A Very Brief History of Apartheid

By Baba Galleh Jallow

Perhaps it would not be farfetched to say that apartheid started dying the 
moment it was born. As Thomas Kuhn argues in "The Structure of Scientific 
Revolutions," every paradigm bears the seeds of its own destruction. The 
validity of this theory is particularly evident in the story of apartheid in 
South Africa. Reading through the literature, one sees the intriguing 
spectacle of a dying apartheid in the very process of its growth. Every 
effort by the Afrikaner National Party to strengthen apartheid paradoxically 
led to its further weakening.

The word apartheid was first coined in the mid-1930s as a means of asserting 
Afrikaner identity and independence from the British. It entered the public 
lexicon during the 1947-1948 political campaign fought between Smuts’ 
pro-British United Party and Malan’s hardline Afrikaner National Party. It 
first appeared in a dictionary in 1950.

As a policy of the nationalist government, apartheid represented an 
insistence on the deepening and institutionalization of the racial 
segregation and separation that had been a feature of South African society 
since van Rieebeck’s arrival at the Cape in 1652. Once in power after the 
1948 elections, Malan’s National Party government started promulgating 
legislation designed “to make the African the different kind of person that 
theory (apartheid) says he is.”(Clark and Worger, p. 4)

In "South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid," Clark and Worger point 
out that long before 1948, racial segregation had been a prominent feature 
of South African society. Van Rieebeck’s arrival was soon followed by the 
introduction of slavery, and the suppression of the Khoi and San peoples in 
the following decades. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 
hardened the racial divides and attracted foreign capital and immigration of 
Europeans into the country. The white populations around the mines expanded 
rapidly and a steady stream of dispossessed Africans flowed into the urban 
and mining areas in search of work. The British conquest of African kingdoms 
in the 1870s and 1880s and the imposition of cash taxation on the conquered 
peoples forced Africans into seeking out wage labor and thereby providing 
the much-needed cheap labor for the mining industry. It was during South 
Africa’s industrial revolution that some of the most obnoxious features of 
apartheid like pass laws, urban ghettoes, poor rural homelands, and cheap 
migrant labor emerged.

After the South African War of 1899-1902, a trend of visible British 
complicity in the construction of apartheid could be seen. At the peace of 
Vereeniging which ended the war, Britain promised the Boers that the 
question of African enfranchisement would not be decided until the 
introduction of self-government for the Boer republics. Godfrey Lagden, 
British governor Alfred Milner’s commissioner of Native Affairs in the 
Transvaal suggested that in order to guarantee a supply of cheap migrant 
labor, Africans should be granted limited access to land in the industrial 
areas. In a comment quite reminiscent of apartheid jargon, Lagden argued 
that as every rabbit must have a warren where he can live and burrow and 
breed, so must every African have a warren too (ibid. p.17). As chairman of 
Milner’s Native Affairs Commission, Lagden was responsible for the 
formulation of key segregationist policies that laid the foundation for 
apartheid. It was his recommendation that Africans be denied ownership of 
land, stripped of the right to decide where they lived or worked, or the 
right to vote for white candidates. Africans should be confined to separate 
locations and vote for separate candidates to represent them in parliament.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Afrikaner nationalism gathered 
steam as a widening rift grew between moderates and radicals. In 1905 Louis 
Botha and Jan Smuts established an all-Afrikaner party named Het Volk in the 
Transvaal. In 1906, J.B.M. Hertzog formed the Orangia Unie in the Orange 
River Colony. In 1914, the Orangia Unie morphed into the National Party. The 
ascension into power of Prime Minister Henry Bannerman’s government in 
Britain in 1906 represented a significant victory for the Afrikaner 
nationalists in South Africa. Shortly after he assumed office, Bannerman set 
in motion a process that would lead to full self-government for the 
Transvaal and the Orange River Colony in 1907. A convention held by 
representatives from the four colonies of Transvaal, the Cape, the Orange 
River Colony and Natal between October 1908 and May 1909 led to the forging 
of the Union of South Africa on May 31, 1910. Only whites were considered 
voting citizens of this Union. Louis Botha took office as the first prime 
minister of the Union. The new union maintained pre-union segregationist 
policies designed to protect white interests and keep Africans in their role 
as a cheap source of labor.

