Discussion 5 - Paper Answers

Many of us in the U.S. have some idea/knowledge about Jim Crow/segregation in the U.S., but the history of apartheid in South Africa is something less commonly learned about here. Based on what you read last week and this week to introduce you to apartheid, answer the following questions:

1. The white population of South Africa, which first colonized the land then established apartheid as the legal code, was a small minority of the overall population. How did such a small part of the population (between 13-20%) manage to establish such an oppressive system against the majority? (Your answer should be 3-4 sentences long)

2. The readings from the end of this week focused on memories shared by people who lived under apartheid. What did you find most striking or interesting from those stories? Explain what you found so interesting/notable. (Your answer should be 3-4 sentences long)

3. Based on what we’ve learned so far about Jim Crow and apartheid, what are some of the similarities that immediately show up? Do you see any differences yet? If so, what? (Your answer should be 3-4 sentences long)

Race Wars (1795 – 1913) – Video – Films On Demand (indstate.edu)

The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in South Africa (thoughtco.com)

Growing Up in Apartheid-Era South Africa (vice.com)

Growing Up Under Apartheid | Cincinnati CityBeat

My Grandmother Recounts Growing Up During Apartheid – The Wildezine

White Supremacy, Segregation and Apartheid

How did South Africa become a society in which racial discrimination was
so deeply entrenched?

White racism was certainly not confined to South Africa. Its roots are
complex, embedded in the lengthy process of European colonialism,
the subjugation of other people in territorial conquest and black enslave-
ment. It was given further impetus from the middle of the nineteenth
century when the need to ‘civilize inferior natives’ became part of the jus-
tification for the scramble for Africa. This was also the period when
Darwinist notions of evolution and hierarchy were applied to human races.
Whites readily came to believe that they were at the top of the evolutionary
scale, as shown by their apparent technological superiority and the dyna-
mism of their imperial expansion, while blacks at the bottom were thought
to be primitive, less intelligent and sluggard. Such pseudoscientific ‘Social
Darwinism’ clearly fitted the colonizers’ view of themselves and their world.

This kind of white supremacism took strong root in South Africa, as it
did in other British colonies in Africa and Asia as well as in the United
States. But in South Africa it developed into a systematic and legalized
discrimination shaping the economic, social and political structure of the
whole country in a more pervasive way than elsewhere. And while after
1945 white supremacism began to wane as many colonies began the move
towards independence, in South Africa discrimination became even more
entrenched. Under ‘apartheid’, South Africa from the late 1940s diverged
from international trends and was marked out for isolation.

The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, Fifth Edition.
Nigel Worden.
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-17 18:44:05.

C
o
p
yr

ig
h
t
©

2
0
1
2
.
Jo

h
n
W

ile
y

&
S

o
n
s,

I
n
co

rp
o
ra

te
d
.
A

ll
ri
g
h
ts

r
e
se

rv
e
d
.

74 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

This chapter will examine the ways in which racial discrimination in the
pre-industrial period developed into structured segregation in the first few
decades of the twentieth century, the context in which this evolved into the
ideology of apartheid, and the varied attempts of a range of organizations
to resist these developments.

White supremacism before the twentieth century

The roots of apartheid are much disputed by South African historians.
Liberals writing in the early and mid-twentieth century placed emphasis
on the irrational frontier prejudices of nineteenth-century Afrikaners:
prejudices which came to override liberal non-racialism and were resur-
rected by the National Party’s policy of 1948. Such a view has become
widespread amongst English-speaking South Africans and outside the
country. But it has obvious flaws. Notably it ignores the racial discrimina-
tion of British settlers and officials. And segregation developed before the
triumph of Afrikaner political power in 1948.

An alternative view developed in the 1970s is that segregation was the
product of the mineral revolution, particularly in response to the needs of
the mining industry, and that apartheid was built on these foundations.
There is certainly much truth in this. However, to neglect the period before
the end of the nineteenth century distorts understanding of the context in
which segregation developed. Important precedents were created in the
pre-industrial period.

Perceptions of white racial superiority were apparent from the earliest
colonial encounters of the Dutch settlers with Khoekhoe pastoralists at the
cape. They also acquired a structured form in the divisions of legal status
in early cape society: Dutch East India company officials, free burghers
(settlers), slaves, ‘Hottentots’ (Khoisan) and free blacks (manumitted
slaves). The first two categories were made up of whites, the others of
blacks. Slavery, which lasted from 1658 to 1834, deeply influenced the class
divide of the colony (Worden 1985). All slaves and most laborers were
black; landowners and employers were white. There were some exceptions
to this rule, since some Voc employees served as overseers on farms and
a propertied and slave-owning free black community developed in cape
Town. The presence of white convicts exiled from other parts of the Voc
empire who worked alongside slaves and also Asian political exiles, some
of whom were treated with high respect, also complicated the absolute
identity of race and class (Ward 2009). However, slave manumission levels

Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-17 18:44:05.
C
o
p
yr
ig
h
t
©
2
0
1
2
.
Jo
h
n
W
ile
y
&
S
o
n
s,
I
n
co
rp
o
ra
te
d
.
A
ll
ri
g
h
ts
r
e
se
rv
e
d
.

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 75

were low (Elphick and Shell 1989). And although miscegenation existed
there was no equivalent to the mixed-race mestizo classes of Latin American
colonies, where they fulfilled important interstitial positions in the economy.
Thus at the cape ‘by the late eighteenth century race and class had over-
lapped for so long . . . that to many Europeans this social structure appeared
to be natural or god-given’ (Elphick and giliomee 1989: 544).

Freund (1976) has argued that these prejudices and the close identifica-
tion of status and race were not entrenched in the legal order of the early
cape, and cannot be said to have been the precursor of the structured
racism of the twentieth century. While the latter point is valid, there were
nonetheless a number of racially discriminatory regulations by the end of
the eighteenth century. Khoekhoe and slaves were discriminated against in
the church and the courts. Free blacks also faced discriminatory controls,
such as liability to arrest if found in the streets of cape Town without
lanterns. None of these rules applied to whites. From the 1760s slaves and
Khoekhoe were obliged to carry passes signed by their employers to prove
that they were not runaways. In 1809 a proclamation by the British governor
Lord caledon laid down that all ‘Hottentots’ (Khoikhoi) must have a ‘fixed
place of abode’, normally on a settler farm as a worker. This was to be
registered with the local authorities, from whom passes had to be obtained
before they could move out of the area. In 1812 Khoekhoe children brought
up on settler farms were indentured for ten years until the age of eighteen,
thus effectively immobilizing Khoekhoe families on specific farms (Elphick
and malherbe 1989: 40–1).

In contrast to the general identity of race and class in the settled south-
western districts of the early cape colony, Legassick has argued that ‘white
frontiersmen expected all their dependants (save their families) to be non-
white: they did not expect all non-whites to be their servants’ and that ‘the
frontier in fact provided opportunities for non-whites to which they had
no access in the capital’ (1980: 56, 67). Links of trade and mutual depend-
ence between settlers and indigenous people were more significant than
had been previously acknowledged. This view contradicts the liberal tradi-
tion that the remoter pastoral frontier was the cradle of racism. There is a
danger of overstressing the cooperative aspects of frontier life; the crudest
examples of coercive violence between settlers and Khoekhoe come from
the northern and eastern cape, and the conflicts of the early nineteenth
century with the Xhosa heightened racial hostility. But Legassick’s argu-
ment does point to the need to probe behind the stereotype of frontier
racism.

76 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

In the early nineteenth century, important changes took place at the
cape. The commercialization and expansion of the colony required an
increase in the supply and mobility of labor. So ordinance 50 of 1828
removed the controls of passes and indenture over the Khoekhoe,
and slavery was ended in 1834 (although slaves remained apprenticed
to their owners until 1838). These measures did not greatly affect the mate-
rial conditions of proletarianized freed slaves and Khoekhoe, most of
whom lacked access to land and capital, although they did permit their
movement to new employers. In racial terms the removal of the distinction
between slaves and Khoekhoe led to the identification of them more
broadly as ‘colored’, in contrast to the ‘white’ and ‘Native’ inhabitants of the
colony.

Legislation was also passed in 1828 to deal with the use of African
laborers. ordinance 49 permitted Africans to enter the colony, but stated
that they were subject to arrest if they were found without a pass issued on
their arrival or if they failed to enter employment. As Hindson has pointed
out, this contrasts with the use of passes in the 1809 caledon code, which
was intended to immobilize existing workers and prevent them from
moving in search of alternative work. ordinance 49 encouraged workers to
enter the colony and to search for employers in a more mobile labor
market, although it still enforced compulsory labor penalties for ‘vagrants’
or those who were unemployed. It thus ‘reflects the beginning of a transi-
tion from senile to market allocated labor, albeit on a limited scale’ (Hindson
1987: 17).

However, other key laws in the mid-nineteenth-century cape made no
reference to race. For instance, the masters and Servants ordinance of 1841,
designed to regulate labor contracts, was color blind. Legislation with
overtly racial controls, such as the proposed Vagrancy ordinance of 1834,
was vetoed. most significantly, the franchise established for the cape Town
municipality in 1839 and that for representative government in 1853 were
not racially defined. These acts were far from socially disruptive: in practice
most servants under the masters and Servants regulations were black and
almost all masters were white. The 1853 franchise was based on earnings
and property ownership, although these were set at quite low levels: earn-
ings of £50 a year or property, which included land, worth £25. This admit-
ted a number of colored and African voters, as well as a large proportion
of the Afrikaner males in the colony (Lewsen 1971).

The non-racial franchise lay at the core of mid-nineteenth-century cape
liberalism. Like liberal constitutions in Europe at the time, it abolished

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 77

monopoly of power by right of birth and ancestry but it upheld the inter-
ests of men of property and wealth. yet cape liberalism was more than just
an import from mid-Victorian Britain. Trapido (1980) has argued that it
must be seen in the context of the particular social formation of the cape.
It went further in its low franchise qualifications than most other constitu-
tions of its time by incorporating many ‘small men’, whose interests were
nonetheless linked to the administrative and commercial ruling classes.
These included black (‘colored’ and African) peasant farmers whose votes
could be relied upon to support commercial development, but it excluded
the proletarianized laborers.

This class-based analysis of cape liberalism is also used to explain its
apparent decline in the late nineteenth century. By the 1880s, peasant pro-
duction was less favored, and small-scale commercial interests were giving
way to larger capital interests. moreover, the incorporation of the ciskei in
1865 and the Transkeian territories twenty or so years later threatened to
alter the balance of power by enfranchising large numbers of African land-
owners. As a result higher franchise qualifications and literacy tests were
introduced. overtly discriminatory Acts were passed in the 1880s and
1890s, such as the anti-squatting legislation and the glen grey Act (see
p. 54). The latter not only restricted individual land tenure but also set up
district councils under appointed local chiefs and headmen to administer
specified areas of African cultivation. The system spread from the eastern
cape into some Transkeian districts and Pondoland in 1905 and 1911. rich
(1981) has argued that it had an important influence on the segregationist
notions of separate reserve administration in the 1920s.

