41 - Apartheid

Summary

INTRODUCTION

South Africa’s racist apartheid regime was officially inaugurated in 1948 with the victory of the Afrikaner National Party and technically ended in 1994 with the country’s first nonracial election resulting in a government led by the opposition African National Congress (ANC) and former political prisoner Nelson Mandela. However, these dates cannot be considered the actual start and end points of apartheid, since a long history of discrimination and segregation predates the official policy of apartheid, and a deeply embedded legacy of inequality persists today.

Apartheid, from the Afrikaans for apartness, was a system of multiple laws, rules, and regulations designed to keep South Africans physically, economically, and culturally apart in order to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of the white minority. Using discredited social and scientific theories to claim differences of culture and nature, South African authorities classified people as white, black, “colored,” or Indian, and endowed these groups with unequal rights and degrees of mobility and opportunity. A highly institutionalized structure, apartheid governed every aspect of South African life, determining everything from whether one could vote and where one could live to what sort of education one was entitled to and with whom one could interact.