During Verwoerd’s premiership, apartheid became the most notorious form of racial domination that the postwar world has known. The cabinet, with enthusiastic support from the rank-and-file members of the National party, tried to plug every gap in the segregation order. The process continued under Verwoerd’s successor, B. J. Vorster, prime minister from 1966 to 1978. The Smuts government had interned Vorster during World War II because he was a general in the extraparliamentary Ossewa Brandwag (Oxwagon Sentinel), which opposed South Africa’s participation in the war. Since 1962, he had been minister of justice in Verwoerd’s cabinet.
Apartheid
The National party government applied apartheid in a plethora of laws and executive actions.5 At the heart of the apartheid system were four ideas. First, the population of South Africa comprised four “racial groups”—White, Coloured, Indian, and African—each with its own inherent culture. Second, Whites, as the civilized race, were entitled to have absolute control over the state. Third, white interests should prevail over black interests; the state was not obliged to provide equal facilities for the subordinate races. Fourth, the white racial group formed a single nation, with Afrikaans- and English-speaking components, while Africans belonged to several (eventually ten) distinct nations or potential nations—a formula that made the white nation the largest in the country.
Soon after coming to power in 1948, the government began to give effect to those ideas. The Population Registration Act (1950) provided the machinery to designate the racial category of every person. Its application led to the breaking up of homes; for example, where one parent was classified White and the other was classified Coloured. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) created legal boundaries between the races by making marriage and sexual relations illegal across the color line. In 1953, after a court had ruled that segregation was not lawful if public facilities for different racial groups were not equal (as in waiting rooms at railroad stations), Parliament passed the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act to legalize such inequality.
As mentioned above, the National party used its majority in Parliament to eliminate the voting rights of Coloured and African people. During the 1950s, when the Nationalist party’s majority in Parliament was still short of two-thirds, it enforced its will by a stratagem that circumvented the Constitution by packing the Senate (the upper house of Parliament) and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court—South Africa’s highest court. In 1951, it passed an act by the ordinary legislative procedure (that is, by simple majorities in each house, sitting separately) to remove Coloured voters from the common electoral rolls. The Appellate Division ruled that the law was invalid, because the Constitution required such an act to be passed by a two-thirds majority of both houses in a joint sitting. Parliament then passed another act by the ordinary procedure, purporting to transform Parliament into a High Court with the power to review and override such judgments of the Appellate Division. The Appellate Division ruled, however, that that act, too, was invalid, on the ground that the High Court was Parliament: under another name. Foiled in that maneuver, in 1955 Parliament passed two more acts by the ordinary procedure: one adding sufficient nominated members to the Senate to give the government a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting, the other increasing the number of appellate judges from five to eleven. Finally, in 1956, a new act to revalidate the act of 1951 and deny the courts the power to inquire into its validity received a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting (thanks to the packed Senate), and the enlarged Appellate Division agreed that the act was valid. The government had used a blend of legalism and cunning to remove Coloured voters from the common roll.6
The government also transformed the administration of the African population. In 1951, it abolished the only official countrywide African institution, the Natives Representative Council. Then it grouped the reserves into eight (eventually ten) territories. Each such territory became a “homeland” for a potential African “nation,” administered under white tutelage by a set of Bantu authorities, consisting mainly of hereditary chiefs. In its Homeland, an African “nation” was to “develop along its own lines,” with all the rights that were denied it in the rest of the country. The legislative framework, foreshadowed by Verwoerd, was completed in 1971, when the Bantu Homelands Constitution Act empowered the government to grant independence to any Homeland.7 Government propaganda likened this process to the contemporaneous decolonization of the European empires in tropical Africa (map 8).
The Transkei was the pacesetter for this process. The government made it “self-governing” in 1963 and “independent” in 1976. Bophuthatswana followed in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981. As they became “independent,” their citizens were deprived of their South African citizenship. The Pretoria government also ensured that collaborative chiefs such as the Matanzima brothers in the Transkei controlled all the Homelands. KwaZulu, the most populous Homeland, was a partial exception. There, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi created a powerful political organization, Inkatha, refused to accept “independence” on the South African government’s terms, and developed an ambiguous relationship with Pretoria.8
Although the South African economy burgeoned in the 1950s and 1960s, the Homelands remained economic backwaters. Nearly every Homeland consisted of several pieces of land, separated by white-owned farms. Bophuthatswana had nineteen fragments, some hundreds of miles apart; KwaZulu comprised twenty-nine major and forty-one minor fragments. Verwoerd forbade white capitalists from investing directly in the Homelands, and the governments of the Homelands depended on subsidies from Pretoria. Under apartheid the condition of the Homelands continued to deteriorate. They could provide full subsistence to a smaller and smaller proportion of the African people. Consequently, the economic incentives for Africans to leave the Homelands, either as migrant laborers or permanently, grew more powerful than ever. The African people relied on wage labor in the great industrial complexes of the southern Transvaal and the Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town areas. Moreover, no foreign country recognized the sovereignty of the “independent” Homelands.
