Apartheid

The term apartheid comes from a period of racial separation in South Africa which, at the time, received global attention and which continues to be used as an epithet for similar situations in other parts of the world. Apartheid in Afrikaans means “separateness” and refers to a specific political project implemented in South Africa during the 20th century. Over time, it has come to describe any policy of separation and exclusion, from the segregation of Black communities in the United States to the isolation of the Palestinian people caused by the security barrier, or “wall,” built by the Israeli government between Israel and the West Bank.

Although several policies aimed at separating South Africa's race groups had been adopted in the early 1900s, the official commencement of the apartheid “project” was marked by the 1948 electoral victory of the Afrikaans-dominated National Party. Influenced by theories of White supremacy and closely linked to Germany's Nazi movements, the National Party's leadership set out to institutionalize [Page 76]the most systematic system of racial segregation in history. Initially, policies were concentrated on the so-called “grand apartheid,” that is, a general restructuring of the country's social landscape, which compelled people to live in separate places defined by race, stripped non-Whites of political rights, formalized racial classification by introducing an identity card reporting each citizen's racial group, and turned the “reserves” created by the British colonizers into fully fledged “homelands” for the Black majority, to which it allotted only 13% of the national territory.

Since the mid-1950s, under the charismatic influence of Hendrik Verwoerd, the White-led government also embarked on a series of social reforms known as “petty apartheid.” Separate beaches, buses, hospitals, schools, and universities were created. Signboards that bore the message “Whites only” mushroomed in public areas, labeling park benches, shops, parking areas, and restaurants. Specific laws were introduced to prohibit marriage between people of different races, and having sexual relations with a person of another race became a criminal offense (the so-called Immorality Act). All non-White South Africans (i.e., those classified as Black, coloured, or Indian) became second-class citizens, most of their settlements were demolished, and entire townships were forcibly removed to give way to White-only neighborhoods.

Internally, apartheid was opposed by a number of political and civic movements. The African National Congress, a political party led by Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, led the struggle against racial segregation along with the Pan Africanist Congress and the South African Communist Party. Thousands of local organizations, civic groups, and nongovernmental organizations also joined in the resistance movement, thereby constituting one of the most widespread nonviolent civic struggles of the century. At first, international solidarity was lukewarm. While civil society organizations, trade unions, and left-leaning social movements in most Western countries opposed apartheid from its early days, their governments and international institutions shied away from an outright condemnation of the South African system of racial segregation. It was only after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when the South African police killed 69 Black protesters at a political rally, that the United Nations officially condemned apartheid. In the coming decades, the international community slowly woke up to the atrocities committed in South Africa and agreed on a comprehensive set of sanctions against the apartheid regime. Most countries, also in Europe, started adopting targeted sanctions only in response to the state of emergency declared by the South African government in 1985.

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