7 - The Apartheid Project, 1948–1970

Summary

The idea of apartheid has long had an international currency that goes well beyond its national historical reference. Apartheid originated as a label for the system of institutionalised racism and racial social engineering inaugurated by the National Party after its election victory in 1948. But the term has since been appropriated as a global signifier of racialised separation, inhumanity and exploitation. International cross-references have the virtue of prompting a more global reading of apartheid as one among many projects of racialised discrimination and subjugation. The historiography of apartheid has tended to be rather more insular and inward looking in the past, particularly in the thick of the anti-apartheid struggle, when the specificities of the South African experience dominated both the analytical and the political agenda of debate. Yet there is also the obvious risk of caricature, essentialising and dehistoricising a system of rule that was more internally fractious and fractured, historically fluid and complex, than the formulaic reductions can possibly render. The symbolic condensation of apartheid as the global signifier of racism risks conferring an apparent – and misleading – transparency on the system of apartheid, as if comprehensible simply as the extremity of racism. This renders its historical unevenness and complexity irrelevant and/or uninteresting.