From 1910 onwards, a stream of racist legislation flowed from the corridors 
of South African power wielders. Indeed, apartheid’s unholy odyssey is 
spotted with an incredible number of laws designed to uphold white supremacy 
and keep Africans down and out of the political process in their own 
country. The 1911 Mines and Works Act and the Native’s Labour Regulation Act 
decreed that Africans could be found guilty of a criminal offense if they 
broke an employment contract, however unfavorable they found the terms of 
such a contract. The Native’s Land Act of 1913 restricted African ownership 
of land to a mere 7 percent of the country’s total land area. This 
percentage was to be increased to 13 in 1936, but that did little to 
alleviate the Africans’ problems because they were confined to the worst 
tracts of land conceivable. In 1918, one of the key pillars of apartheid, 
the Afrikaner Broederbond, was formed by a group of Afrikaner extremists. In 
1923, the Natives (Urban Areas) Act restricted Africans to segregated 
townships or locations where they could rent accommodation provided by the 
urban municipality. The Industrial Coalition Act of 1924 and 1937 decreed 
that African unions would not be officially recognized in labor 
negotiations. After Hertzog entered into a coalition government with Smuts 
in 1924, the notorious “civilized labour” policy was introduced to give 
white workers wages that could support their ‘civilized’ living standards. 
The 1927 Native Administration Act gave the Department of Native Affairs 
control over all matters pertaining to Africans. Under this Act, the 
government ruled by decree rather than law in the African rural areas. In 
1929, the Broederbond formed the FAK, the Federation of Afrikaner Cultural 
Organizations, which was instrumental in constructing and propping the 
apartheid infrastructure.
One of the most significant milestones in the history of apartheid happened 
in 1934 when D.F. Malan broke away from the Smuts-Hertzog administration and 
formed the Purified National Party whose manifesto was squarely based on the 
separation of the races. In 1936, the Representation of Natives Act removed 
all African political rights from the books in the Cape Province. In 1938, 
the FAK organized a centenary celebration of the Great Trek and the 
Voortrekkers’ defeat of the Zulu at the Battle of Blood River in December 
1838. At this gathering, the pro-Nazi Ossenwabrandwag was formed to support 
the agitation for Afrikaner supremacy in South Africa and oppose South 
Africa’s entry into the war on the side of Britain. In 1942, War Measure 145 
made it illegal for African workers to engage in strike activity. Six years 
later in 1948, Malan’s National Party was elected to power and from then on, 
while the rest of the world was moving towards greater respect for human 
rights, South Africa was moving in exactly the opposite direction at an 
alarming rate.

Meanwhile, the road to 1948 had not been as smooth as the white supremacists 
would have liked. The harsh policies of the Milner administration led to the 
growth of a number of African resistance organizations. Gandhi’s Natal 
Indian Congress sprung up in 1894. In 1898 the African Native Congress was 
born; the Native Vigilance Association followed in 1901; and the African 
Political Organization and the Transvaal Native Vigilance Association were 
established in 1902. All these were formed in direct response to the 
oppressive policies of South Africa’s white regimes. At around the same 
time, a crop of vibrant African, Coloured and Indian press houses mushroomed 
around the country. In 1906, Bambatha, a Zulu chief rebelled against the 
forced labor, land confiscation, and taxation regime of the British 
authorities. In 1912, the ANC’s ancestor, the South African Native National 
Congress (SANNC) was formed under the leadership of John L. Dube, a 
U.S.-trained teacher and minister who derived inspiration from the ideas of 
Booker T. Washington (the SANNC was renamed the ANC in 1923).

A year after the formation of the SANNC in 1913, there was a massive women’s 
anti-pass protest in Bloemfontein. Because of this historic protest, South 
African women were exempted from carrying passes for the next forty years. 
In 1918, the Johannesburg Sanitation Workers and Rand Mineworkers went on 
strike for better working conditions and against discriminatory practices. 
In 1919 and 1920, a series of strikes organized by Clements Kadalie’s 
Industrial and Commercial Workers Union rocked South Africa. In 1928, the 
Non-European Trade Union Federation was formed; and in 1935, 400 hundred 
delegates from the majority of African political organizations met at 
Bloemfontein and established the All-Africa Convention (AAC). In 1941, the 
second year of the Second World War, the Africa Mineworkers Union was 
formed. The wartime economy had led to a massive influx of blacks into the 
urban areas and the government enacted influx control and other harsh 
legislation to stem the flow of the blacks and protect the jobs of white 
workers.

