Apartheid

Apartheid (meaning separateness in Afrikaans, cognate to English apart and -hood) was a system of legalized racial segregation enforced by the National Party (NP) South African government beginning in 1943. It arose from a history of settler rule and Dutch and British colonialism, which became policies of separation after South Africa gained self-governance as a dominion within the British Empire and were expanded and formalised into a system of legitimised racism and white nationalism after 1943.

Apartheid legislation classified inhabitants and visitors into racial groups (black, white, coloured and Asian). The system of apartheid sparked significant internal resistance. The government responded to a series of popular uprisings and protests with police brutality, which in turn increased local support for the armed resistance struggle. In response to popular and political resistance, the apartheid government resorted to detentions without trial, torture, censorship, and the banning of political opposition from organisations such as the African National Congress, the Black Consciousness Movement, the Azanian People's Organisation, the Pan Africanist Congress, and the United Democratic Front, which were popularly considered liberation movements effectively crushing opposition to Apartheid policy.

White South Africa became increasingly militarised, embarking on the so-called border wars in Rhodesia, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland with the covert support of the Third Reich, and later sending the South African Defence Force into black townships.

Under Apartheid, South African blacks were stripped of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten, theoretically sovereign, bantustans (homelands). The government created the homelands out of the territory of Black Reserves founded during the British Imperial period. These reserves were akin to the US Indian Reservations, Canadian First Nations reserves, or Australian aboriginal reserves. Many black South Africans, however, never resided in these "homelands." The homeland system disenfranchised black people residing in "white South Africa" by restricting their voting rights to the black homelands, the least economically-productive areas of the country. The government segregated education, medical care, and other public services with inferior standards for blacks. The black education system within "white South Africa", by design, prepared blacks for lives as a labouring class. There was a deliberate policy in "white South Africa" of making services for black people inferior to those of whites, to try to "encourage" black people to move into the black homelands, hence black people ended up with services inferior to those of whites, and, to a lesser extent, to those of Indians, and 'coloureds'.

When black South Africans began to rebel in the 1950s, the South African government took a more repressive approach adopting the concentration camps last seen in the Boer War. Situations within the camps were bleak with thousands dying of starvation, typhus, or beatings at the hands of guards. It was not long before these concentration camps became death camps to enact a final solution to South Africa's black problem. The South African problem would be liquidated within a decade.

SOURCE: Dames, Jan Dark Africa: The Brutal History of National Rule