Educate me..?

Question

What exactly was apartheid? The extent of my knowledge is that it had to do with blacks and whites in South Africa and that it was oppressive..what was "it"?

Answer 1

The Afrikaners were in charge of everything and there were all sorts of laws that kept black South Africans oppressed. The government told them where they could work and when they could travel and where they could live. Blacks were jailed, disappeared, or killed for any reason the government wanted to list. Blacks, even when educated, couldn't get good paying jobs and were forced to live in substandard housing. They were forced to live on land that wouldn't support agriculture or in areas with very little water. The policies were so bad that South Africa was banned from participating in the Olympics several times. Many countries boycotted South African products to pressure the government to remove the restrictive apartheid laws.

Answer 2

Apartheid (meaning separateness in Afrikaans cognate to English apart and -hood) 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.


Read more on Wikipedia.

Answer 3

i know everyone is going to give you thorough replies, so i wont bother. But I'd like to make it clear that, it wasnt only between Black and White... Indians and Coloreds where also in the same boat, though i think the black people had it even worse, and of course not forgetting the few white people who were helping the Black race through this fight, who also faced some form of prejudice for doing so...

Answer 4

exactly that-apart hate.the part hated was the mixing of white and black creating a coloured,which to a lot of people would seem to be like mixing an alsation dog with a rottwiellor dog and we call it a mongrel.same **** different smell.problem is,when u make a law u need another ten to enforce it.that ten needs another 50 to keep them in place and eventually the system becomes clogged with all sorts of laws that suck.on a high note at least we had some form of law and raping 2 year old girls to cure the aids epedemic didnt happen as often.

Answer 5

the short answer - a law was passed which segregated white people from black people, and where they lived.

no different from alabama in the 60's, except no burning crosses, only burning tyres and much more violence.