African agitation and resistance correspondingly gathered steam and in 1944, 
young members of the ANC decided to form the ANC Youth League to inject 
energy into what they thought was becoming a rather moribund organization. 
This event led to the emergence of anti-apartheid leaders like Nelson 
Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo, and Robert Sobukwe. 
Thus, even as the party of apartheid (the NP) was being born, its nemesis, 
the party of freedom (ANC), was also being born.

It seems as if the 1950s and 1960s saw more repressive legislation in South 
Africa than any other period in that country’s troubled history. These two 
decades certainly saw the systematic construction of the apartheid 
superstructure. Having campaigned and won the 1948 elections on an apartheid 
platform, D. F. Malan now embarked on the perilous task of fulfilling his 
promises to his racist constituency. While his National Party grew from 
strength to strength in the decades after 1948, the opposition United Party 
grew weaker and all but openly endorsed the NP’s racist policies. Rather 
than question the ethical legitimacy of the NP’s concept of white supremacy, 
the UP continuously harped on its practicality. Indeed, there were very 
little differences between the policies of the two parties over the racial 
question. Thus, from 1948, every aspect of life in South Africa was 
determined under race-based legislation. Race laws flew from the chambers of 
South Africa’s lawmakers like meteors and stung the increasingly 
dispossessed but defiant non-white races.

Determined to preserve the ‘purity’ of the white race, the Malan 
administration started off with the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in 
1949. This was followed by the Immorality Act of 1950, which extended the 
1927 ban on sexual relations between whites and blacks to a ban on sexual 
relationships between whites and all non-whites. The Group Areas Act of 1950 
imposed control over property rights requiring permits based on race and 
gave the government the power to forcibly remove existing occupants on any 
piece of land and give it to other occupants. 1950 also saw the enactment of 
the notorious Suppression of Communism Act which outlawed the Communist 
Party of South Africa (SACP) and defined communism as “any scheme aimed at 
bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change within 
the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder or that encouraged 
feelings of hostility between the European and non-European races of the 
Union” (ibid. p. 54). The Act gave the Justice minister the power to “list” 
and “ban” any individual or organization for up to four years. The Bantu 
Authorities Act of 1951 institutionalized the claim that the tribal reserves 
were the true homes of Africans and abolished the Natives Representation 
Council, the only official avenue for African political expression in the 
country. 1951 also saw the passing of the Separate Representation of Voters 
Act, which removed Colored voters from the Cape roll. When the Supreme Court 
declared this Act invalid, the government re-enacted it in 1956 as the 
Separate Representation of Voters Amendment Act. From this point on, only 
whites enjoyed political rights in South Africa.

In 1952, the Bantu Laws Amendment Act established labor bureaus to register 
African male workers aged 16 to 64. The Reservation of Separate Amenities 
Act of 1953 allocated separate public amenities for the separate races. 
Under this Act, signs were posted all over the country designating parks, 
toilets, beaches and other public amenities to individual races. During 
1953, the Native Labour Act denied Africans the right to legal union 
representation and the right to strike. In the same year, one of apartheid’s 
worst pieces of legislation and one that was to play a crucial role in its 
dismantling was promulgated: The Bantu Education Act decreed that blacks 
should have separate educational facilities under the control of the 
Department of Native Affairs rather than the Ministry of Education. The Act 
removed subsidies from mission schools that formerly catered to the 
educational needs of Africans with the result that most of them either sold 
their facilities to the government or simply closed down. Bantu education 
was designed to mold Africans into compliant kaffirs and productive workers. 
As Africans could and would never be absorbed into white society, the only 
education they needed was one that would prepare them for life within the 
African community and on the periphery of white society. The Bantu education 
curricula and textbooks were deliberately designed to glorify Afrikanerdom 
and demean the African kaffir as savages, thieves, thugs, clowns and 
lecherous lazybodies. The Public Safety Act of 1953 allowed the government 
to declare a state of emergency whenever it wanted to and the Criminal Law 
Amendment Act of the same year institutionalized the powers of the police to 
presume African detainees guilty until proven innocent.  In 1955, the 
Customs and Excise and Official Secrets Acts established a Board of Censors 
to scrutinize and vet all films, books, and other materials imported or 
produced in South Africa. In 1956, the Riotous Assemblies Act outlawed any 
public gatherings which might ignite racial tensions and prohibited banned 
persons from attending or addressing public meetings. 1956 also saw the 
passing of the Native Administration Act, which permitted the government to 
banish Africans to remote rural areas, away from their homes and families 
for as long as it wished. In the same year (1956), police arrested 156 
people including Luthuli, Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu and put them on trial on 
treason charges. The trial dragged on for five years. In 1957, the 
Transkeian Territorial Authority was opened as the first of the homelands to 
be groomed for independence.