By the turn of the twentieth century, some cape legislation was overtly
racial. Liquor laws restricted the sale of alcohol to Africans in the Transkeian
territories and elsewhere. In cape Town, where there was a greater degree
of inter-racial social interaction among the lower classes than in other
South African towns, social segregation markedly increased from the 1880s.
This was largely the result of concern by the city’s dominant English elite
at what they perceived as lower-class disorder and the need to protect the
white ‘deserving poor’, at a time when growing numbers of immigrants
were arriving from Europe (Bickford-Smith 1995). African migrant dock
workers in cape Town had always worked and lived separately from others,
but in 1902 a segregated location was established for all Africans in cape
Town. In 1905 the School Board Act introduced compulsory educational
segregation, which separated white and colored pupils in government
schools. cape liberalism was certainly dented by 1910. The Act of Union

78 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

preserved the cape franchise in that province, but there was no concerted
attempt by the cape representatives to have it extended elsewhere. And
even in the cape the black franchise remained limited by property quali-
fications, while for whites under the Act of Union it included all adult
males. Africans were also not permitted to stand as parliamentary candi-
dates but were to be represented by whites. As Davenport has noted, ‘even
liberals were more concerned in the final resort to preserve the dignity of
the cape in its relations with the other colonies than the rights of blacks’
(1987: 33).

In fact, white supremacist notions were heightened in the mid-
nineteenth-century period at the time of the origins of cape liberalism.
Humanitarian attitudes that had been expressed by some cape missionar-
ies and reformers in the era of emancipation and reform in the 1820s
and 1830s were on the wane. Disillusionment at the prospect of racial
harmony came with the conflicts in the Xhosa wars in the Eastern cape
and the Kat river rebellion and by the 1850s ‘a new racial conservatism’
had emerged amongst cape intellectuals, officials and colonists (Bank
1999: 375). The realities of Xhosa resistance to the cultural impositions of
missionaries and the political rule of soldiers and administrators produced
a new discourse of racial stereotyping. The Xhosa became irredeemable
savages, obstacles to the spread of imperial civilization (Price 2008). many
settlers had in any case shown no compunction in using racist arguments
in the 1830s to call for vagrancy legislation and tighter controls over slave
apprentices. Although the underlying causes of the great Trek were eco-
nomic (see p. 16), one of the stated objections of the emigrants had been
the placing of slaves on an ‘equal footing . . . contrary to the . . . natural
distinction of race and color’.

The principles of the cape liberal franchise were clearly rejected in the
constitutions of the trekker republics. The very concept of citizenship was
defined by membership of trekker families, since isolated farmers and set-
tlers attempted to establish forms of government in regions where indig-
enous people were still occupying much of the land. Thus there were no
limitations of property or wealth as at the cape, but political representation
was restricted racially to whites. The 1839 constitution of Natalia laid down
annual elections for all adult white males. The successor trekker republics
in the Free State and the Transvaal followed this pattern. The Transvaal
grondwet (constitution) of 1858 stated explicitly that ‘the people desire to
permit no equality between colored people and the white inhabitants of
the country, either in church or state’.

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 79

This was also clear in other aspects of the trekker polities. The Dutch
reformed church (Drc) resolved to segregate its churches in 1857, a move
that led inexorably in 1881 to the complete separation of the established
Drc for whites and the Sendingkerk (mission church) for everyone else
(ritner 1967). And political power remained confined to whites. Indians
were excluded from the Free State altogether, and in the Transvaal were
denied the franchise in the 1880s. yet the issue here was not just one of
black exclusion. one of the bones of contention in the Transvaal in the
1890s was the refusal of Kruger’s government to give representation to
white outsiders (uitlanders).

other discriminatory Acts in the republics were passed, although often
without the means of effective enforcement. Africans were forbidden to
carry guns and they were subject to vagrancy and pass laws. In the Free
State they were not permitted to register land ownership, although many
controlled land held nominally by missionaries and other whites, and in
the Transvaal some land was purchased by African chiefs in the years after
the South African War. In the 1870s and 1880s, the lure of the mines led
to stricter enforcement of pass laws by the state in an attempt to keep labor
on the farms.

But these policies were not confined to the Boer republics, as is illus-
trated by the position in Natal. Initially the charter granted to the colony
in 1856 did set up a non-racial franchise on the lines of that of the cape,
granting a vote to those with fixed property worth £50 or those paying £10
per annum in rent. However, once the Natal settlers gained control over
government, this was whittled down. As more and more Africans acquired
claims to land that brought them within these levels, laws stemming black
registration were quickly passed in the 1860s. moves were also made to
exclude Indians, many of whom were merchants and men of property, from
the franchise, although this was not finally achieved until 1896.

overtly racial controls were also established by such means as the levy
of a £3 poll tax on all Indian labor immigrants who remained in Natal
without renewing their indentures. African migrants entering the colony
from the 1860s were obliged to carry passes, in a measure very similar to
the cape ordinance 49. And by the time of Union settler racist hysteria
had reached a height in the aftermath of the Bambatha rebellion and Indian
protest actions. Natal fitted happily into the Union’s racially restricted
franchise.

Natal was also the site of what Welsh (1971) has described as South
Africa’s first example of structured segregation: a form of indirect rule over

80 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

Africans known as the ‘Shepstone system’. Shepstone was placed in charge
of ‘Native Affairs’ in the colony in 1846. given the weakness of the settlers,
he realized that the only way to protect the colonial state was to allocate
land still unclaimed by white farmers as ‘locations’, which Africans would
have the right to cultivate undisturbed, under the rule of local headmen
and chiefs operating under ‘Native Law’, although this was ill defined.
control over the chiefs was in the hands of white resident magistrates and
Administrators of Native Law, themselves subject to Shepstone and the
Natal Legislative council. crucial to this system were the hut taxes that
were levied on each head of household. These paid for the administration
not only of the locations, but also of much of settler Natal, a vital factor
given the reluctance of the imperial government to provide much financial
support to the colony (Etherington 1989).

The Shepstone system was opposed by poorer settler farmers who
resented the tying up of land and labor in the locations. However, as labor
became more readily available with external migration in the 1870s and
1880s, such complaints died down. Shepstone and his supporters claimed
that the system of separation existed to ‘protect’ Africans from erosion of
their society by European influences, particularly in matters of land tenure
and homestead production. However, it is clear that his motivation was
primarily protection of the colony against the instability of African com-
petition and ‘disorder’. The priority of control was evident in the curfews
and pass laws used to restrict Africans working in towns and villages outside
the locations. And the contrast of the stability of Natal with the upheavals
of neighboring Zululand served to bolster this view of the Shepstone system
amongst the white settlers.

By the time of Union Natalians were therefore firmly behind the prin-
ciple of segregation. Shepstonian notions of separate administrative and
legal systems had much influence on the development of ‘Native’ policy in
the Union in the 1920s, as we shall see. other foundations of segregation
in the early twentieth century had precedents in the white supremacist laws
and practices of the nineteenth century. However, it was not until the early
twentieth century that a concerted ideology and overarching plan of seg-
regation was developed.

Segregation

Segregation needs to be distinguished from white supremacy. Although it
was predicated on perceptions of racial difference and was developed in

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 81

the aftermath of colonial conquest, South African segregation was not just
racial subordination writ large. Its underlying principle was the enforced
separation, not just subordination, of blacks and whites in the spheres of
work, residence and government. Nineteenth-century precedents for this
had been seen in the demarcation of land and authority set up under the
glen grey Act in the eastern cape and the Shepstone system in Natal. But
it was only in the period between the end of the South African War in 1902
and the 1930s that a cogent ideology of segregation emerged and was
implemented.

There has been some disagreement amongst historians as to precisely
when and why segregation emerged. The liberal view that it was a direct
heritage of the nineteenth-century Boer republics has now been repudi-
ated. Indeed the Transvaal and orange Free State were less racially segre-
gated in terms of land settlement and economic activity than were Natal
and the eastern cape. As cell has pointed out, the Boer general Botha, who
was to become the first Prime minister of the Union, stated in 1903 that
cheap African labor was needed on the farms, not segregated tribal reserves
which locked up labor and withheld land from white ownership. White
supremacy was certainly central to his thinking, but ‘the language and the
details of segregation would represent not a direct continuation of prevail-
ing Afrikaner ideas about how economy and society should be regulated,
but a distinct departure from them’ (cell 1982: 49).

Botha’s comments were made in testimony he gave to the South African
Native Affairs commission (SANAc), appointed by milner, which sat
between 1903 and 1905. Its function was to prepare the way for Union by
establishing outline policies for Africans. As cell has shown, its major rec-
ommendations provided the first clear articulation of segregationist ideals
and it was the blueprint for much of the legislation that followed Union.
Thus it proposed racial separation of land ownership, the establishment of
‘Native locations’ in towns, regulation of labor influx to the cities with pass
laws, differential wage levels, mission-based schooling for Africans rather
than state education, administration in separate Native councils, and no
extension of the cape’s non-racial franchise to other parts of the Union.
Some of these recommendations were based on existing practices in various
parts of the country, such as pass laws, urban locations and racially deter-
mined wage levels. But it was only during milner’s reconstruction admin-
istration that they were combined into an overarching general policy.
milner was strongly influenced by racial notions of white supremacy and
solidarity across the Anglo-Saxon world, which included the United States

82 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

and other parts of the British Empire such as Australia, but the strongest
impetus for segregation came from within South Africa itself (Lake and
reynolds 2008).

As we have seen in the previous chapter, many of the recommendations
of the SANAc were put into practice by legislation of the subsequent
decades. most notable were the mines and Works Act (1911), which
imposed the color bar, the Natives Land Act (1913), which segregated land
ownership, and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act (1923), which provided for
residential segregation in towns. In addition to these restrictions, Africans
had long been subject to a variety of pass controls, requiring them to obtain
official documents in order to move freely between town and countryside.
The Stallard doctrine of controlled urbanization (see pp. 49–50) required
such mechanisms to be extended, although women were exempted after
the effective resistance to passes for women mounted in the orange Free
State in 1913. During the 1930s and 1940s attempts were made to tighten
up pass laws, although it was not until the 1950s that they were centralized
in a single administrative system.

