Apartheid

The Party Slogan

The first widespread use of the term apartheid emerged as a slogan of the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party (later the Herenigde Nasionale Party or HNP) in the mid-1930s. In this era, the prime minister, J.B.M. Hertzog, espoused a philosophy of territorial segregation and racial preference for whites that was essentially an apartheid vision. The Afrikaner nationalism that bolstered such views borrowed ideological elements and a range of invented folk traditions, symbols, and rituals from the Nazi ideology of Hitler's Germany. While Afrikaner nationalism was uncomfortable with the violent excesses of the [Page 522]Nazi persecutions, it was comfortable with its social Darwinist and eugenicist racist belief systems, and in sympathy with its conceits of Nordic volk (folk) greatness. A small group of Afrikaner intellectuals founded a Suid-Afrikaanse Bond vir Rassestudie (South African League for Racial Studies) in 1935. Prominent among the intellectuals was Professor Gert Cronje, who published Regverdige Rasse-apartheid (Justifiable Racial Separation) in 1947.

The HNP won the 1948 election and began systematically to implement the policy. In the 1940s and 1950s there were a series of new and important acts under the premierships of the Malan and H.F. Verwoerd National Party that established the framework of the apartheid state. The underlying principle was that of aparte ontwikkeling (separate development). The goal of Verwoerd was nothing less than the complete and unambiguous decoupling of white and black destinies in every sphere of existence. So determined was the government to achieve apartheid's goals that it stacked the courts and the senate in order to manipulate the defeat of constitutional provisions that would have guaranteed certain rights to the colored (mixed-race) population. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the so-called Immorality Act (1950) prohibited marriage and even consensual sexual relations between the races. The Population Registration Act (1950) classified people according to four designated races, white, colored (mixed race), “Asiatic,” and “Bantu” (black African). The Group Areas Act (1950) and other similar legislation compelled individuals of different races to be resident in distinct designated areas. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) enforced apartheid in social and cultural settings, while the Bantu Education Act (1953) introduced a separate and distinctly unequal system of racialized educational provision. The Native Resettlement Act (1954) forcibly removed African residents from Johannesburg. Each of these acts was an ingenious contribution to the overall attempt to guarantee white minority dominance into the indefinite future.

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