Separateness as law: South Africa’s grand and petty apartheid
Apartheid, an Afrikaans word for “separateness” first recorded in 1929, governed South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 to 1994. It sorted every citizen by race, then used that label to decide whom they could marry, where they could live and which jobs they could hold.
The system was built on baasskap, or “boss-ship”, which kept political, social and economic power with the white minority. Its laws fell into two broad kinds. Petty apartheid segregated public facilities and social events, while grand apartheid divided housing and employment strictly by race. The first statute was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, followed by the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950, which together outlawed marriage and sexual relationships across racial lines for most citizens, and the Population Registration Act of 1950 assigned everyone a racial category.
Its roots ran back to 1652, when the Dutch East India Company set up a trading post at the Cape, pushed out the Khoikhoi and imported enslaved labour. In 1797 officials in Swellendam and Graaff-Reinet required travelling Khoikhoi to carry passes, a rule the British confirmed in 1809. Later measures narrowed the vote and landholding, including the Glen Grey Act of 1894 under Cecil Rhodes, while diamond and gold discoveries deepened inequality.
The word became a party programme in 1948. As African leaders such as Alfred Xuma and the ANC pressed for political rights, land reform and unions, the Herenigde Nasionale Party painted Jan Smuts’s United Party as captured by Western liberals. Its plan, drawn from a theory by Hendrik Verwoerd and presented through the Sauer Commission, aimed to clear black people from white areas, including cities, except as temporary migrant workers.
Between 1960 and 1983 some 3.5 million black Africans were evicted into segregated areas, mostly to confine them to ten designated homelands known as bantustans. United Nations condemnation, arms embargoes and economic sanctions followed, and internal resistance grew more militant through the 1970s and 1980s. Talks between the National Party and the ANC from 1987 to 1993 led to non-racial elections in April 1994; living standards have since improved, but inequality persists.
Source: Apartheid