Another key element in segregationist policy was the Native Affairs Act
(1920), which set up separate tribal councils for the administration of the
reserves and advisory councils for Africans in urban areas, all under the
aegis of the Native Affairs Department and under the ultimate authority
of the Prime minister. Administrative segregation was the logical develop-
ment of the denial of African political representation in the central bodies
of government in the Union. And finally, the Industrial conciliation Act
(1924) legalized the collective bargaining power of trade unions, but
excluded migrant workers from its definition of ‘employee’. This was a clear
attempt by the Smuts government to woo white workers after the rand
revolt, but when the government was ousted by the Labour–National Party
‘Pact’ in 1924 it was clear that this policy had not worked.

The basic tenets of segregation were thus laid down under the Smuts
government. However, under Hertzog’s Pact administration segregationism
continued with renewed vitality. The Labour Party’s demand for white
worker protection, forged in the conflicts of the rand, was extended to
other areas of employment. cresswell, the Labour Party leader and new
minister of Labour, replaced Africans with white workers in major areas of
government employment such as the railways, harbors and post offices.
This was extended under the 1926 mines and Works Amendment Act,
which gave the government powers of color bar enforcement in private
industry. moreover, this ‘civilized labor policy’ established racial differences

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 83

in wage rates between ‘persons whose standard of living conforms to the
standard of living generally recognized as tolerable from the usual European
standpoint’ and others ‘whose aim is restricted to the barer requirements
of the necessities of life as understood among barbarous and underdevel-
oped peoples’.

A further major segregationist measure of the Pact government
related to the administration of the reserves. The Native Administration
Act (1927) stressed the need for Africans to be retribalized under a distinct
system of law and government. A more uniform system of administration
was applied, with chiefs responsible for paying the taxes of the Africans
under their control and subject to a more codified single system of ‘Native
Law’. The Native Affairs Department was given a more regulatory role,
which included disciplining chiefs and the possibility of relocating com-
munities to fit the government’s notions of ethnic distribution within the
reserves.

The 1927 Act marked a rejection of the notion of political assimilation
of Africans into the Union. It clearly backed the Natal principles of bolster-
ing ‘traditional’ authorities in the reserves under the ‘Supreme chief ’, the
governor-general of South Africa, in ways which resembled the old
Shepstonian system. Its conscious revival of tribalism, which was presented
as ‘traditional’ although it bore no resemblance to any precolonial struc-
ture, was to be crucially important to the development of diverse African
ethnicities which were brought to full fruition in the homelands policy of
the 1960s (Landau 2010a).

As another part of the move to entrench tribalism, an assault was made
on the cape enfranchisement of detribalized African property owners. In
1926 Hertzog introduced a series of bills into Parliament proposing the
removal of individual voters from the electoral roll, to be replaced by a
limited number of white representatives chosen by chiefs and headmen.
Partial compensation was to be provided by the establishment of a Natives
representative council, although this was also dominated by chiefs and
headmen and had only limited advisory powers. However, under the Union
constitution such a change to the franchise required a two-thirds majority
in Parliament. This was not obtained until Hertzog’s National Party fused
with Smuts to form the United Party in the 1933 government. In 1936 the
representation of Natives Act was finally passed, removing the cape fran-
chise. It was partially driven through by the ‘compensation’ of extending
the reserve areas in the Native Trust and Land Act (see p. 67). Segregation
of African administration and political power was now complete.

84 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

Each of these pieces of legislation had its own specific context. But what
underlay the broad segregationist thrust that united them all?

The consensus amongst revisionist historians of the 1970s and 1980s
was that segregation represented the entrenchment of the cheap labor poli-
cies developed in the mines of Kimberley and the rand in the early stages
of the mineral revolution. The SANAc met during a period of consider-
able uncertainty after the upheavals of the South African War had led to
decreased migrant labor supplies as a result of the ‘rolling back’ of the ter-
ritorial conquest of Africans (see p. 35). Under these circumstances, milner’s
reconstruction administration was primarily concerned with establishing
a firm foundation for the mining industry. Seen in this light, the SANAc
recommendations show the extent to which segregation was a product of
the particular circumstances of South Africa’s mineral revolution. Thus
the principle of migrant labor, with subsistence in rural areas, was to be
entrenched and permanent urbanization leading to high wage demands
would be checked by influx controls.

In the subsequent decades the pre-eminence of the mining industry gave
way to other interest groups, whose votes influenced the policy of the
unified state in the direction of segregation. Notable amongst these were
white farmers needing both cheap labor and monopoly of land ownership
to meet the opportunities of an industrializing society, and white workers
demanding protectionist employment and wages. Hertzog’s legislation
reflected these forces (Lacey 1981).

There is no doubt that segregation was the product of South Africa’s
industrial revolution. But there is a danger of seeing it as a rigid and
uniform policy enforced by the state in the interests of mine owners, white
workers and farmers. more recently, some historians have examined the
complexity of segregationist thinking and the circumstances in which it
took root. Dubow has pointed out that before the 1920s, although key items
of segregationist legislation were introduced, they ‘were seldom interpreted
as integral elements of a united ideological package’ (1989: 39). The SANAc
recommendations were not adopted wholesale, and implementation of
segregation was still very patchy. The division of land was still incomplete
after the 1913 Land Act, proposals made in 1917 for administrative segrega-
tion were dropped and much uncertainty surrounded ‘Native Policy’ in the
period of heightened conflict on the rand between 1918 and 1922.
Permanently proletarianized black workers were growing in number,
including on the mines, and the future of the migrant labor system was by
no means secure by 1920.

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 85

It was only in the 1920s that segregationist ideology became firmly
entrenched, particularly in the emphasis on retribalization. In addition,
legislation acquired a much more overtly racist character. For instance, in
addition to the measures outlined above, the Hertzog administration
passed Acts limiting mixed marriages and placed increasingly stringent
controls over the mobility and property rights of Indians. This was not
solely a response to the needs of white employers for cheap labor. It was
also a reaction to the heightened conflicts of the 1920s, marked by worker
militancy, rural resistance, millenarianism and the dramatic growth of the
Industrial and commercial Workers’ Union (IcU) (see pp. 59–64). In an
important case study demonstrating this argument, marks (1978) showed
how Natal planters in the 1920s came to support the idea of bolstering the
Zulu royal chief in a separate administrative structure, in sharp contrast to
settler opposition to traditional rulers in the aftermath of the Bambatha
rebellion. The reason was the desire to bolster a more conservative system
as a means of social control against the alarming alternative focus of the
radical IcU.

Dubow has extended this to stress that the recreation of communal land
and legal control under chiefs and headmen was intended primarily to stem
the threat of an increasingly radicalized African proletariat. Thus Heaton
Nicholls, member of Parliament for Zululand and a key framer of the 1926
Native Bills, stated in their defense that ‘if we do not get back to commu-
nalism we will most certainly arrive very soon at communism’ (Dubow
1989: 71). In his campaigns of the late 1920s Hertzog linked the threat of
black ‘Bolshevism’ with African permanent urbanization and detribaliza-
tion. In his election speeches of 1929, the ‘Black Peril’ theme was his key
defense of segregation.

The ‘Black Peril’ slogan tapped a strong underlying current of white
supremacism which had certainly not diminished since the late nineteenth
century. For instance, opposition to miscegenation and fears of white
‘degeneration’ in unsegregated cities were widely held notions. Together
with this came the belief that Africans were innately incapable of becoming
fully incorporated members of ‘civilized’ society.

certainly this strong element of racism primarily explains the voter
support that segregation received in the 1920s. However, by no means all
segregationists were racist fanatics. Indeed, to many influential writers and
spokesmen in the early twentieth century, segregation was not only a rejec-
tion of the cape assimilationist tradition but also of overt forms of racial
subordination. A new form of pro-segregationist liberalism was emerging

86 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

which stressed the need to preserve and protect traditional African culture
against the onslaught of industrial society. Thus, for instance, Howard Pim,
a friend and adviser of milner, stressed the need to enable the African to
live ‘under natural conditions which he understands and has created for
himself ’, distant from the disintegrating effects of proletarianization in the
towns (rich 1984: 5). And Ernest Stubbs, Native commissioner in the
eastern Transvaal, believed that segregation would be a means of protecting
Africans from white land encroachment (rich 1980).

Such views were not so much the outcome of concepts of biological
racial inferiority as a positive assertion of the values of an existence which
their proponents believed was traditionally African. They were strongly
influenced by anthropological studies which developed in South Africa in
the 1910s and 1920s and which presented the image of a cohesive, tribal
and unchanging African rural culture (Dubow 1987; Landau 2010a: 223-7).
Thus academics such as Edgar Brookes, later a vocal critic of apartheid,
acted as advisor to Hertzog and strongly supported the 1926 Native Bills
on the grounds that they protected Africans from detribalization. Such
views were highly influential and were shared by many administrators in
the Native Affairs Department. And in his 1929 lectures at oxford, Smuts,
although in parliamentary opposition to Hertzog, gave firm support for
protectionist segregation. He rejected both the view of ‘the African as
essentially inferior’ and the assimilationist approach that destroyed ‘the
basis of his African system which was his highest good’. The solution, he
believed, was segregation. ‘The new policy . . . is to foster an indigenous
native culture or system of cultures, and to cease to force the African into
alien European moulds.’ Segregation was to replace both assimilation and
repression (Dubow 1987: 84).

It was on these grounds that many local Native Affairs Department
officials accepted the principles of separate administration, particularly
those who had experienced the protectionist mould of the old ‘Transkeian’
system of indirect rule. However, there were major problems with this kind
of justification for segregation. Firstly, African societies had never been
unchanging and static. The notion of ‘traditional culture’ embodied in
codes of ‘native law’ and chiefly authorities was as much a creation of early
twentieth-century academics and administrators as anything else. Secondly,
by the 1920s the reserves were clearly incapable of maintaining any separate
political and social order. The process of colonial conquest, new taxes
and long exposure to migrant labor, together with land deterioration and
general impoverishment, made a mockery of the idealized perception

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 87

that they could be a repository of a ‘traditional’ way of life for all Africans.
The breakdown of the pre-colonial polities had gone too far to turn the
clock back.

By the end of the 1920s many of the liberal segregationists were coming
to realize this and were changing their minds. most prominently, Edgar
Brookes made a public recantation in 1927, and others such as Pim fol-
lowed suit. Hertzog’s insistence on overt racial discrimination, marked
particularly by the job color bar, was one source of disillusionment. Some
administrators objected to the way in which the 1927 Native Administration
Act turned the Native Affairs Department into a repressive bureaucratic
body which broke with the older paternalistic traditions (Dubow 1986).
The repressive nature of forced segregation was becoming too evident to
ignore.

