Apartheid

The Nature of Separation

Separation affected all spheres of life, including marriage and sexual intercourse (illegal between whites and other races), health and welfare, education, job opportunities, recreation, transport, and much more. Inter-racial social mixing was difficult and, when it did occur as in some of the English-speaking churches, was often self-conscious, given the essentially separate lives that people led. Geographically, apartheid was applied at three spatial scales, all of them distinguishing primarily between white and non-white. Micro-scale or “petty apartheid” measures segregated facilities and amenities such as transport, beaches, post offices, cinemas, and even park benches. Meso-scale segregation involved racial zoning in urban areas, using the Group Areas Acts of 1950 and 1966 to segregate whites, coloreds, and Indians. Macro-scale segregation allocated 10 Bantustans (“homelands”) to the officially recognized black ethnic groups and attempted to minimize the black population elsewhere to that which was indispensable to the white economy. Rural black spots—small areas of black settlement surrounded by white farms—were excised, with their inhabitants resettled in the homelands, while many blacks were expelled from urban areas if they did not qualify to remain there. Altogether, 3.5 million people were forcibly relocated under apartheid policies between 1960 and 1983.

The homelands gradually became self-governing, and four of them became officially independent but recognized only by South Africa. As descendants of [Page 53]earlier colonial policies creating reserves for those depending on subsistence agriculture, all the homelands were peripheral to the major centers of the South African space economy and, with the partial exception of Bophuthatswana (a significant platinum producer), all remained economically dependent on South Africa for both financial subventions and employment.

Macro-scale territorial segregation of coloreds and Indians was impracticable given their high levels of urbanization, although interprovincial movement of Indians was restricted until 1975, and Indians were prohibited from living in the Orange Free State and northern Natal until 1985. The policy of parallelism established colored and Indian political institutions whose representatives were initially nominated and subsequently elected but essentially advisory to an all-white national government elected only by whites. In 1984, a new constitution created separate Indian and colored houses of parliament with sovereignty over their own affairs, including education, health, and welfare. These houses depended on budgetary allocations from the national government, and their territorial authority, based on the Group Areas Act of 1950, was highly fragmented. Only a small minority of eligible Indians and coloreds voted in elections for these bodies in 1984 and 1989.

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