Apartheid

Colonial Roots of Apartheid

From the outset of urbanization in South Africa, the colonial state engaged in deliberate policy interventions to establish residential segregation between indigenous Black Africans and Whites. After the abolishment of slavery in 1834, there was a considerable influx of Blacks into colonial towns. In response, the first form of separate settlement—a “location” for Blacks isolated from the town—was introduced in Port Elizabeth by the London Missionary Society. This would become the basic template for a “separate location” policy for the next 100 years, cementing racial segregation into the fabric of urban space from the outset of urbanization.

The Natives Land Act of 1913 was the first legislative attempt to give legal effect to divisions between White and Black groups. The Natives Land Act designated that Africans could own land only inside so-called Native Reserves, which amounted to 8.9 million hectares (less than 13 percent of the total land area of the Union). In terms of the act, Black Africans could not purchase land outside the designated reserves except for the Cape Province where their number was low, dating back to demographic patterns in precolonial times.

The most important legislative intervention in terms of urban segregation was the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. It required municipalities to establish separate locations for Black Africans and to ensure the effective regulation of migration to towns. Even though there was some reluctance on the part of certain municipalities to establish separate locations because of the expense involved, urban historians agree that by 1948 when formal apartheid arrived on the scene, the system of physically separate African locations was firmly in place throughout much of the country. The blatant acts of segregation and movement regulation that stemmed from this act were further complemented by a range of covert urban reforms in the domains of public health, housing, and planning, which may have done even more to ensure thoroughgoing racial segregation in all domains of life. However, the system was not totally successful because the volumes of migration simply overwhelmed state capacity, which produced a patchwork of settlement in the ideal image of the segregationist ambition of the Union government of the time.

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