By the mid-1930s and the 1940s the close interdependence of Africans
and urban employers rendered protectionist segregation an invalid notion.
Liberal attention diverted away from the hopes of preserving an idealized
African lifestyle in the reserves to issues of social welfare in the slums of
the cities. That segregation was racial exploitation became crystal clear. The
foundation of the Liberal Party in opposition to apartheid in 1953 showed
that many earlier supporters of segregation had made an about turn.

The ideology of segregation thus emerged in the context of an industri-
alizing society, founded on specific practices which at the turn of the
twentieth century had been primarily associated with the mining industry.
Although legislative foundations such as the job color bar, the Land Act
and urban segregation were responses to specific white class interests, by
the 1920s segregation was primarily intended to prevent African proletari-
anization, which both threatened ‘traditional culture’ and led to radicaliza-
tion and overt conflict.

Segregation was thus a complex response to the circumstances of early
twentieth-century South Africa. It was not inevitable, nor was it immutable.
In the 1940s, it began to break down as the number of Africans moving
permanently to the cities grew and as calls were increasingly made for their
integration into South Africa outside the reserves. This was the direct result
of the growth of manufacturing industry that had been under way since
the end of the Depression in the early 1930s and which was given a particu-
lar boost by the Second World War. The growth rate of black employees in
manufacturing exceeded that of whites, drawing primarily on newly urban-
ized workers (Nattrass 2005). Feinstein (2005) has pointed out that the
needs of manufacturing employers were incompatible with the policies of

88 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

migrant labor and black urban restrictions which had served the mining
industry and farmers so well in earlier decades.

Indeed the 1940s has now been identified as something of a ‘liberal
interregnum’ when a different kind of social order was a real possibility
(Dubow 2005). Ideas were canvassed within the Smuts government about
relaxing urban restrictions on Africans, recognizing black trade unions in
bargaining procedures and providing broader social welfare for all. However
Smuts refused to understand black demands for political rights, there was
little sympathy among white voters for such ideas, and enthusiasm faded
after the end of the war (Jeeves 2004). With the development of apartheid
a policy was found to resurrect segregation, albeit in a rather different form
and with no remnant of the liberal protectionist notion. But before exam-
ining the roots of apartheid we need to see how segregation was viewed by
those who were at its receiving end.

Black responses to segregation

In the previous chapter we examined many examples of local conflicts in
town and countryside during the early decades of South Africa’s industri-
alization. Here we shall look at the broader political and organizational
responses of blacks to segregation between the late nineteenth century and
the 1940s. This period has often been seen as that of the foundation and
growth of a modern African nationalism, although such developments
were closely intertwined with earlier forms of popular protest (Landau
2010a). There is also a danger of portraying an ever-strengthening and
unified national movement. There was much diversity and fluctuation in
the development of black political movements.

The roots of African political organization have often been traced to the
foundation of the African National congress in 1912. However, as odendaal
(1984) has shown, black protest politics had a long tradition before then.
The earliest examples of black political organizations were found in the
eastern cape in the late nineteenth century, where the franchise involved
the propertied in politics, led by a mission-educated elite. competition for
African votes became marked in the 1880s when rival political parties
encouraged voter registration, and black political activity was marked by
petitions, mass meetings and newspapers (Saunders 1970). organizations
such as the Native Educational Association (1879) and Imbumba ya
manyama (Union of Black People) (1882) were founded to air issues of
particular concern to black voters. Their membership strongly overlapped

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 89

with those involved in the electoral committees, agents’ meetings and reg-
istration campaigns that surrounded the political parties.

Political divisions soon emerged. A key figure was John Tengo Jabavu, a
mission-educated teacher whose support for independent political candi-
dates gave backing for his newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu (Native opinion).
Through it strong protests were registered at the increase in the franchise
qualifications of 1887 and other grievances of the African middle class.
However, by the 1890s Jabavu’s support for Afrikaner Bond candidates led
to the founding of an alternative newspaper, Izwi Labantu (Voice of the
Black People), and the formation of the South African Native congress,
with leading members based in East London and led by the cleric Walter
rubusana and magistrate Allan Soga. The congress grew in membership
and organization with many local area branches and it became the main
focus of cape African political expression in the period around and fol-
lowing the South African War, with strongly pro-British sympathies.

Despite the lack of constitutional outlets for black political involvement
in the other parts of South Africa, organizations did emerge in the height-
ened political atmosphere of the South African War. The Natal Native
congress, led by the teacher and minister John Dube, provided an outlet
for the aspirations of the kholwa landowning class with its newspaper
Ilanga lase Natal (Natal Sun). Similar though smaller groupings also arose
in the Free State and the Transvaal, and other African newspapers appeared,
such as Sol Plaatje’s Sesotho Tsala ea Batho (Friend of the People).

Despite regional and political differences, African political involvement
before 1910 was characterized by a liberalism which reflected the position
of the African elite within colonial society, and which had little contact with
more populist rural protest movements such as Transkei protests against
taxation or the Bambatha revolt. mission-educated and predominantly
middle-class professionals, the members of such bodies called for equal
access to education and an extension of the cape’s limited black franchise
to other parts of the country, but they accepted the paternalism of white
society. Thus the executive of the South African Native congress reassured
the British colonial Secretary in 1903 that the formation of independent
African churches should not be seen as a challenge to white ecclesiastical
and government authority, since

the black races are too conscious of their dependence upon the white mis-
sionaries and of their obligations towards the British race, and the benefits
to be derived by their presence in the general control and guidance of the

90 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

civil and religious affairs of the country to harbour foolish notions of politi-
cal ascendancy. (Karis and carter 1973: vol. 1, 18)

This cooperative stance was clear in the approval given by the SANAc
(1903–5) of the open conduct of African political activities, which pre-
sented little threat to the status quo.

However, African disillusionment with the benefits of colonial rule
began to set in shortly after this. The failure of the Union constitution to
extend the cape’s non-racial franchise led to fruitless petitions and appeals
to both the local and British administrations. The optimism of the 1890s
was shattered. Segregationist legislation of the early Union government,
notably the mines and Works Act and the Natives Land Bill, showed that
African interests could not be served by influencing white politicians on an
individual basis, and this acted as a catalyst for more permanent organized
unity. Delegates from throughout South Africa met in 1912 in Bloemfontein
to form the South African Native National congress (SANNc) (renamed
the African National congress (ANc) in 1923).

The declared intention of the SANNc as set out in its first constitution
was

to encourage mutual understanding and to bring together into common
action as one political people all tribes and clans of various tribes or races
and by means of combined effort and united political organization to defend
their freedom, rights and privileges. (Karis and carter 1973: vol. 1, 77)

However, it was far from a mass movement. It included some of the main
chiefs and rural leaders, but its members were still primarily middle-class
men who feared ‘being thrust back into the ranks of the urban and rural
poor’ by the legislation of the post-Union years (Lodge 1983: 2).

The tactics of the SANNc were accordingly moderate. It still hoped to
exert influence by petitions, delegations and journalism. Thus opposition
to the Land Act was epitomized by the writing of its Secretary, Sol Plaatje,
and by a delegation of protest to London. There was little contact with
popular protests such as the pass-burning campaigns in Bloemfontein or
the labor disputes of the rand. Loyalty to the British Empire was still
stressed, and shown by the suspension of all protest during the First
World War.

The ineffectiveness of such approaches became clear by the end of the
decade. In the years following the end of the war, a diversity of African elite
political responses emerged. congress’s leader, Dube, cautiously accepted

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 91

the principle of segregation, although objecting to the unfairness of the
terms of the Land Act. This led to his ousting from the presidency, but he
remained in control of the Natal branch of congress. In this influential
position he stressed the need for black self-help education rather than chal-
lenges to the state, in a tradition which owed much to his experience of
Booker Washington’s ideas during a visit to the United States. The Natal
congress was dominated by kholwa landowners, who came actively to
support the re-establishment of the Zulu monarchy and the principle of
Zulu ethnic nationalism, symbolized by the founding of Inkatha ka Zulu
in 1922–3 as a conservative bulwark against the radicalism of the IcU
(marks 1986a: 36–7). Dube and his supporters seemed to follow the pro-
segregationist stance of the liberal protectionists, a position that was par-
ticularly strongly held in Natal.

By contrast, in the Transvaal a section of the congress leaders did iden-
tify with the more radical labor movement on the rand. There they faced
common grievances of low wages, inadequate housing and tightening of
the pass laws. As a result they gave support to the striking municipal
workers in Johannesburg in 1918 and to the anti-pass campaigns of the
following year, and showed sympathy to the mine workers’ strike of 1920
(Bonner 1982). However, this class alliance was always precarious, and
congress leadership was never wholly in favor of strike action and always
nervous of a mass uprising. With the suppression of the 1920 strike, ANc
leaders distanced themselves from the ‘Bolshevism’ of labor protest. Vaguely
conciliatory moves on the part of the government, such as an enquiry into
the pass laws and labor issues, were sufficient to disengage them from the
main body of protesters.

cooperation with employers is also apparent in Willan’s case study of
Sol Plaatje’s relations with the monopoly de Beers mining company in
Kimberley in 1918–19 (1978). De Beers gave active support to Plaatje’s
self-improving and christian-based ‘Brotherhood movement’ in a clear bid
to keep out ‘the black Bolsheviks of Johannesburg’. As this example shows,
congress support for worker protest was limited to the rand.

congress alienation from popular protest continued into the 1920s.
many middle-class African leaders followed Dube’s example and were
involved in joint deliberations with the liberal segregationists, rejecting the
radicalism of the IcU and the millenarianism of rural protests such as
the Wellington movement. However, the Hertzog bills of 1926 to remove
the cape African franchise gave them a shock, and revealed the barrenness
of a segregationism which sought to recreate a tribalism from which they

92 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

were far removed. This led to some reconciliation with other movements.
Josiah gumede, elected as President of congress in 1927, was much influ-
enced by garveyism as well as open to contact with the communist Party
of South Africa (cPSA). The way to this had been opened by the cPSA’s
temporary re-orientation from white worker mobilization to acceptance of
cooperation with reformist middle-class organizations such as congress.
The heightened tensions of the 1929 ‘Black Peril’ election gave further
meaning to such an alliance.

However, by 1930 the communist Party had again withdrawn from such
contacts, and a more conservative backlash in congress was shown when
gumede was voted out of office and replaced by Pixley Seme. In the 1930s
the ANc went into sharp decline. Its cautious and conservative orientation
towards the reserve chiefs and the aspiring African commercial and middle
classes provided little link with the majority of the population facing rural
impoverishment and urban proletarianization. militants in the organiza-
tion were expelled and it lapsed into almost total inactivity.

