Apartheid: South Africa’s Policy of Racial Segregation

Yellow apartheid sign in English and Afrikaans reserving public premises and amenities for white people. — This sign reserved public facilities for white people in English and Afrikaans. Under apartheid, racial separation extended beyond voting and land ownership into everyday life. Signs like this told South Africans which entrances, benches, beaches, and other public spaces they could use, making government restrictions visible throughout their daily routines.

Under apartheid laws in South Africa, a government board decided each person’s race. Its decision determined where that person could live, work, go to school, and whom they could marry. The National Party introduced apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness,” after it won the 1948 election, in which Black South Africans, more than two-thirds of the population, could not vote. Their ancestors had lived in the region for more than a thousand years before the first Europeans settled at the Cape in 1652.

The Demand for Equal Rights

Black South Africans argued that they should have a voice in governing the country where they lived and worked. They paid taxes and supplied much of the labor on white-owned farms and in mines, yet white lawmakers decided where they could live and own land.

The Argument for Segregation

Supporters of segregation argued that South Africa’s different peoples should live separately to preserve their cultures. Many white South Africans feared that Black workers would take their jobs and that government by the Black majority would leave them powerless.

Women protest pass laws, holding signs reading “Women do not want passes” and “With passes we are slaves.” — Pass laws made permission to live and work in white areas dependent on government documents. Extending these requirements to Black women threatened families’ livelihoods and freedom of movement. Women organized petitions, demonstrations, and resistance campaigns, becoming an important force in the broader struggle against apartheid and white minority political control.

Apartheid Becomes Law

During World War II, factories drew more Black South Africans into cities, where they sought homes for their families and better pay. Black leaders demanded voting rights while white farmers worried about losing rural workers.

The National Party promised tighter racial separation to protect white jobs and political control. It drew on the longstanding argument that Black Africans were not ready to share in governing. Not all white voters supported the National Party, but the 1948 election gave them a choice about South Africa’s future that the Black majority did not have.

Once in power, the National Party passed the Population Registration Act, which classified South Africans into four main groups: Black, white, Coloured, and Asian. The Group Areas Act assigned separate areas to each group, forcing people to leave homes in areas designated for another race. Black people could work in white areas, but pass laws forced them to carry documents proving they had permission to be there.

Resistance and Repression

The African National Congress (ANC) had challenged racial discrimination since its founding in 1912. During the 1952 Defiance Campaign, volunteers deliberately broke segregation laws. More than 8,000 were arrested, and the ANC grew into a mass movement.

In 1960, police killed 69 people at Sharpeville during an unarmed protest against pass laws. The government then banned the ANC. Arguing that peaceful resistance had failed, Nelson Mandela and fellow activists began sabotaging government facilities and infrastructure, initially seeking to avoid killing people. In 1964, Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage.

Nelson Mandela crouches beside a brick wall, holding his passbook as it burns. — Nelson Mandela burns his passbook in 1960, days after the Sharpeville killings. The ANC called on Black South Africans to destroy their passes in protest, and thousands did. The government declared a state of emergency, arrested Mandela along with thousands of others, and soon banned the ANC.

Separate but Unequal

The government argued that South Africa contained separate nations, each entitled to govern itself. White South Africans would control the main cities, industries, and 87 percent of the land. Black communities, more than two-thirds of the population, would govern “homelands” on the remaining 13 percent, much of it poor farmland far from the jobs.

Other laws authorized segregated public facilities and established separate school systems with lower standards for non-whites.

Mbuyisa Makhubo carries fatally wounded Hector Pieterson while Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, runs beside them during the 1976 Soweto uprising. — One of apartheid’s most iconic photographs shows Mbuyisa Makhubu carrying Hector Pieterson beside Hector’s sister Antoinette Sithole. Police shot Hector during the Soweto uprising on June 16, 1976. Sam Nzima’s photograph brought worldwide attention to the students’ protests against compulsory Afrikaans instruction and the government’s violent response to their demands.

The Soweto Uprising

In 1976, students in Soweto protested a government order requiring them to study some subjects in Afrikaans, a language associated with white rule. Police opened fire on the students, and the uprising spread across South Africa. More than 500 people were killed, many of them schoolchildren. In the years that followed, protests and strikes grew, and the government answered them with mass arrests and force.