Another landmark development in the history of apartheid was the coming to 
power of Hendrik Verwoerd in 1958. Commonly referred to as the architect of 
apartheid, Verwoerd charged forward with the apartheid project with unusual 
energy. Under Verwoerd, Justice minister and future prime minister John 
Vorster and Security Police chief Hendrik van der Bergh, both former members 
of the Ossenwabrandwag, headed the campaign to brutally crush all internal 
resistance. The General Laws Amendment Act of 1963 empowered the police to 
detain people without charges or access to lawyers for up to ninety days. 
After ninety days, detainees could be re-arrested and re-detained; and this 
process could continue for as long as the police desired. In the same year, 
Mandela, Sisulu and others were again arrested at a farmhouse near Soweto, 
tried for treason and sentenced to life imprisonment. When Verwoerd was 
assassinated by a Coloured parliamentary messenger in 1966, Vorster became 
the new Prime Minister.

Again, the efforts to entrench apartheid from 1948 were paralleled by a 
counter process of resistance by the ANC and other organizations. In 1949, 
the ANC adopted a program of action under the new leadership of James 
Moroka, with Sisulu, Tambo and Mandela on the executive committee. The ANC 
outlined a plan of passive resistance along Gandhian lines, organizing 
strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience marches, non-cooperation as well as a 
national day of work stoppage. In 1950 the South African Communist Party 
(SACP) organized a national strike and the ANC, in conjunction with the 
African People’s Organization (APO) and the South African Indian Congress 
(SAIC) organized a national day of protest against the growing list of 
unjust apartheid legislation. In 1952, the ANC and SAIC staged a defiance 
campaign on April 6 and June 26. A significant milestone in the 
anti-apartheid struggle took place on June 25 and 26, 1955, when 3000 
delegates representing the ANC, the SAIC, the Congress of Democrats, the 
Coloured Peoples Congress, and the multi-racial South African Congress of 
Trade Unions (SACTU) met near Soweto and issued the Freedom Charter, a 
document outlining a new vision for a multi-racial, democratic South Africa 
characterized by respect for human rights and the rule of law, as well as 
equal opportunities and responsibilities for all South Africans regardless 
of race. The Freedom Charter effectively became the manifesto of the 
liberation struggle in South Africa.

In 1959, a breakaway faction of the ANC led by Robert Sobukwe formed the 
Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). The birth of the PAC is significant because 
it was the organization that initiated the anti-pass law campaign of 1960 
that led to the historic Sharpeville Massacre on March 21 of that year when 
police opened fire on demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 186. When 
30,000 Africans marched on the House of Parliament in Cape Town to protest 
the massacre, Verwoerd declared a state of emergency. Police arrested 18,000 
demonstrators including ANC and PAC leaders and both organizations were 
banned. At this point, the freedom fighters realized that the South African 
government could never be persuaded to dismantle apartheid though passive 
resistance. Accordingly, in 1961, the ANC formed its military wing, the 
Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK – Spear of the Nation) and the PAC formed Poqo (Pure) 
as its armed wing. The era of guerilla warfare against apartheid had begun. 
In the words of Mandela, the African people “had either to accept a 
permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government” by violent means 
(ibid. p.58). From then on, both the ANC and PAC, with bases in nearby 
countries, launched violent attacks on government buildings and targeted 
government agents and stooges for assassination.