Broadly similar patterns of class representation and tactics can be identi-
fied in the political organization of other South Africans who were threat-
ened by segregationist measures. By the end of the nineteenth century a
sense of ‘colored’ identity was growing, particularly in cape Town and
amongst the professional classes who were facing ostracism from white
racism but were concerned to distance themselves from Africans, who were
subject to greater discrimination, and to claim rights to full participation
and assimilation into ‘civilized’ society (goldin 1987). In 1902 members of
the colored elite, concerned at the establishment of an African location in
cape Town and the application of pass laws to Africans which they feared
might come to be applied to them, founded the African Political (later
People’s) organization (APo). Under the leadership of Abdullah
Abdurahman, a member of the cape Town city council, the APo protested
strongly against the provision of compulsory state education for whites only
as well as the lack of enfranchisement of coloreds outside the cape.

However, as with the SANNc, there were limits to how far the APo was
prepared to go. Its goal was colored assimilation into white society, not
equality for all (Adhikari 2005). It showed little support for radical action,
much faith in British liberal principles and overt support for the British
cause in the First World War. In the early 1920s the APo organized peti-
tions against increasing discrimination, but these were ignored by the gov-
ernment and the organization was seen to be increasingly irrelevant to both
the radical trade union movement representing colored workers and to the

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 93

more conservative colored middle class. The APo did nothing to back the
campaign to support farm-worker strikes in the western cape against low
wages in the late 1920s. Hopes that coloreds would be given a ‘new deal’
were raised by one of Hertzog’s 1926 bills, which confirmed colored voting
rights in the cape and proposed its extension to the whole Union, in con-
trast to the disenfranchisement of Africans. APo opposition to segrega-
tionism was consequently weakened. By 1936, when Hertzog no longer
needed colored voting support, this bill was dropped. The APo could offer
little effective protest (Lewis 1987).

Another focus for political organization amongst the disenfranchised lay
amongst the Indian population of Natal and the Transvaal. Early organiza-
tions established in both regions in the 1890s represented the commercial
classes, opposed to franchise restrictions and trading limitations but
making no contact with the grievances of Indian indentured laborers and
their descendants. Between 1906 and 1914 greater radicalization did
develop, and passive resistance campaigns, largely organized by mahatma
gandhi, opposed registration taxes and other discriminatory legislation. In
1913, such campaigns briefly linked up with a general strike of rural
workers. But then splits again emerged, partly because of gandhi’s depar-
ture for India, but also because the commercial elite who dominated both
the Natal and Transvaal Indian congress consciously distanced themselves
from worker radicalism, particularly as represented in the late 1920s by
support of Indian workers for the IcU (Swan 1987).

It was only in the mid-1930s with the implementation of the Hertzog
bills that a revival of organizational opposition took place and a new bid
for unified action was made. In 1935 over 400 delegates from a variety of
organizations, including Jabavu, Seme, leaders of the communist Party, the
APo and the South African Indian congress, met together and formed
the All African convention (AAc). Again, the delegates were primarily
professional and middle-class men, who were now alienated from the
repressive segregationism of the Hertzog years. The AAc’s tactics of peti-
tion and moderate reformism, however, differed little from earlier methods
and it met with as little response from the government as did the SANNc
in 1912.

The failings of the AAc and other organizations to meet the challenge
of segregation led to the emergence of more radical breakaway groupings.
In the western cape disillusionment with the inactivity and reformism of
the APo led to the foundation of the National Liberation League (NLL),
led by Abdurahman’s daughter, ‘cissie’ gool, a prominent member of the

94 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

communist Party. Disgusted by the AAc’s refusal to boycott segregated
administrative structures, the NLL called for a national organization to
protest more radically against segregation which would unite all black
South Africans. The Non-European United Front was the result, which
during the Second World War renamed as the Non-European Unity
movement and produced the ‘Ten Point Programme’ (1943) identifying the
‘present system in South Africa’ as ‘similar to the Nazi system of Herrenvolk’,
and calling for a united stand of all opposed to segregation and the estab-
lishment of democracy as the rule ‘of the people, by the people, for the
people’ (Karis and carter 1973: vol. 2, 352–7). The background to this
process of radicalization was not only disillusionment with the failings of
existing organizations, but also the upsurge of popular protest that emerged
in the 1940s (see pp. 70–1). At last this found resonance in black political
organizations.

The ANc had undergone some revival with reorganization and an active
membership recruitment campaign under Alfred Xuma, elected President
in 1940. At the same time, younger members of the ANc, less imbued with
respect for white authority and chiefly power than their elders and con-
cerned with the failure of congress to respond to the urban and labor
protests, challenged the orientation of the organization. The congress
youth League, formed in 1943 under the leadership of Anton Lembede,
stressed the importance of African leadership and self-determination, the
need to ‘go down to the masses’ and the importance of such direct action
as boycotts, strikes and trade union mobilization. This marked a sharp
break with the deferential policies and practices of the ANc in the 1930s.
Some of the youth League leaders, such as Lembede, Walter Sisulu, oliver
Tambo and Nelson mandela, were elected to the executive alongside older-
style liberals and communist Party members. In general, however, the
youth Leaguers were suspicious of the intentions of the white-dominated
communist Party. Lembede in particular stressed the need for African
control over political ideology, thus anticipating the black consciousness
developments of subsequent decades, although after his early death in 1947
some of the cohesion of his political philosophy was weakened. Nonetheless,
the youth Leaguers had moved beyond the view of their congress predeces-
sors that African nationalism meant black unity as one part of a wider
South Africa. For them Africans were by right of their indigenous status
and numerical preponderance the only people entitled to rule South Africa
(gerhart 1978: 67).

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 95

Events after the Second World War gave further impetus to more mili-
tant strategies. Popular protest continued, marked by strikes on the rand
and in Durban. Indian passive resistance campaigns were renewed in the
Transvaal and Natal against the ghetto Act, which limited areas of Indian
property ownership. In this way the leadership of the South African Indian
congress was mobilized together with wider worker support and ANc,
Unity movement and communist Party sympathies, although Freund has
argued that many Durban Indian workers who took part in strike action
in these years viewed African labor as competition, and were less enthusi-
astic about cross-racial alliances (1995: 50–63). These events brought some
international condemnation of the Smuts government, with the newly
independent India breaking off economic and diplomatic ties in the first
example of sanctions against South Africa, although the United Nations
refused to condemn what it regarded as matters of internal policy.

The example of national determination provided by the independence
of India in 1947 and set out in the 1941 Atlantic charter influenced the
youth Leaguers of the ANc. moreover, they faced the threat of white
demands for the rigid imposition of segregation, a threat brought to reality
in the victory of the National Party in 1948 under its slogan of apartheid.

Against this background the youth League produced its Programme of
Action (1949), which marked a decisive break with the conciliatory policies
of the previous decades. It called for ‘national freedom’ and political inde-
pendence from white domination, a sign of the influence of Lembede’s
Africanism, together with rejection of all forms of segregation and the use
of weapons of boycott, civil disobedience and strike. These tactics reflected
the changing membership of congress and the final recognition that seg-
regation had to be counteracted at the popular level and by more drastic
means than those used previously. The problem was that opponents of
discrimination now faced a newly determined segregationist government.

Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid

Apartheid emerged as the slogan of the gesuiwerde Nasionale Party (later
renamed the Herenigde Nasionale Party (HNP)), which originated as a
splinter group from Hertzog’s National Party in 1934 and captured leader-
ship of political Afrikanerdom in the 1940s. In 1948 the HNP narrowly
won power. Apartheid had been a means by which it drew voters together
behind a revived Afrikaner nationalist political movement.

96 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

Afrikaner nationalism is a topic surrounded by mythology. Like all
nationalist movements, it has created its own symbolism and its own
history stressing the unified experience of the Afrikaner volk: born on the
old cape frontier, trekking away from the British in 1836, surviving attacks
by hostile Africans in the interior, defending themselves against the British
in the 1870s and again in the South African War, suffering maltreatment
in British concentration camps, rebelling against South African support for
the British cause in the First World War, partially triumphing in the 1920s
under the Hertzog government which made Afrikaans an official language,
reacting against the English-dominated Fusion government of Hertzog and
Smuts in the 1930s and early 1940s, finally winning the election of 1948
and – the ultimate achievement – breaking from the commonwealth and
establishing a republic in 1961.

certainly all of these events took place. But such a one-track view ignores
the diversity of experience of Afrikaners of different regions and classes.
The notion of Afrikaner nationalism had to be consciously forged rather
than growing spontaneously. In this it did not differ from other nationalist
movements in nineteenth-century Europe, or indeed from African nation-
alism in South Africa. Apartheid was an important means by which politi-
cal unity was forged out of Afrikaner diversity in the 1940s.

Like African political consciousness, Afrikaner nationalism was rooted
in the experience and leadership of middle-class teachers and clerics in the
late nineteenth-century cape, although in its western rather than eastern
region. A group of them in Paarl founded the genootskap van regte
Afrikaners (Society of True Afrikaners) in 1875 ‘to stand for our language,
our nation and our land’, produced a newspaper, Die Afrikaanse Patriot,
written in Afrikaans rather than the Dutch currently in standard use, and
published their own history book stressing the distinctiveness of the
Afrikaner experience and the god-given destiny they possessed as a chosen
people. This was the first time that such a view had been articulated. It was
absent in the mid-nineteenth-century period of the great Trek and the
establishment of the Boer polities of the interior. Du Toit (1983) has argued
that its emergence in the 1870s and 1880s was a conscious attempt by an
elite class to stress social cohesion in the face of a process of industrializa-
tion and modernization over which it had little control.

In 1880 this movement found political expression in the foundation of
the Afrikaner Bond, which contested seats in the cape Legislative Assembly
and established branches in other parts of South Africa. But in general the
idea of Afrikaner unity attracted little support outside the western cape.

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 97

The governments of the Free State and the Transvaal saw no unity of inter-
ests with Afrikaners in the cape, and by the 1890s the Afrikaner Bond was
in parliamentary alliance with their arch-enemy, cecil rhodes.

However, in the western cape the ‘Patriot’ movement did find
other allies. giliomee (1987) has shown how the wealthy wine and grain
farmers of the region faced economic difficulties in the depression of the
late 1870s and came to identify their interests in opposition to the English
merchant and commercial classes. They demanded protective tariffs for
their produce, state support for agriculture and adequate controls over
labor. Not only did they support the Afrikaner Bond, they also backed
local financial institutions in opposition to the London-based Standard
Bank, and began to build a local capital base. By 1915, a strong Afrikaner
nationalist bourgeoisie had emerged in the western cape, consisting of
farmers and professionals who were shareholders and directors of major
financial institutions and intellectuals of the Dutch reformed church
(Drc) and Stellenbosch University. Afrikaner capital was used in 1915 to
found the Nasionale Pers publishing house and the newspaper De Burger,
and to set up the large trust and insurance companies Santam and Sanlam
in 1918.

