Life in South Africa, c1948

• National Party won 79 seats in Parliament during the election in South Africa


  1948
• The National Party's rivals, a coalition of the United and South African Labour parties, gained 71 seats
• Apartheid


  A system in which the different races in South Africa were segregated as much as possible
• Principles of apartheid


  • South Africa comprised four racial groups, each with its own inherent and separate cultures
  • White people were the civilised race and were entitled to absolute power over the interests of all
  • The white race was a single entity, despite comprising Afrikaner people and English speakers. Black African people, meanwhile, were made up of different tribes that needed to be kept separate from each other in their own best interests
  • The interests of white people should prevail
• It was not necessary to provide separate but equal facilities for other races as they were believed to be inferior
• Laws were enacted which determined which race one belonged to, which in turn effectively determined one's whole expectations of life
• Factors such as the thickness of one's hair were considered highly important by a growing bureaucracy
• White South African people benefited from apartheid as it guaranteed them the majority of the wealth of South Africa, the vast majority of the well-paid white-collar jobs, and pleasant, well-ordered lifestyles
• African people suffered discrimination all their lives, and did the hard work in the mines and on the farms for little pay
• Grand apartheid


  The overall policy to keep the different races as separated as possible, for example by ensuring that they lived in different areas
• Petty apartheid


  The day-to-day restrictions, such as separate facilities and restrictions - the segregation between the races
• Segregation preceded the National Party victory in 1948, and extensive discriminatory policies aimed at maintaining white supremacy and treating non-white people as inferiors with limited rights of citizenship were already in place
• The intellectuals behind National Party policy designed segregation under apartheid to protect both white superiority and survival
• South Africa before European colonisation

  Vast area of 470,000 square miles (1.2 million km') inhabited over thousands of years by different African peoples whom the settlers were to call Bantus
• First wave of European settlers, mainly employees of the Dutch East India Trading Company, arrived


  1652
• Indigenous San and Khoi


  • Feared the arrival of European settlers
  • Settlers, mainly from the Netherlands and Germany, began to arrive to farm and use enslaved people trafficked from elsewhere in Africa
• Boers


  Settlers who began to fan out, moving north and west and meeting the more powerful Xhosa population, who equally resented their presence
• The British arrived


  As a result of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
• San and Khoi


  • More or less been exterminated by warfare and disease
  • Xhosa were gradually defeated by the British Army with its more sophisticated military technology
• The nineteenth century saw African peoples losing more and more land to settlers
• Boer settlers


  • Relationship with British people was always uneasy, and worsened when the British abolished slavery within the British Empire in 1833
  • Many who kept enslaved people then moved into the vast hinterland away from British rule, called the Great Trek
• The myth developed that the Boers had moved into an empty land
• Afrikaner people subsequently used this to suggest African people had no right to the land of South Africa, and that African people had moved into these areas at roughly the same time as the Boers themselves
• Battle of Blood River against the Zulus in 1838


  The Boers were alleged to have a Covenant with God asking for victory, which subsequently became the basis of the Boer belief that God had granted them the land of South Africa
• Boer Republics


  Transvaal and Orange Free State
• Diamonds and gold were discovered in great quantities in the Transvaal


  1867 and 1886
• This led to a gold rush and eventually to the second Boer War between the Boers and the British in 1899
• Britain emerged the victor in the Boer War


  1902
• The two Boer Republics were absorbed into the new Union of South Africa, made up of the two predominantly Afrikaner areas, and the British-dominated Cape and Natal


  1910
• The Union of South Africa became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire
• The different races of South Africa were strictly segregated
• With only a few exceptions, white people were the only ethnic group who could vote
• Black African people, in particular, were treated as cheap labour, unable to compete with white people for whom the best jobs were reserved
• By 1948, black African people had been dispossessed of most of their land, could not vote and were subject to widespread discrimination
• Successive governments not only kept them as far as possible away from the white population, but tried to keep them separate from each other - a type of divide and rule
• Other main ethnic groups in South Africa

  • Coloured people (descendants of mixed marriages, who lived mainly in Cape Province)
  • Indian people (descendants of 150,000 people imported by the British during the nineteenth century, who lived mainly in the province of Natal)
  • White people (comprised of Afrikaans and English speakers, with tensions between them)
• Mines and Works Act 1911


  Excluded African people from most skilled jobs in the mines, which were reserved for white people
• Natives' Labour Regulation Act 1911

  Set down working conditions for African people. They were to be recruited in rural areas, fingerprinted and issued with pass books which gave them permission to enter their areas of work
• The Natives' Labour Regulation Act 1911 was one of the Acts known as the pass laws
• Natives Land Act 1913

  Restricted African ownership of land to seven per cent of South Africa. The government argued this figure was equivalent to African land holdings before the whites occupied the hinterland