Apartheid

Historical and Theoretical Context

Apartheid in South Africa cannot be understood without being placed in its historical context. For centuries, descendents of the Dutch settlers (the Afrikaners) coexisted uneasily with native African tribes who were being displaced by Afrikaner territorial expansion. Afrikaners also found themselves increasingly in competition with the British, who began to assume political and economic control of much of southern Africa. The tension between the two imperial forces reached a head during the Boer Wars, which entrenched British influence and extinguished the political independence of the Afrikaner republics. The period after this defeat was marked by the growth of a distinct Afrikaner identity, which gradually reasserted itself culturally, linguistically, and politically under British rule.

As South Africa became increasingly urbanized, Afrikaners began drifting into the cities, where they perceived themselves to be the victims of British racism and cultural imperialism. A new class of urban Afrikaner poor emerged that had to compete with cheap labor from Black migrants. Traditional racial hierarchies were realigning around class, and many poor White Afrikaners found their traditional privileges to be under threat. The fear was that British capitalist imperialism would result in Afrikaners being “lumped together” with other minority ethnic groups and afforded the same kind of [Page 26]second-class citizenship that Black, Colored, and Indian South Africans had received. Political sympathies began drifting toward segregationists, who worked to revive the fortunes of the Afrikaners relative to the British colonizers and the ethnic minorities.

The policy that became known as apartheid was designed to entrench Afrikaner power relative to these two traditional threats. The model for race relations in South Africa (and many other nations) in the early 20th century was a British imperialist model, in which Blacks and Whites were geographically segregated within a single polity. Whites ruled over Blacks politically, and Blacks were expected to assimilate to White culture in order to become competitive within the socioeconomic system.

Apartheid theorists in the 1940s argued that this horizontal system of White supremacy was unsustainable because it would breed frustration, violence, and rebellion from the ethnic minorities. Under apartheid, Afrikaners, Anglos, Coloreds, and various Black tribes would be given separate homelands, which would coexist within the nation of South Africa. By giving each ethnic group its own political and cultural space, it was argued that racial conflict would be reduced because each ethnic group would be free to develop its own political and cultural identity independent of the others.

As an intellectual abstraction, apartheid is consistent with “dual identity” models of intergroup relations, whereby subcultures are encouraged to foster a distinct identity while at the same time embracing what they share at the superordinate (national) level. Indeed, much of the rhetoric that was used to promote apartheid focused on its potential to liberate Afrikaners from British domination and to reduce interracial conflict.

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