8. The African “Homelands” of South Africa
Apartheid included rigid and increasingly sophisticated controls over all black South Africans. The government tried to herd into the Homelands nearly all Africans, except those whom white employers needed as laborers. In 1967, the Department of Bantu Administration and Development stated this policy quite bluntly in a general circular: “It is accepted Government policy that the Bantu are only temporarily resident in the European areas of the Republic for as long as they offer their labour there. As soon as they become, for one reason or another, no longer fit for work or superfluous in the labour market, they are expected to return to their country of origin or the territory of the national unit where they fit ethnically if they were not born and bred in their homeland.”9 To give effect to this policy in the towns, the government intensified its predecessors’ attempts to limit the influx of rural Africans by prohibiting them from visiting an urban area for more than seventy-two hours without a special permit and by authorizing officials to arrest any African who could not produce the requisite documents. Every year, more than 100,000 Africans were arrested under the pass laws; the number peaked at 381,858 in the year 1975-76.10 The government also removed African squatters from unauthorized camps near the cities, placing those who were employed in segregated townships, and sending the rest either to the Homelands or to farms where the white owners required their labor.
The government also began to eliminate “black spots” in the countryside—that is to say, land owned or occupied by Africans in the white areas. And since white farming was becoming largely commercial and mechanized, Africans lost their last land rights on white farms and many Blacks became redundant to the labor needs of farmers. The “surplus” Africans were expelled from the white rural areas, and, because they could not enter the towns, most were obliged to resettle in the Homelands, even if they ha
d never been there before. In several cases, the government started new townships alongside existing urban complexes and treated them as parts of Homelands, as in Mdantsane in the Ciskei outside East London and Umlazi in KwaZulu outside Durban. In other cases, displaced people were congregated so densely in Homelands, far from the existing urban complexes, that they formed new townships. In 1980, in the tiny Sotho Homeland called QwaQwa, 157,620 Africans were trying to survive on 239 square miles.11
In the cities outside the Homelands, the government transferred large numbers of Coloureds and Indians, as well as Africans, from land they had previously occupied to new segregated satellite townships. Under the Group Areas Act (1950) and its many subsequent amendments, the government divided urban areas into zones where members of one specified race alone could live and work. In many cases, areas that had previously been occupied by Blacks were zoned for exclusive white occupation. Of the numerous removals effected under this act, one of the most notorious was Sophiatown, four miles west of Johannesburg center. Sophiatown was one of the few townships where Africans had owned land since before the Urban Areas Act (1923) put an end to African purchases. In 1955, the government removed the African inhabitants to Meadowlands, twelve miles from the city. Sophiatown was rezoned for Whites and renamed Triomf (Triumph). Another notorious removal was District Six, adjacent to the center of Cape Town, which had been the home of a vibrant Coloured community since at least the early nineteenth century. The homes were razed and the inhabitants relocated to the sandy, wind-swept Cape flats. In Durban, many Indians also suffered severely, losing homes and businesses in areas zoned for Whites.12
The government claimed that these removals were voluntary. In fact, it intimidated the victims and when they resisted used force. An African woman who had been moved to a Homeland told an interviewer: “When they came to us, they came with guns and police. . . . They did not say anything, they just threw our belongings in [the government trucks] .... We did not know, we still do not know this place. ... And when we came here, they dumped our things, just dumped our things so that we are still here. What can we do now, we can do nothing. We can do nothing. What can we do?”13
One cannot know for sure how many Blacks were uprooted by those measures. The number was certainly vast. The Surplus People Project, which made a thorough study of the removals, estimated that 3,548,900 people were removed between 1960 and 1983: 1,702,400 from the towns, 1,129,000 from farms, 614,000 from black spots, and 103,500 from strategic and developmental areas.14
The removals resulted in a great intensification of the overpopulation problem in the Homelands. At the time of the 1950 census, 39.7 percent of the African population of South Africa lived in the areas that became Homelands; in 1980, 52.7 percent was there. The Homeland population increased by 69 percent between 1970 and 1980, by which time the density of population in the Homelands was 23.8 per square mile, compared with 9.1 for all of South Africa, including the Homelands. In spite of all those removals, the African population of the towns continued to increase rapidly under apartheid, and so did the Coloured and Asian urban populations. By 1980, the towns were occupied overwhelmingly by Blacks. Their 4 million white inhabitants were greatly outnumbered by 6.9 million Africans, 2 million Coloureds, and 700,000 Indians.15
By that time, the black urban settlements of the war years had expanded into vast “townships” adjacent to the major white “cities”—Johannesburg, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, and even Cape Town where previously few Africans had lived. Hundreds of thousands of Africans had been born and bred in the towns, and nearly as many African women as men were living there. Still the government persisted in treating all urban Africans as visitors whose real homes were in the Homelands and whose real leaders were “tribal” chiefs. Moreover, the material gap between employed Africans and employed Whites increased significantly between 1948 and 1970, by which time white manufacturing and construction workers were earning six times as much as Africans and white mineworkers were earning no less than twenty-one times as much as Africans. In 1971 the real wages of African mineworkers were less than they had been in 1911. During the 1970s, African wages began to rise in response to competition among employers for experienced workers and vigorous African trade union activity—even though African trade unionism was illegal. The gap was down to 4.4 in manufacturing and construction and 5.5 in mining by 1982.16 But wage rates do not provide a complete picture of the condition of the Africans. Unemployment, always high among black South Africans, increased during the 1970s. South African economist Charles Simkins estimated that African unemployment almost doubled from 1.2 million to 2.3 million between 1960 and 1977, by which time perhaps 26 percent of Africans were unemployed.17 Consequently, Blacks experienced high levels of poverty, undernutrition, and disease, especially tuberculosis.
