Rights and Protest: SA Apartheid - Nature of Discrimination

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)

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

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

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

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

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”

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