Apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid in South Africa

          “Apartheid was a system of legal racial separation, which dominated the Republic of South Africa from 1948 until 1993.” However, the procedure of apartheid was set in place long before 1948, and South Africa continues to deal with the consequences. Under apartheid, various races were separated into different regions, and discrimination against people of color was not only acceptable, but also legally okay, with whites having better housing, jobs, education, and even political power. South Africa was greatly criticized for the system, it was not until 1991 that the legal system of apartheid began to be broken down, and in 1993 was thrown out altogether with the election of the first black 


democratically elected President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela.   




 “Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning “apart” or “separate,” and one of the first pieces of apartheid legislation was the Group Areas Act of 1950, which segregated living spaces, concentrating whites in the cities and forcing people of color into rural areas or the urban fringes.” In addition to separating 
whites from nonwhites, apartheid also separated different races. Whites and nonwhites held different jobs, lived in different regions, and were subject to different levels of pay, education, and health care. Apartheid paid no attention to former social or residential status, dividing people up by color.


        When nonwhites were pushed out of the urban areas, most of them were shuffled into “Bantustans”, or “African homelands.” Because they were made citizens of the Bantustans, black South Africans were not allowed to participate in the government of South Africa, and were forced to carry passes and obey curfew laws if they wanted to travel outside of their homelands. The homelands were also established on land which was largely unusable, and were heavily reliant on South Africa for assistance. “Along the fringes of the cities, Africans lived in massive, terrible slums, often separated from their families because only one family member could get a permit to live in the city.”


     “Nelson Mandela, along with many others, is a member of the African National Congress, a group which worked to abolish apartheid. He joined right before the Second World War, and was part of a major push to make the African National Congress a national movement, incorporating ethics of nonviolent resistance, strikes, and mass civil disobedience to fight for equal rights.” In 1952, he was tried in court for participating in the Campaign of Just Defiance, and given a suspended sentence. He spent time in and out of prison throughout the 1950s and became an attorney to help blacks who had been “expelled under apartheid.”


    In 1960, the African National Congress was banned, and Mandela was one of the founding members of Umkhonto we Sizwe, a violdent civil rights organization. His membership was short, however; in 1962, after traveling out of the country to speak about the situation in South Africa and receive military training, Mandela was imprisoned for life, and not released until 1990. The African National Congress was reformed in 1991, as apartheid began to be apart, and Mandela was elected President of the organization, going on to take office as President of South Africa in 1994, serving through 1999.


   The whites also realized that the only way that this state of affairs could continue was to set up a separate society where education and advancement was made practically impossible. Naturally you don't want these creatures to live among you so you also house them a respectable distance away, but not so far that they could not get to work for you and be paid a small amount. Racial segregation had been in force for many decades in South Africa. When the Union of South Africa was formed on 31 May 1910, Afrikaner Nationalists were given a relatively free hand to re-organize the country's franchise according to existing standards of the now-incorporated Boer republics, the “Zuid Afrikaansche Repulick (ZAR - South African Republic or Transvaal) and Orange Free State. Non-Whites in the Cape Colony had some representation, but this would prove to be short-lived.”

Citation :
Carter, Cale. "The History of Apartheid in South Africa." Student Information. 1995. Web. 13 Apr. 2011. <http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html>.