The government also intensified its control of the educational system. Although it treated Whites as a single entity in politics, in defense of Afrikaans culture it insisted on separation between Afrikaners and other Whites in the public schools. Building on the policy that J. B. M. Hertzog had initiated in the Orange Free State, the government maintained parallel sets of white public schools throughout the country and made it compulsory for a white child to attend a public school that used the language of the child’s home—Afrikaans or English.
Previously, as we have seen, the government had left African education almost entirely to the mission institutions, whose capacity to meet the needs of the large African population was constrained by lack of funds, despite increasing public subsidies. This was unsatisfactory to the Nationalist government. It considered that the mission schools were transmitting dangerous, alien ideas to their African students and turning them, in Verwoerd’s words, into Black Englishmen. As the economy expanded and became more sophisticated, moreover, industry required more literate workers than the mission schools could produce. Under the Bantu Education Act (1953) the central government thus assumed control of public African education from the provincial administrations, made it virtually impossible for nongovernmental schools to continue, and proceeded to expand African education while controlling it firmly. During the 1960s, the government also assumed control over the education of Coloured and Asian children. Verwoerd was frank on the subject of African education: “Native education should be controlled in such a way that it should be in accord with the policy of the state. ... If the native in South Africa today in any kind of school in existence is being taught to expect that he will live his adult life under a policy of equal rights, he is making a big mistake. . . . There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.”18
Under government control, the number of black children at school increased considerably. By 1979, 3,484,329 African children in the entire country including the Homelands (21.41 percent of the African population of the country) were officially listed as attending school. Substantial differences remained in the quality of education provided for different “races,” however. Education was compulsory for white but not black children. White children had excellent school buildings and equipment; black children, distinctly inferior facilities. Most African children were in the pre-primary and the primary classes. In 1978, when there were five times as many African children as white children in South Africa, only 12,014 Africans passed the matriculation examination or its equivalent (similar to American graduation from high school), whereas three times as many Whites did so. The government spent ten times as much per capita on white students as on African students, and African classes were more than twice as large as white ones. Moreover, most teachers in African schools were far less qualified than the teachers in white schools; African teachers were paid less than Whites even when they did have the same qualifications; and they had to teach African schoolchildren from textbooks and to prepare for examinations that expressed the government’s racial views. The white schools were also superior to the Coloured and Indian schools, though to a lesser extent.19
The government imposed segregation in higher education as well. When the National party came to power in 1948, there were in South Africa four English-language universities, four Afrikaans-medium universities, one bilingual correspondence university, and the small South African Native College at Fort Hare. Though autonomous, all were largely dependent on government subsidies. The Afrikaans-medium universities and English-medium Rhodes University admitted white students only. Twelve percent of the students at the University of Cape Town and 6 percent of the students at the University of the Witwatersrand were black and were taught in integrated classes; 21 percent of the students in the University of Natal were black and were taught in segregated classes.20
In 1959, brushing aside large-scale student and faculty opposition in the English-medium universities, Parliament passed the Extension of University Education Act, which prohibited the established universities from accepting black students except with the special permission of a cabinet minister and led to the foundation of three segregated colleges under tight official control for Coloured, Indian, and Zulu students and another one for African students in .the Transvaal. At the same time, the government took over the South African Native College at Fort Hare, fired the principal and seven senior staff members, and made it a college for Xhosa students, subjecting it to the same controls as the other black colleges. By 1978, nearly 150,000 students were enrolled in universities in South Africa, 80 percent of them White.21
From 1948 on, “Whites Only” notices appeared in every conceivable place. Laws and regulations confirmed or imposed segregation for taxis, ambulances, hearses, buses, trains, elevators, benches, lavatories, parks, church halls, town halls, cinemas, theaters, cafes, restaurants, and hotels, as well as schools and universities. It was also official policy to prevent interracial contacts in sport: no integrated teams and no competitions between teams of different races in South Africa, and no integrated teams representing South Africa abroad. Although no legislation was specifically designed to give effect to this policy, the government was able to keep sports segregated under other legislation, such as the Group Areas Act.22 Verwoerd even tried to prohibit Blacks from attending church services in white areas and moderated his demands only when Geoffrey Clayton, Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, died of a heart attack after signing a letter saying he could not counsel members of his church to obey such legislation.23
A History of South Africa Page 28
