Rights and Protest: SA Apartheid - Nature of Discrimination

Social Darwinism

• Survival of fittest → negative traits = racial origins

  • “Vices are generational”

  • Certain races need to be controlled/in power

• Trying to sciencify racism → Nazis did this too with the Jews

• Calvinism: “God created different races, wanted to keep them separate”

  • Apartheid follows rule of God, can’t go wrong with God

  • “Chosen” ones are Afrikaners (the whites)

Grand Apartheid

• Large-scale separation of homelands and communities across the nation

• Ideologically sophisticated (late 1950s) Verwoerd

• Less ‘obvious’ racism → grand, wider strategy

• Aim for complete segregation and higher ambitions

  • Both groups have their own jurisdiction → allowed to achieve “full independence”

  • Achieve and convince people of Apartheid’s legitimacy

Petty Apartheid

• Smaller scale

• More nitpicky legislation

• Specific and fussy → affect all aspects of life in SA

• Subjugation of the black minority → economic and political

  • Eg. segregation of public facilities (transport, parks, schools etc.)

• Firm manner in how government dealt with opposition

• More early apartheid → Malan

Impact of Apartheid on Individuals

• Comparison to US → not separate but unequal, it’s separate AND unequal

  • No pretence of fair treatment

• Blacks in white people world = need separation of worlds

  • Blacks go to whites so they need to abide by their rules

  • Separate amenities = don’t need to be equal

Bantu Education Act (1953)

• Government approved inequality in education

• Education system run by Ministry of Native Affairs rather than teachers

• Students learn how to do anything just for work

  • No cultural education

• Goal: good and compliant workers

  • Justification: future workers learning their place

Sophiatown Removals (1955)

• Black residents evicted from Sophiatown → lively, multicultural suburb on the edges of Johannesburg

• Existence of Sophiatown was defiance of Apartheid messages → keeping different races

  • Multicultural + free nature was a threat to the government

• Policemen armed with rifles and guns, residents moved with a few days → forced out of homes, police had families move goods onto trucks

  • Rehoused in a sterile estate called Meadowlands

  • Sophiatown bulldozed and turned into whites only area called Triomph

• First stage of policy known as “separate development”

Bantu Self-Government Act (1959)

• Reserves created in 1913 Land Act would become 10 separate “homelands” or Bantustans

  • Each based on African language spoken in area

  • Every African in SA would become a ‘citizen’ of one of the homelands

• Dividing Africans into ten different cultural, political + ethnic groups = Nationalist government can claim there’s African majority in SA

  • Highlighting ethnic identities of Africans = create divisions between them

  • Prevent growth of united African nationalism that could threaten the apartheid state