Register; and for matters incidental thereto.
Apartheid South Africa 1940s to 1960s Essay for Grade 11 Apartheid in South Africa was a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination that existed from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. This period in ... The Population Registration Act (1950): This act classified all South Africans into racial groups - 'white ...
The Population Registration Act of 1950 required that each inhabitant of South Africa be classified and registered in accordance with their racial characteristics as part of the system of apartheid. [1] [2] [3] Contents. See also; References; External links; Race classification certificate issued in terms of the Population Registration Act Explanation of South African identity numbers in an ...
The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every South African by race. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) prohibited interracial marriage or sex. ... The Indemnity Act (1961) made it legal for police officers to commit acts of violence, to torture, or to kill in the pursuit of official duties.
Summary. Apartheid, a political and economic system built on race, required laws and administrative authorities to determine each person's racial identity. Race is never an objective, biological characteristic; in any society, race is a socially constructed concept. The Population Registration Act of 1950 required that each citizen be issued an ...
The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided the basic framework for apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race, including Bantu (Black Africans), Coloured (mixed race) and white.
Sovereigns from House of the Romanovs 1613-1913 Lives and essays. Moscow, 1913 [n/a] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Sovereigns from House of the Romanovs 1613-1913 Lives and essays. Moscow, 1913
The registration should be taken first of all as routine act of civil law. It is enough to read the press release from April 17 of the Ministry of internal Affairs to be convinced that by this, the Moscow Patriarchate cannot legalize its canonical, ecclesiastical or historical claims in Estonia.
Interstate 25 will close to traffic at the North Platte River on Wednesday night as crews pour the new deck on the adjacent F Street bridge, according to a news release from the Wyoming Department ...
Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971; First Published: in New-York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1859; Transcribed: by Andy Blunden. There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery, and increases in crimes even more rapidly than in numbers.
The demographic consequences are estimated by Kondrashin as 2.5 million excess deaths and 700,000 unborn children, making a demographic loss of 3.2 million. These figures are derived from the population registration data, as adjusted by Soviet statisticians in 1934 (Kondrashin Citation 2018, pp. 399-401). This ignores another possible source ...