In the Free State and South African (Transvaal) republics, Afrikaners
controlled the state. Attack from outside, such as the British annexation of
the Transvaal in 1877 and the rebellion of 1881 which ousted them, mobi-
lized support for the republican cause by using Afrikaner symbols. But the
commercialization of agriculture produced marked class divisions amongst
Afrikaners in the north, and by the end of the nineteenth century poor
bywoners had little in common with the wealthy farmers and commercial
groups who controlled government (giliomee 1989). During the South
African War support for Afrikaner nationalism grew, especially in the Boer
commandos, but this was not universal (Pretorius 2002). In particular,
some bywoners and poor white tenants had refused to join commandos led
by the large landowners, and some even joined the British.

In the following decades Afrikaner class interests became even more
divided, especially with the move of young men and women from the land
into the towns. This gave some cause for alarm to Dutch reformed minis-
ters, who saw the waning of church influence in the cities. In addition, a
small group of Afrikaner intellectuals and teachers, alienated by the angli-
cization of state education under reconstruction, had formed separate
schools, funded from Holland and independent of the state, advocating a
distinctively Afrikaner ‘christian National’ education.

98 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

In a conscious attempt to develop an Afrikaner ethnic identity in the
face of industrialization and class division, these northern clerics and
teachers mobilized support for the Afrikaans language and published news-
papers and popular magazines such as Die Huisgenoot (Home companion),
stressing the common heritage of all Afrikaners, in an approach which
mirrored the emphasis of anthropological studies on African ‘traditional
culture’ of the time (Hofmeyr 1987). Furthermore, in 1918 a secret society,
the Afrikaner Broederbond (Brotherhood), was established, dominated by
Transvaal intellectuals and clergy, to mobilize political support. In 1929 it
was instrumental in the founding of the Federasie van Afrikaanse
Kultuurverenigings (Federation of Afrikaner cultural Associations) (FAK)
to unify and disseminate a sense of separate Afrikaner identity.

Important studies since 2000 have shown the crucial role that women
played in the growth of Afrikaner nationalism during this period. They
were far from being passive consumers of ideas promoted by men, as earlier
historians had implied. Boer women played an active role in the South
African War (see p. 34), and in its aftermath in the period between 1902
and 1914, they promoted Afrikaner political and cultural ideals through
women’s nationalist movements (Bradford 2000b). For example the
Afrikaanse christelike Vroue Vereniging (Afrikaner christian Women’s
Society), founded in 1904, was concerned with the upliftment of poor
white Afrikaner women in the towns. In the process the volkmoeders of
the AcVV also promoted the Afrikaans language and called for racial
purity and the exclusion of colored Afrikaans speakers from the volk (du
Toit 2003).

Such developments certainly played an important role in mobilizing
popular perceptions. But political mobilization of Afrikaner nationalism
was not easy. Divisions of wealth and class persisted: bywoners and those
Afrikaners who worked as unskilled laborers in the towns had little in
common with the teachers and intellectuals of the Afrikaner cultural move-
ment. However, during the First World War some of these divisions were
breached. In 1914 a number of ex-Boer commando leaders rebelled against
the Union government and marched to the defense of the germans in
South-West Africa. most of those who fought under them were ‘desperate
men’, landless bywoners from the northern Free State and southwestern
Transvaal who had lost out in the rapid changes that had taken place since
the South African War (Swart 2000). The rebellion was put down and its
leader executed, but this act was identified by some Afrikaner intellectuals
as the creation of a martyr.

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 99

Hertzog’s National Party openly identified with the rebellion, opposed
South African participation in ‘England’s war’ and certainly benefited from
heightened Afrikaner nationalist sentiment during the war years. But its
main body of support were farmers who resented the dominance of mining
and British capital interests in the state. Some poorer Afrikaners were also
drawn in, but they still had little in common with landowners; and as they
became increasingly urbanized, their class interests led them to support the
Labour Party. When in power after 1924, Hertzog gave support to official
recognition of Afrikaans and introduced a new national flag to replace the
Union Jack, but he placed greater emphasis on white national unity (‘South
Africa first’) in contrast to imperial control than to separatist Afrikaner
ethnic mobilization.

Hertzog’s alliance with Smuts in the Fusion government of 1934 marked
a clear rejection of Afrikaner separatism and an alliance with British capital
interests. It led to the breakaway of the gesuiwerde Nasionale Party
(‘Purified’ National Party) under malan. much of the ethnic symbolism
built up by the Afrikaner Broederbond, the FAK and Nasionale Pers swung
behind the new party. The western cape farmer–intelligentsia alliance fol-
lowed, but in the Free State and the Transvaal support for malan was
limited to some academics, teachers and clerics. Fusion threatened the
status and position of these middle-class Afrikaners who had obtained
greater access to government and administrative positions.

o’meara (1983) argues that Fusion was a turning point in the political
mobilization of Afrikaner ethnicity. After 1934 a conscious effort was made
by the National Party to capture power by mobilizing Afrikaners across
divisions of region and class. This was marked in three main ways. First,
Afrikaner culture was further defined and propagated through the Afrikaner
Broederbond, the FAK and christian Nationalist education, stressing the
need for volkseenheid (unity of the volk) in the face of political party divi-
sions. The height of this development was the Eeufees celebration of the
centenary of the great Trek in 1938, which mobilized widespread popular
interest and support in the symbols of an Afrikaner past, represented by
the processions of ox wagons through the country and the founding of the
Voortrekker monument in Pretoria.

Secondly, there was recognition of the importance of Afrikaner workers
and an attempt to win them away from trade unions dominated by English
speakers with socialist ideas inimical to Afrikaner unity. There were clear
signs of the potential. For example Afrikaner women in the garment
Workers Union rejected the notion that urbanized female workers were

100 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

fallen volk, ‘insisted that the factory workers deserved to be treated as a
legitimate and respectable part of the Afrikaner nation’ (Vincent 2000: 68),
and willingly participated in the Eeufees. They thus did not reject their
ethnic identity as Afrikaners in favor of a broader class unity. Attempts to
establish alternative Afrikaner labor organizations were made which met
with success where Afrikaner workers felt alienated from older craft unions,
such as in the mines, but were not entirely successful elsewhere (o’meara
1978). But although by no means all Afrikaner workers broke with the older
unions, enough shifted loyalty from the Labour Party to the National Party
to help it to win victory in 1948.

Thirdly, Afrikaner business and capital were actively encouraged and
developed to meet the challenge of the overwhelming domination of these
fields by English interests. Afrikaner capital had been largely based in the
western cape, but closer links between Sanlam and the Afrikaner
Broederbond were now forged. In 1939, in the aftermath of the Eeufees
euphoria, Sanlam underwrote the reddingsdaadfons (Act of rescue Fund)
to support fledgling Afrikaner business interests. Stressing the need to
counteract foreign-dominated capital and monopolies, which were stated
to have caused proletarianization and class division amongst the volk
and driven them into competition with black labor, Afrikaner business
claimed by contrast to serve the entire Afrikaner community rather than
merely enriching one sector of it. This volkskapitalisme marked a significant
break with previous Afrikaner nationalist promotion of an idealized rural
and pre-capitalist society. Afrikaner nationalism was now dealing head
on with the realities of an industrialized society, although the impor-
tance of the earlier volkskultuur movement should not be underestimated
(giliomee 1983).

It was only in the 1940s, however, that this process began to bear political
fruit, largely aided by other events in South Africa and abroad. Smuts’s
immediate support of Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War in
1939 led to Hertzog’s split from the Fusion alliance and his swift political
demise. With him went supporters of the old Nationalist Party and those
who could not follow Smuts’s automatic acceptance of British interests.
malan’s ‘purified’ National Party, which had benefited from its backing of
the 1938 Eeufees, was now poised to fill the gap as the true political home
of Afrikaner nationalism. Pro-german sympathy was also expressed by
some Afrikaner intellectuals and by the militant ossewa Brandwag, which
was founded as a cultural movement in 1938 but turned to active sabotage
during the war. However, few Afrikaners actively supported such develop-

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 101

ments. malan’s National Party broke with the ossewa Brandwag in 1941
and consciously moderated its support for fascist movements after 1943,
although it continued an ‘uneasy courtship’ with right-wing ideas long after
the end of the war (Furlong 1991: 208). The main thrust of support for
malan came not from the far-right organizations, but from an alliance of
voters who saw their own position threatened by the economic and social
changes within South Africa of the war period and its aftermath.

In the 1943 elections, the National Party emerged as the official opposi-
tion, with forty-three seats against the government United and Labour
Party coalition of 103 seats. Between then and 1948, a number of United
Party and Labour Party voters shifted allegiance to the National Party.
Paramount in this was the breakdown of segregation, marked by African
urban influx, the relaxation of pass laws and the apparent inability of the
state to deal with the rising tide of black protest. These were the products
of the boost to secondary industry and urbanization provided by the war,
as we have seen (pp. 69–73).

Although malan had emphasized Afrikaner ethnic identity in the 1943
campaign, it was only after 1945 that the National Party began to stress
racial issues and the need for a firm ‘native policy’. Arguments for the need
to protect distinct ‘cultures’ tended to dominate National Party thinking,
owing as much to the views of the earlier segregationists as to overt notions
of scientifically proven white race supremacy (Dubow 1992). In opposition
to the government’s Fagan commission, which recognized the inevitability
of permanent African urbanization and the impracticability of enforcing
the 1936 Land Act, the National Party’s Sauer report of 1946 thus recom-
mended consolidation of the reserves, rigorous controls over African urban
settlement, segregated facilities for coloreds and Indians, and the abolition
of the white representatives of Africans in Parliament. coined as apartheid,
this policy became the basis of malan’s campaign in the 1948 election.

Was apartheid simply segregation by another name? Some historians
have argued that this essentially was so, although apartheid involved a more
ruthless system of labor control. However, Wolpe (1972) has stressed the
essential difference that by the 1940s the existing reserves were palpably
incapable of maintaining a subsistence base for migrant workers, as earlier
segregationist policy had envisaged. Apartheid thinkers thus planned to
bolster the reserves with possibly more land, but also with manufacturing
development closer to their boundaries.

