Can anyone give me a brief history of Apartheid in South Africa?

Question

All I really need is a description of what apartheid is and a brief history of it. Any information would be nice.

Thanx

Answer 1

You know what, I stay in South Africa and if I hear the word APARTHEID one more time, I'll die!!!! I'm so sick and tiered of everybody going on about it! Can't we go on and live for the future and not the past?

Answer 2

Apartheid (literally "separateness" in Afrikaans) was a system of racial segregation that was enforced in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. Apartheid was designed to form a legal framework for continued economic and political dominance by people of European descent.

Under apartheid, people were legally classified into a racial group — the main ones being White, Black, Indian and Coloured — and were geographically, and forcibly, separated from each other on the basis of the legal classification. The Black majority, in particular, legally became citizens of particular "homelands" that were nominally sovereign nations but operated more akin to United States Indian Reservations and Australian/Canadian Aboriginal Reserves. In reality however, a majority of Black South Africans never resided in these "homelands."

In practice, this prevented non-white people — even if actually resident in white South Africa — from having a vote or influence, restricting their rights to faraway homelands that they may never have visited. Education, medical care, and other public services were segregated, and those available to black people were generally inferior.

Answer 3

Sorry boet, it's over 50 years of history, I can give you a brief description, but your better of reading up on it on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid
Basically in 1948, the government, consisting of all white men, the majority Afrikaans, decided that the people of the country should live in segregation, much in the same way Hitler believed Arians where the supreme race, and jews, gypsies etc where second class and of bad blood.
The South African government divided the country in regions or Bantu stans, which where for the black people, and the rest of the country was exclusively for whites only. It was unfairly divided, 70% of South africans are black, but they only got 30% of the land. They also made laws making it illegal to have sex or get married to a person of a differant race, or for persons of differant races to use the same schools, hospitals or public facilties (public transport, beaches etc). They kept this control by only allowing whites to vote.
Naturally this was met with resistance from the black community and two major parties where formed: the ANC (African National Congress) and PAC (Pan African Congress).
At first these parties where passive, only staging protests but in the 70's and 80's they became militant and more violence occured, car bombings etc.
There are many important dates in Apartheid history, but the two most significant for me are "Sharpeville 21 March 1960", where many black people gathered in protest outside the policestation in Sharpeville. To this day there are no accurate figures of how many protesters there where and how many policemen, but the one solid fact is, that in the confusion 69 people where killed.
The second is "The Soweto Massacre 16 June 1976"
Black school children where told that they will be forced to take all or most of their subjects in school in Afrikaans, (as this was the language of their "masters") They took to the streets in protest, once more confusion followed and ocnce more many where killed (the figure stands between 23 and 200, although just like Sharpeville the figures where changed as propaganda by both governments)
There are many other important events like the death of Steve Biko and Mandela being released from prison.
During the 80's Apartheid slowly started to crumble and in 1994 South Africa had it's first free and fare electipon where both blacks and whites could vote, and after which Mandela became our first black president.

Answer 4

Want to read a different version?? The first is the ruling party's version and the second is the United Nations version.

Answer 5

I cant agree more with poepies...i am sick and tired of hearing that word.....
It not even a word as such....but it gets hammered over and over again....
I i had my way...i would ban the use of it...i would go as far as give you a death sentence for using it....
Now can we drop that word....I know the ''Bleeding Hearts''
like to use it...but we are not them....are we?

Answer 6

I agree 100% with poepies!!!

Cant we all just forget & move on?

I suggest you just google it - you'll get all the correct info there!

cheers

Answer 7

The word was coined in 1948 by National Party, but apartheid had been part of South Africa for a long time. In 1948 when the National Party took the government, the apartheid policy was institutionalised. Its main aim was to oppress Africans. Africans who formed more than 80% of the population were forced to belong to concentration camps known as Bantustans (also known as homelands). Collectively, all homelands occupied 14% of the country’s land. South Africa is rich in natural minerals – none of the homelands was established in areas known to have these minerals. Almost 60% of the allocated land was not arable. All land in homelands belonged to either the chief or homeland administration. So, no Africa person could own land. People were in many cases uprooted from the urban areas and dumped in the homelands. All Africans who were not living in homelands had a legislated permission called Section 10 of the pass laws. These Africans were however still confined in townships. The law used for this was called “Group Area Act”. These Africans were permitted in the cities because they had to provide labour. While every White person had the right to live wherever they chose, Africans were strictly forbidden to live outside their permitted areas. If you have the permission to live in a Johannesburg township, you would need a special to visit and/or sleep over in a Germiston township despite the two cities being divided by just a street.

Almost every city had a township. The size of the township was determined by the size of the city. All big townships had single men hostels. These were living quarters for men from homelands. These men were called migrant workers and were allowed to commute between the hostels and place and work.

South Africa has four major groupings, viz. Africans, Coloureds, Indians (collectively referred as Blacks) and Whites. Both Coloureds and Indians were allowed to remain part of the bigger South Africa and were given second class citizen status. Whites were first class citizens. At some stage Coloureds and Indians were given their “parliaments”. You served in those “parliaments” only if you swore to uphold the repressive laws of the day.

In effect, the remaining 86% of the land was shared amongst white people. Every law in the country was geared in entrenching White supremacy. All African children had to be taught “Bantu Education”, specifically designed to make them servants of Whites. All African children had to be taught at least three languages – Afrikaans, English and their mother tongue. At some stage, we were forced to do all school subjects in Afrikaans – this is what led to the 1976 uprisings.

There was Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. While some people who genuinely loved each other found a way of cheating the Act, many married White bosses raped African women working as their domestic workers, but it was these African women who felt the brunt of law when they became pregnant. (I’ve emailed you my first encounter with this law)

Africans were forbidden from belonging to trade unions. A law was passed to upgrade the living standards of poor Whites – this led to the Railways Act. All uneducated Whites were employed in the national railway system and getting good salaries. No African was allowed to supervise a White person irrespective of the level of education or experience.

Shops were divided into Black and White sections. All stale food was transferred to the Black section. In most small cities, African had to queue at the window and do their shopping from there. African townships were all run by White males, most of were officials who failed at the city halls. He would employ a couple of African men (we used to call them blackjacks) who would go house to house searching for passes. They would arrest anybody who didn’t have correct documents.

In fact application of every law had to distinguish between Black and White. With Whites being advantaged in every respect. There were three TV stations. One for Afrikaans, one for English and one for all African languages (nine languages). Given that the TV stations were operating for about 5 hours a day, you can imagine what was happening to these languages.

Four homelands were given “independence” status – in essence this was just to make homeland leaders feel good as they could be called “presidents”. But there was nothing independent about them. They had no recognition as “states” by anybody other than White South Africa. Their economy was 100% dependent on White South Africa. They were not instructed to hunt down liberation fighters who happened to have established cells in their territories.

There were free elections for Whites. Any party could have campaigned on the ticket of abolishing apartheid. None did. There were other parties – notably the Progressive Federal Party, which wanted more freedoms for Africans. But none stood for a totally non-racial South Africa. The National Party’s rule was uninterrupted for over 40years. This shows how majority of White people felt and wanted the country to be. It was not surprising that many left the country when apartheid ended. They couldn’t see themselves under African rule. In all honesty it had nothing to do with the government’s track record.

There’s so much about apartheid but I don’t enough space.

So, should we forget about aparthedi? NO. But we should not keep on harping on it. Many Whites love this country abnd even though they never ackowledge their previous support, it would be in the best interest of all for us to move on!