Explain the features of Apartheid in South Africa.

Answer:

Apartheid, meaning apartness, was the system of institutionalised racial segregation imposed in South Africa by the National Party after its election victory of 1948. It classified the population by race and used law to entrench white minority domination in every sphere of life.

The legal architecture

• The Population Registration Act of 1950 classified every person by race.
• The Group Areas Act of 1950 assigned residential areas by racial category.
• The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and Immorality Act forbade inter-racial unions.
• The Bantu Education Act of 1953 provided deliberately inferior schooling for Africans.
• Pass laws restricted African movement, and the Separate Amenities Act segregated public facilities.

Political and territorial exclusion

• Africans were denied the vote and all representation in the national parliament.
• The Bantustan or homeland policy stripped them of South African citizenship.
• Some eighty per cent of the population was confined to about thirteen per cent of the land.
• Migrant labour to the mines was controlled through the pass system.

Resistance and repression

• The ANC's Defiance Campaign and the Freedom Charter of 1955 challenged the system.
• Sharpeville in 1960 and Soweto in 1976 provoked international outrage.
• The system was dismantled between 1990 and 1994, when Mandela became president.

Its economic logic

• Cheap, controlled African labour served the mining and farming economy.
• Job reservation protected white workers from competition.
• The homelands functioned as labour reservoirs rather than viable states.

Apartheid was therefore a comprehensive legal order designed to entrench racial domination in land, labour, education and politics. As historians observe, it was sustained for four decades by law and force alike, and its dismantling required both sustained internal resistance and concerted international pressure.