APARTHEID

APARTHEID An Afrikaans term meaning ‘separation’, used in South Africa for the policy initiated by the Nationalist Government after 1948 and usually rendered into English in the innocuous sounding phrase, ‘policy of separate development’. Apartheid had been preceded in 1913 and 1936 by the Land Acts which restricted the amount of land available to black farmers to 13 per cent. But in 1948 the Apartheid laws were enacted, including the Population Registration Act, which registered all people by racial group; the Mixed Amenities Act, which codified racial segregation in public facilities; the Group Areas Act, which segregated suburbs; the

Immorality Act, which illegalized white–black marriages; and the establishment of the so-called Bantustans, or native homelands, to which a large proportion of the black population was restricted. Theoretically, the establishment of the Bantustans was supposed to provide a solution to the racial tension of South Africa by providing a series of designated territories or homelands in which the different races could develop separately within the state. But since the white minority retained for themselves the bulk of the land, and virtually all of the economically viable territory, including the agriculturally rich areas and the areas with mining potential, it was, in practice, a means of institutionalizing and preserving white supremacy. Since the economy required a large body of non-white workers to live in close proximity to white areas, for which they provided cheap labour, the Group Areas Act led to the development of specific racially segregated townships, using low-cost housing, such as the notorious Soweto area (South West Townships) south of Johannesburg.
                 
               

Under the same Act,people of African,Cape Coloured or Indian descent were forcibly removed from urban areas where they had lived for generations. The notorious and still unreconstructed District Six in central Capetown, bulldozed and cleared of its mixed race inhabitants under the Act,is an often cited example of this aspect of apartheid policy. The policy of segregation extended to every aspect of society, with separate sections in public transport, public seats, beaches, and many other facilities. Further segregation was maintained by the use of Pass Laws which required non-whites to carry a pass that identified APARTHEID 14 them, and which, unless it was stamped with a work permit, restricted their access to white areas. The racist basis of the policy was nowhere more apparent, and nowhere more bizarre in its application, than in the frequent redesignations of races conducted by the government, in which individuals were reclassified as Black, Coloured, Indian or White. Most of these rectifications were, predictably, downwards within the white-imposed hierarchy of race.The process demonstrated the sheer fictionality of suggesting that these racial divisions were either fixed or absolute, as did the necessity of passing a law against miscegenation between the races.The so-called Immorality Act,designed to preserve ‘racial purity’, indicated the desire to rewrite the fact that the societies of Southern Africa had for centuries intermingled culturally and racially. The term apartheid acquired very widespread resonance, and it became commonly used outside the South African situation to designate a variety of situations in which racial discrimination was institutionalized by law.An extreme instance of this is when the post-structuralist philosopher and cultural critic Jacques Derrida employed the term in an influential essay, suggesting that it had acquired a resonance as a symbol that made it an archetypal term of discrimination and prejudice for later twentieth-century global culture (Derrida 1986).