Vorster, however, was not about to back down. In 1967, the Terrorism Act 
expanded the types of activities that could be considered dangerous to 
include any action that could encourage resistance or further any political 
aim. In 1969, the notorious Bureau for State Security was established to 
supplement the activities of the secret police. In 1972, the State Security 
Council (SSC) was added to the long list of repressive state agencies to 
advise the prime minister on security policy formulation and strategy. The 
killing of school children during anti-Bantu education riots in Soweto on 
June 26, 1976 and the death in detention of Steve Biko in September 1977 
intensified the struggle and condemnation of apartheid both inside South 
Africa and in the international community. Still determined to impose 
eternal apartheid, the South African government launched its Total Strategy 
in 1977 to overcome what it called ‘this Total Onslaught.’ The new prime 
minister P. W. Botha established the National Security Management Systems 
(NSMS) and embarked on a campaign of sabotage and assassinations of 
opponents. To facilitate his covert operations, Botha secretly established 
the Koevert (Crowbar) in 1979. Other covert units set up by the Botha regime 
included the Vlakplaas and a notorious unit made up of unemployed, 
illiterate black men, often with criminal convictions called the 
kitskonstables (instant police). Alongside these brutal covert operations, 
Botha presented a benign face to the public, recognizing African labor 
unions for the first time, and allowing the growth of an African political 
opposition, among other half-hearted reforms. By the time of his death in 
1989, South Africa had become a pariah state in the community of nations. 
The country’s economy was collapsing at an alarming rate and international 
financial institutions operating in the country were curbing their 
investment, cutting back on loans to the government, and loudly clamoring 
for an end to apartheid. In October 1986, the U.S. Congress overrode a veto 
by President Reagan and passed legislation imposing mandatory sanctions 
against South Africa that included a ban on all new investments, the ending 
of air travel between the U.S. and South Africa, and the banning of any 
imports from South Africa. Inside the country itself, apartheid had been 
made unworkable and the country ungovernable in response to the ANC 
leadership’s call of April 1985.

Therefore F. W. de Klerk, the last leader of apartheid, inherited a 
government that had no choice but to compromise. At least, de Klerk 
reasoned, there was still a small window of opportunity to negotiate from a 
position of power. On February 2, 1990, he announced the lifting of the ban 
on the ANC, the SACP, the PAC and 31 other anti-apartheid organizations. 
About a week later, he had Nelson Mandela released from prison after serving 
27 years and refusing to accept an earlier offer by Botha to gain his 
freedom by renouncing violence. A period of intense negotiations between the 
government and the ANC ensued in the face of stiff opposition from Afrikaner 
extremists like Eugene Terre Blanche and his murderous AWB, the Afrikaner 
Committee of Generals, the Freedom Alliance, the Freedom Front, and black 
organizations like Chief Buthelezi’s Inkhata Freedom Party. For a brief, 
tense moment, it seemed as if the negotiation process would collapse as 
right wing Afrikaner elements and the de Klerk regime itself employed 
underhand tactics to derail it. Against all odds, however, and with the 
growing realization that the time was up for apartheid, de Klerk reached an 
agreement with the ANC in September 1992. According to this new agreement, 
national elections were to be held by April 1994 in which all South Africans 
would participate. The interim constitution agreed upon guaranteed the 
safety of minorities and included arrangements for the possible formation of 
a government of national unity. In the April 1994 elections, the ANC won 
with over 62 percent of the vote. Nelson Mandela became the first president 
of a democratic, majority-ruled South Africa, with Thabo Mbeki as the First 
Deputy President and de Klerk as Second Deputy President. Under Mandela’s 
guidance, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to avoid the 
kind of bloodbath and vendetta that white South Africans rightly feared.

In conclusion, it is clear that the construction and dismantling of 
apartheid were two processes that ran concurrently over the years. From the 
very beginning, it was clear that a small minority of white people could not 
keep a great majority of black people under virtual servitude indefinitely. 
Black South Africans had suffered centuries of racial segregation before 
1948, but formal apartheid itself lasted only about fifty years. Not that 
this is a short period of time for the oppressed people of South Africa. But 
the collapse of apartheid before the end of the twentieth century was 
certainly not what the architects of that hideous system anticipated. Malan, 
Verwoerd, Vorster, Botha, and to some extent de Klerk, believed that they 
could manage to indefinitely keep black South Africans in the tribal 
homelands, strip them of their South African citizenship, and carve a small 
Europe on African land. They were gravely mistaken. In the end, their very 
tactics spelled their doom.

Note: Nancy Clark and William Worger’s South Africa: The Rise and Fall of 
Apartheid (Edinburgh: Pearson Education Ltd., 2004) was widely consulted in 
putting together this piece.

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