Apartheid, Essay Example

Apartheid was the name that South African whites gave to a nationwide policy enforcing separation of white races from those termed black, colored, and Asian. White Boers had a long history in the borderlands of southern Africa that lay outside British authority in the early Cape Colony. They fought constantly with both the British and the African tribes that opposed the Boers’ attempts to subjugate them. The Boers, largely illiterate and isolated, spoke Afrikaans, a language descended from their Dutch forefathers. The Boers also deeply opposed British laws mandating legal equality of the races. But unlike the U.S. after its Civil War, the British made no radical attempts to force the practice of legal and social equality among races. In 1948, the Re-United National Party of David François Milan, representing the Boers and conservative British residents, defeated Jan Smuts, the long-time national leader who favored policies of the Commonwealth. Milan immediately began building a systematic apartheid regime to last.

Like the U.S. from 1896 to 1954, South African apartheid was justified under the principal of separate but equal. Malan’s government set up the Tomlinson Commission to figure out how to create separate homelands for blacks (Malan, 1989). The Commission reported that it would be far too expensive to accomplish any kind of economic equality (a billion English pounds was the estimated cost for infrastructure), and good lands held by white settlers would have to be turned over to the blacks. The report was shelved, and, just like in the U.S., separate but equal became a legal fiction used to oppress blacks (and, in South Africa’s case, Asian immigrants). Like America’s Indians, South Africa’s blacks were forcibly moved onto reservations, and their poverty was extreme. Soweto township was a leading example. But the Boers had a precedent of sorts for the creation of such zones: during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the British had enclosed thousands of Boer women and children in refugee camps. Tens of thousands of those white detainees died of exposure, disease, and starvation. (Far more black detainees died as well, but for the Boers, blacks didn’t count.)

South Africa withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1961, achieving its political independence as a republic. Independence was not a liberalizing move, however, as South Africa had been condemned by the Commonwealth for its apartheid policies. From that point on, the new republic was free to tighten, not loosen, the laws of racial separation. The newly created black “homelands”, such as Bophuthatswana, were not always cohesive units like a state, but might consist of many physically separated jurisdictions. Black political parties, like the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress, being banned in South Africa, recruited among the disaffected and disenfranchised blacks in these territories. One of those recruited was Nelson Mandela, a black agitator against apartheid who, arrested in 1962, spent the following 27 years in prison before being released to win election as President of South Africa. But before that could happen, apartheid had to be weakened from within and without. Both were difficult, as foreign investment and white population increased dramatically after independence, creating an economic boon that enriched whites and employed blacks. But in 1973 the United Nations declared apartheid to be a crime against humanity. A U.N.-led disinvestment campaign hurt trade. Uprisings in Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe eventually surrounded South Africa with forces determined to end apartheid. In 1976, a protest movement erupted in Soweto, killing hundreds. Many fled across the borders. These developments, along with increasing strikes by labor unions, caused foreign investment to drop and the economy to slow, fueling further unrest. Eventually, the ruling National Party accepted that apartheid, and its own rule, had to end.

By 1994, one year after both were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping end apartheid, Mandela was President and white former President F.W. de Klerk was his deputy.

References

Malan, R. (1989). My Traitor’s Heart . (p. 19). New York: Grove Press.

National party (NP). (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/405219/National-Party-NP