But in the 1940s apartheid was not a single cohesive policy (Posel 1987).
Although all of its supporters agreed on the need to maintain white

102 WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID

supremacy by the total exclusion of Africans from political power, there
were differences of opinion over other aspects of apartheid policy. Some
intellectuals in the tradition of the Broederbond and the FAK advocated
‘total segregation’, with exclusion of Africans from ‘white’ towns and rural
areas, their replacement by white immigrants and the consolidation of the
reserves as self-contained economic units. Such a policy was clearly articu-
lated by writers like W.m.m. Eiselen (1948), later to be the National Party
government Secretary of Native Affairs, and it also appealed to white
workers. But businessmen and farmers needing continued access to black
labor favored a more ‘practical apartheid’, whereby labor mobility would
be strictly controlled by the state, which would also permit supplies of
African rural and urban workers to be obtained. The Sauer report was
sufficiently vague to accommodate both of these viewpoints and thus to
attract a wide range of differing class interests. The ambiguity of apartheid
was its electoral strength, although its differing interpretations were to
emerge fully after 1948.

Apartheid thus provided the means of cementing the cross-class
Afrikaner alliance which had been consciously forged in the preceding
decades. It appealed to traditional National Party supporters: teachers,
clerics, intellectuals and the large-scale farmers of the western cape. But it
also attracted significant new categories of voters. many white workers,
threatened by black urbanization during the Second World War and influ-
enced by the FAK assault on the trade unions, deserted the Labour Party
for malan. Also Transvaal and Free State farmers were attracted to the
prospect of cheap contract labor provision at a time when urbanization
was making this difficult to obtain. They were also hostile to the Smuts
government’s price control policy, which kept food cheaper for the towns.
And small-scale Afrikaner traders and businessmen in Natal and the
Transvaal welcomed the removal of Indian competition in more strictly
segregated cities.

Smuts was somewhat complacent in the 1948 election campaign and
vulnerable to malan’s accusations that he had placed British imperial inter-
ests above those of his own people, and that under him segregation was
collapsing. Nonetheless, the results were close and malan obtained only a
slender majority. Apartheid had proved the basis of a rather fragile alliance
behind this Afrikaner nationalist victory and was by no means pre-ordained.
other options had existed in the 1940s, a decade of liberal hopes and of
rising African nationalist expectations (Dubow 2005). Few of malan’s

WHITE SUPrEmAcy, SEgrEgATIoN AND APArTHEID 103

opponents believed that such a government with such a policy could last
for long.

Suggestions for further reading

cell, J. 1982: The highest stage of white supremacy: the origins of segregation in South
Africa and the American South. cambridge: cambridge University Press.

marks, S. and Trapido, S. 1987: The politics of race, class and nationalism in twentieth-
century South Africa. London: Longman.

o’meara, D. 1983: Volkskapitalisme: class capital and ideology in the development of
Afrikaner nationalism, 1934–1948. cambridge: cambridge University Press;
Johannesburg: ravan.

A Companion to African History, First Edition

Edited by William H. Worger,
Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Apartheid, literally meaning apartness, and pronounced apart‐hate, was the name
for the policy and practice of white supremacy through which the National Party
ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994.1 The origins of the policy – and its
implementation – have been highly contested, and the consequences for South
Africa since 1994 even more so, but always in separate conversations, racially and
ethnically distinct, reflecting the profound impact of institutionalized racism on
South Africa past and present.

When Hendrik Verwoerd made his first speech to the South African Senate in
1948, he linked apartheid in theory and practice to the previous policies of segre-
gation that had been enforced nationally since the formation of the Union of
South Africa in 1910:

there is nothing new in what we are propagating, nor have we made any claim that
there is anything new in it. The claim we have made is that we are propagating the
traditional policy of Afrikanerdom, the traditional policy of South Africa and of all
those who have made South Africa their home … whether it is called segregation or
by the clear Afrikaans word apartheid.2

The laws underpinning segregation that he would have had in mind would
have included the South Africa Act of 1909, which racially restricted elected
members of Parliament (House and Senate) to “British subject[s] of European
descent”; the Mines and Works Act of 1911 which restricted all skilled jobs in the

Apartheid Forgotten and Remembered

NaNcy L. cLark aNd WiLLiam H. Worger

Chapter twenty-three

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central http://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.

C
op

yr
ig

ht
©

2
01

8.
J

oh
n

W
ile

y
&

S
on

s,
In

co
rp

or
at

ed
. A

ll
rig

ht
s

re
se

rv
ed

432 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

mining industry to whites; the Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which limited ownership
of 93 percent of the land area of South Africa to whites (who made up 22 percent
of the population); the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which required
that Africans live in segregated sections of all urban areas and not be allowed to
purchase freehold property therein; the Native Administration Act of 1927, which
established administrative (rather than civil) law as primary in all areas inhabited
by Africans and made it a criminal offense punishable by heavy fine or a year in
prison for anyone (though no whites were ever prosecuted) who “utters any
words or does any other act or thing whatever with intent to promote any feeling
of hostility between Natives and Europeans”; the Immorality Act of 1927 which
made sex between whites and Africans a criminal offense (again, only Africans
were ever prosecuted); and the Representation of Natives Act of 1936, which
placed the few Africans entitled to vote on the basis of their property holdings on
a separate roll from that of all other voters.

Despite the fact that all of these laws were still in force when we first visited
South Africa in the mid‐1970s, the government claimed that apartheid was over,
a thing of the past, and that the essential divide in the country was between “first‐
world” and “third‐world” societies. What then explained the elaboration of the
segregation laws into rigidly enforced separate amenities by race, the different
entrances to post offices, the separate busses, the separate trains, or, in the case of
Cape Town, the separate carriages depending on which suburb you were traveling
to? And, above all, what explained the geographic separation of landownership,
with African possession of any land outside certain strictly circumscribed rural
areas legally prohibited, and the lack of voting rights for any person of color?
Apartheid had indeed, in Verwoerd’s own words, constructed “something new”
on the foundation of segregation.

Many of the individuals in power in the mid‐1970s – people like John Vorster,
prime minister from 1966 to 1978 and state president from 1978 to 1979, born
Balthazar Johannes in 1915 but who preferred to go by the English version of his
name, and P. W. Botha, born Pieter Willem in 1916, Vorster’s minister for defense
from 1966 to 1978, and then successively prime minister from 1978 to 1984 and
state president from 1984 to 1989 – had been instrumental in developing the leg-
islation that underpinned apartheid. Such legislation included the 1949 self‐
explanatory Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act; the 1950 Population Registration
Act, which established mechanisms for classifying all residents of South Africa as
either “Whites,” “Coloureds,” or “Natives” and allocating or removing legal rights
(to the vote, most importantly) on the basis of those classifications; the 1950
Immorality Act, which made it illegal for people from different races to have sex
with one another (not just whites and Africans as under the Immorality Act); the
1950 Group Areas Act, which retroactively defined spaces within South Africa as
belonging to one or other classified group and in practice excluded Africans, or
Natives in the then contemporary usage, of owning and being entitled to legal
permanent residence in any urban area; and the 1950 Suppression of Communism

Worger, W. H., Ambler, C., & Achebe, N. (Eds.). (2018). A companion to african history. ProQuest Ebook Central http://ebookcentral.proquest.com
Created from insu-ebooks on 2020-09-29 11:50:36.
C
op
yr
ig
ht
©
2
01
8.
J
oh
n
W
ile
y
&
S
on
s,
In
co
rp
or
at
ed
. A
ll
rig
ht
s
re
se
rv
ed
.

apartheid forgotten and remembered 433

Act, which banned the South African Communist Party, made being a communist
subject to criminal prosecution, and defined, among a variety of ways, being a
communist as including any person who engaged in an act

which aims at bringing about any political, industrial, social or economic change
within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts or
omissions or by the threat of such acts or omissions or by means which include the
promotion of disturbance or disorder, or such acts or omissions or threat

– which could, but did not necessarily, include “the encouragement of feelings of
hostility between the European and non‐European races of the Union.”3

The practical measure used to enforce these and many other laws introduced in
the 1950s and operative throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s was the
enforcement of the pass laws, regularized nationally in 1952 by the Native Laws
Amendment Act and the Orwellian‐titled Abolition of Passes and Co‐ordination of
Documents Act. Under these two acts, and various subsequent revisions, every day
in every part of South Africa, which we like everyone else witnessed, tens of thou-
sands of black South Africans were stopped by the police and asked to show their
passes, documents which listed their racial classification as well as their employment
history, and identified whether they had permission, based on their employment
status, for being where they were. Those without the documents, or without proof
of current employment, were arrested, sometimes whipped, often imprisoned, and
exiled back to where they were “supposed” to live until their labor was needed by
the migrant system that underpinned South Africa’s rural and urban economies,
with their endless need for a constant supply of cheap and compliant workers – ulti-
mately a pipe dream and the most fundamental contradiction for state efforts to
create permanent white supremacy. What we want to do in this chapter is to discuss
how, since 1994, apartheid has been written about in South Africa, how it has been
remembered, and how it has been forgotten, who has done the remembering, and
who has done the forgetting. Because of the continuing relevance of the historiog-
raphy of apartheid to around the early 1990s, we shall start with a survey of that
work, focus first on the forgetting, and then on the remembering, and talk about
the ways in which the separateness of apartheid, inherited from and perpetuating
colonialism, continues to divide South Africa and South Africans.

Removing the black voice

The most detailed and powerful analyses of apartheid and its introduction and
impact were written by those most affected by the new laws, just as had been the
case under the preceding policies of racial segregation enforced nationally since
the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Most of this speech took place
in the public and political sphere, since South Africa’s universities were racially
segregated in the 1950s, just as they had been since their inception, and academic

434 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

analyses were almost without exception white‐authored (the exceptions mainly
related to linguistic analyses of African languages). There was a vibrant periodical
and newspaper culture in the 1950s through which black authors could express
their views about a wide range of topics, from sport to music to detailed analyses
of the harshest impact of apartheid laws breaking up families and forcing people,
including especially children, to work under onerous conditions. Drum magazine
was particularly prominent, employing a range of talented authors such as Henry
Nxumalo, Todd Matshikiza, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, and
Es’kia Mphahlele, and the photographer Peter Magubane. There were also news-
papers targeted at black audiences like the World and the Guardian (later renamed
the New Age). But the most powerful speech came in the form of the political
statements, sometimes made from the dock, by leaders of the African National
Congress (ANC) such as Nelson Mandela (especially his presidential speech for
the Transvaal Branch in 1953), Oliver Tambo, and Albert Luthuli, as well as by
the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) Robert Sobukwe and by Moses
Kotane of the South African Communist Party, banned since 1950. The PAC‐
organized Sharpeville demonstration of March 21, 1960, which was violently
repressed by the police, and the subsequent banning by the government of the
ANC and the PAC, together with censorship restrictions placed on individuals,
organizations, and print media, largely removed black voices from public dis-
course about politics in South Africa. All the individuals mentioned above were,
by the mid‐1960s, either in prison, in exile, or dead and their speeches and writ-
ings were banned in South Africa. Banned meant they could not be read or
quoted. The extension of such censorship over a wide spectrum of writing meant
that even the works of insightful critics of white racism in South Africa prior to
apartheid, like Sol Plaatje and A. T. Nzula,4 among others, could not be read by
South Africans throughout almost the entire period of apartheid.5

