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controlled de jure by apartheid laws included political rights, voting, freedom of movement and settlement, property rights, right to choose the nature of one's work, education, criminal law, social rights including the right to drink alcohol, use of public services including transport, social security, taxation, and immigration (Cornell 1960, United Nations 1968). The brutal cruelty, of which these laws were the scaffolding, continued for more than four decades. Millions of people were dislocated, jailed, murdered, and exiled. |
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The racial classification that was so structured in the 1950s sought to divide people into four basic groups: Europeans, Asiatics, persons of mixed race or coloureds, and "natives" or "pure-blooded individuals of the Bantu race" (Cornell 1960). The Bantu classification was subdivided into eight main groups, with Xhosa and Zulu the most numerous. The coloured classification was also complexly subdivided, partially by ethnic criteria. The terribly fraught (and anthropologically inaccurate) word Bantu was chosen in preference to African (or black African), partly to underscore Nationalist desires to be recognized as "really African.''
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State authorities, touching every aspect of work, leisure, and education obsessively enforced apartheid. In a bitter volume detailing his visit to South Africa, Kahn notes: |
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Apartheid can be inconvenient, and even dangerous. Ambulances are segregated. A so-called European injured in an automobile accident may not be picked up by a non-European ambulance (nor may a non-European by a European one), and if a white man has the misfortune to bleed to death before an appropriate mercy vehicle materializes, he can comfort himself in extremis by reflecting that he will most assuredly be buried in an all-white century. (Nonwhite South African doctors may not perform autopsies on white South African corpses.) (Kahn, 1966, 32) |
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"Separate development" was the euphemism used by the Nationalist party to justify the apartheid system. It argued from a loose eugenic basis that each race must develop separately along its natural pathway, and that race mingling was unnatural. This ideology was presented in state-sanctioned media as a common-sense policy (Cell 1982). |
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Despite that fact that it was required by law, it often took months or years for blacks to acquire passbooks, during which time they were in danger of jail or being deported to one of the black homelands (Mathabane 1986). Horrell recounts a story about the early years of apartheid, and a group of black people waiting for hours outside the registration office. "The Native Affairs Department official tried to |
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