Marchers carry a banner reading “Say No to Racism! Defy Apartheid!” during a street demonstration. — The Soweto killings in 1976 sparked protests around the world. Demonstrations like this one, with banners urging people to defy apartheid, spread across campuses and city streets. Protesters pressed governments, universities, and businesses to cut ties with South Africa, turning outrage over Soweto into lasting economic and diplomatic pressure.

The End of Apartheid

The government yielded to resistance at home and world pressure by repealing major apartheid laws in 1991. The next year, more than two-thirds of white voters approved negotiations to end apartheid. In 1993, a new constitution negotiated by the government and the ANC guaranteed people of all races the right to vote. The following year, South Africans elected Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader who had been imprisoned for twenty-seven years, as their president.

The Union of South Africa

In 1910, eight years after the Boer War, Britain joined four colonies, including the two former Boer republics, into the Union of South Africa. Like Canada, the new nation had its own prime minister and Parliament, while the British monarch remained head of state. Black Africans outnumbered white people by more than three to one, but only white men could vote in most of the country. In 1913, the Natives Land Act limited Black land ownership to about 7 percent of the land, later raised to about 13 percent.

South Africa’s mixed-race people, called Coloured, descended from Europeans, the Khoikhoi and San peoples, and enslaved people the Dutch brought from Asia and other parts of Africa. Most lived in the Cape and spoke Afrikaans.

Beginning in 1860, Britain brought workers from India to labor on sugar plantations in Natal. Indian merchants followed. Mohandas Gandhi came to South Africa in 1893 as a lawyer for an Indian business. He led protests against discrimination before he left for India in 1914.

The Bantu Homelands

The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 made every Black South African a citizen of a homeland, a territory the government set aside for their ethnic group, such as the Zulu or the Xhosa, even people born in cities who had never lived there. The government said Black South Africans could vote in their homelands, so they did not need a vote in South Africa, where they lived, worked, and paid taxes.
Between 1976 and 1981, the government declared four homelands independent countries, but no other nation recognized them. Millions of their citizens were treated as foreigners in the country where they were born and had lived their entire lives.

World Outrage

From the 1960s on, much of the world turned against apartheid. South Africa left the Commonwealth, the association of Britain and its former colonies, in 1961 under pressure from other members. South African teams were barred from the Olympic Games from 1964 until 1992, and the United Nations banned weapons sales to South Africa in 1977.

In the United States, students protested on college campuses, demanding that their schools sell investments in companies doing business in South Africa. In 1985, Britain and the United States adopted limited economic restrictions. The next year, Congress passed broader sanctions. Many American companies pulled out, and South Africa’s economy suffered.

Settlers and the Settled

South Africa was not the only country where European settlers took indigenous land and restricted people’s rights. Many of apartheid’s tools had been used before in the Americas and Australia.

In the United States, indigenous people lost land through treaties, often signed under pressure, and through defeats in war. Settlers then moved onto land the treaties had promised to protect. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, much as South Africa’s government would later move Black communities to the homelands. Over the next decade, soldiers forced the Cherokee and other nations from their land in the Southeast to Indian Territory, today’s Oklahoma. Thousands died on the journey, remembered as the Trail of Tears.

In Canada, from the 1880s into the 1940s, some First Nations people needed a government agent’s written permission to leave their reserves, much like South Africa’s pass laws.

In Australia, government policies took thousands of children from Aboriginal Australian families to be raised in institutions or by other families. In South Africa, pass laws kept many Black workers apart from their families for most of the year.

What set South Africa apart was who held power. In the United States, Canada, and Australia, settlers came to outnumber indigenous peoples. In South Africa, a white minority ruled the Black majority until 1994.

Resources

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Mr. Donn has an excellent website that includes a section on Africa.

Cite this page:
Dowling, Mike, “Apartheid,” mrdowling.com. Web. [Date of access].

Sources:

Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (1990)

Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (2004)

Saul Dubow, Apartheid, 1948–1994 (2014)

Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise (1991)

Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (2003)

Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (1983)

Laurine Platzky and Cherryl Walker, The Surplus People: Forced Removals in South Africa (1985)

Robert Kinloch Massie, Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years (1997)

South African History Online, “Apartheid”

Population Registration Act and Group Areas Act (1950)

African National Congress, The Freedom Charter (1955)

Nelson Mandela, “I Am Prepared to Die,” statement at the Rivonia Trial (1964)

Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (1970)

Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (1978)

Commission of Inquiry into the Riots at Soweto and Elsewhere (Cillié Commission), Report (1980)

Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986)

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1994)

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Report (1998)

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