The absence of these individuals from what was deemed by the state to be
legitimate discourse within South Africa meant also the absence of a core argu-
ment – the role of race, specifically white supremacy, in propelling and underpin-
ning apartheid – in debates about politics and history during the apartheid era.
The ANC Youth League in its 1944 manifesto noted that “The White race … had
invested itself with authority and the right to regard South Africa as a White man’s
country” (ANC 1944). Mandela linked the struggle against apartheid in South
Africa with that against colonialism in the rest of the world when he argued in
1953 that “there is nothing inherently superior about the herrenvolk [master
race] idea of the supremacy of the whites” in South Africa, it was the same as had
been used to rule “in China, India, Indonesia, and Korea, American, British,
Dutch and French Imperialism … [now] completely and perfectly exploded”
(Mandela 1953). For Sobukwe the problem for South Africa in 1959, as it was for
all still colonized societies, was “the ruling White minority,” but he expected that
would be overcome, “by 1963, or even by 1973 or 1984,” in South Africa as in
the rest of the African continent (Sobukwe 1959: 48).

apartheid forgotten and remembered 435

White conversations about black actions

Many white South Africans now, and then, claimed that they did not know of
apartheid’s worst policies and practices, or that, even if they did know a bit in
passing, they did not know of the worst excesses of the police state – the govern-
ment death squads in particular, which assassinated opponents of apartheid from
the early 1970s (and perhaps earlier) right up to the beginning of majority rule in
April 1994. Claims of not knowing ring hollow, especially because of what people
could witness on a daily basis in the streets, unless they chose not to look or to
see, and because of what they could read even in a strictly censored press, where
stories critical of the government were literally blacked out (as with a black per-
manent marker pen), or left with empty newsprint by editors showing what offi-
cial censors had required of them. But what of white scholars who were more
intent than the average citizen on analyzing the historical trajectory of twentieth‐
century South Africa?

The academic scholarship written about apartheid within South African univer-
sities reflected the views of white scholars, especially after the removal of the few
blacks with appointments in South African universities. The 1959 Extension of
University Education Act (referred to by Afrikaner scholars more accurately as the
1959 Separate Universities Act), prohibited “open universities,” such as the
University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town (universities
that had admitted some black students) from admitting students labeled “non-
white”; the latter would now be educated in separate universities set up on a racial
basis for African, Colored, and Indian students but employing primarily Afrikaner
faculty: at Ngoye in Zululand for Zulu speakers, at Durban for Indians, at Turfloop
in Northern Transvaal for Sotho and Tswana speakers, at Belleville in the Cape for
Coloreds, and at Fort Hare for Xhosa speakers.6 With the establishment of these
separate institutions, the few black scholars who had found academic employ-
ment, primarily teaching African languages and literature, were excluded. A. C.
Jordan, who had taught African languages at the University of Cape Town since
1945, left South Africa on a one‐way exit visa in the early 1960s; Robert Sobukwe,
who had lectured in African languages at the University of the Witwatersrand
from 1954 onward, was imprisoned in 1960 and spent the rest of his life in deten-
tion or under house arrest; Archie Mafeje, whose appointment to a post at the
University of Cape Town in 1968 was rescinded under pressure from the govern-
ment, spent almost his entire career in exile from South Africa.

The most prominent writer on South African historiography in the early years
of apartheid, F. A. van Jaarsveld, noted in his 1964 collection of essays, The
Afrikaner’s Interpretation of South African History, that “the advocates and apol-
ogists of ‘apartheid’ on historical grounds” were sociologists and theologians (van
Jaarsveld 1964: 151).7 He divided white historians between those who wrote in
Afrikaans (and taught in Afrikaans‐language universities: Stellenbosch, Pretoria,
Potchestroom, and the Free State) and those who wrote in English and taught in

436 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

English‐language universities (University of Cape Town, Rhodes, Witwatersrand,
and the University of Natal, Durban and Pietermaritzburg campuses). Their his-
torical writing in terms of choice of topic and interpretation reflected their politi-
cal differences: the Afrikaners focused on the history of the Great Trek in the
1830s, when thousands of Afrikaans speakers, accompanied by their black serv-
ants, sought to escape British colonialism by moving into the interior of South
Africa, and the South African War of 1899–1902, when the British conquered the
two internal states resulting from the trek, interpreting both events from the
viewpoint of people who considered themselves persecuted on the basis of their
nationality and who in the twentieth century had built a nationalist movement
that culminated in political victory in the 1948 election and the establishment of
the apartheid state.

The English speakers by contrast, in van Jaarsveld’s analysis, adopted a tone of
blame and regret in their analyses of what had gone wrong in twentieth‐century
South African politics. The blame lay on Afrikaners and what were seen as their
nineteenth‐century frontier attitudes being extended into a twentieth‐century
modernizing economy, to the detriment of the latter. The regret lay in the failure
of British imperial authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
to rein in and control Afrikaner nationalism. Van Jaarsveld’s English contempo-
raries, he wrote, “confronted with the Afrikaner’s nationalism and racial policies
… [sought] to explain who the Afrikaner is and what one may expect of him.”
Their work was full of “disappointment at the present” and “visions of impending
catastrophe” (van Jaarsveld 1964: 146). It still is.

Looking to the future of South African historical writing, van Jaarsveld wrote
that the “main field of study will be ‘causes of the South African Revolution’”: “If
the somber predictions of internal revolution and external pressure are realized,”
“if the optimistic belief in the success of apartheid should become a happy reality
then no doubt the praises will be sung of the Afrikaner’s far‐seeing vision and
sacrifices” (van Jaarsveld 1964: 154).

Two iconic texts first published in 1969 reflected clearly the white dichotomy
identified by van Jaarsveld: Five Hundred Years: A History of South Africa, edited
by C. F. J. Muller, which recounted “the activities and experiences, over a period
of nearly five hundred years, of the White man in South Africa” (Muller 1969: ix8)
and the two‐volume Oxford History of South Africa whose “central theme of
South African history is interaction between peoples of diverse origins, languages,
technologies, and social systems, meeting on South African soil” (Wilson and
Thompson 1969: v).9 Muller described South Africa as “a white power in a black
continent,” “guided by white intellect and enterprise but for a long time …
dependent on non‐white labour,” where “the main concern now is whether less
than four million white South Africans [counting Afrikaans and English speakers
together] can maintain their supremacy against the more than 300 million black
inhabitants of Africa who are supported by many other nations” (Muller 1969:
xi). B. J. Liebenberg (1969) ascribed the success of the allied Herenigde Nasionale

apartheid forgotten and remembered 437

Party (Reunited National Party) and the Afrikaner Party in 1948 to its taking
place in a context in which “racial integration would inevitably cause the White
minority to lose power,” where “the idea of apartheid or separate development …
attracted the White electorate,” and was “a victory for Afrikaner nationalism”
(Liebenberg 1969: 426). He considered the “social legislation” (Population
Registration Act, Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, Group Areas Act, etc.)
introduced in first decade of apartheid as an extension of previous attempts “to
solve the colour question”:

Apartheid in public spaces was naturally not new because there had been separate
buses, separate railway coaches, separate benches in public parks and separate
bathing facilities and beaches for the different races long before 1948. The inno-
vation was that what had previously been custom had now become a written law.
(Liebenberg 1969: 428, 429)

More contentious, in Liebenberg’s view, were the laws to enforce “political apart-
heid” by putting Colored voters on a separate roll from whites. Steps taken to
eliminate any representation for African voters in South Africa – the few enfran-
chised because of their property ownership had been allowed to vote for whites to
represent them – and to lay the basis for self‐governing states in the small rural areas
set aside for them (Transkei, Ciskei, etc.) were “a positive aspect” of “apartheid as
a policy of separate development” (Liebenberg 1969: 430). Apartheid was, for
Afrikaner politicians like J. G. Strijdom, “synonymous with ‘white domination,’”
though Verwoerd, whom Liebenberg considered “more than anyone else … the
architect and driving force behind the policy of apartheid,” was also “more than
anyone else … responsible for transforming this policy of apartheid from a merely
negative policy of domination and repression (baaskap) into a positive policy of
separate development which aimed at ‘fairness to each and justice to all’” (Liebenberg
1969: 427, 428).10 Muller, like van Jaarsveld, foresaw two opposed futures for
South Africa: either going “the same way as ancient Carthage” and disappearing
“completely after seven hundred years of progress and prosperity,” or “develop[ing]
into one of Africa’s chief spreaders of Western ideas, at a time when Western powers
had declined in Africa and elsewhere” (Liebenberg 1969: 478).

Despite or perhaps because of their reference to “interaction” – a process and
noun which seemed to have no actors or action – the contributors to the Oxford
History, especially volume 2 which focused on the period 1870–1966 (Wilson
and Thompson 1971), fitted van Jaarsveld’s description of English‐language
scholarship. The author commissioned to write the chapter on the period includ-
ing apartheid, an Afrikaner and not an academic (he was a newspaper editor),
believed the political victory of Afrikaner nationalism in 1948 was due to its race
policies, that is, white supremacy, and added that apartheid “had its positive side
as well, and it was the achievement of Dr. Verwoerd … that he gave to the theory
a philosophic basis and content,” most clearly reflected, it seems, in his vision of

438 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

“the ultimate emergence of some sort of commonwealth of states in South Africa”
(de Villiers 1971: 402, 414).11

The one variant on van Jaarsveld’s account of English speakers’ interpretations
was the essay by the sociologist Leo Kuper who argued that “the implementation
of apartheid which dominated political action and race relations after 1948 was in
the nature of a counter‐revolution by whites.” Still not a revolution by Africans as
the actors, but rather “to the increasing mobilization of force against opposition …
The counter‐revolution was directed to the control of social change, in the
interests of white domination, by monopoly of the constitutional means of
change” (Kuper 1971: 459). In other words, Kuper alluded in a somewhat opaque
manner to growing African resistance to the strictures of both segregation and
apartheid. Apartheid censorship, however, prevented all South Africans, white
and black, from reading Kuper’s analysis of the actions of black critics of apartheid.
Oxford University Press, ultimately supported by the editors of the Oxford History,
though opposed by Kuper himself, removed his chapter from the South African
edition on the basis that

Legal opinion on the chapter by Leo Kuper … was to the effect that it infringed
South African law in many respects, mainly by references to books and articles deal-
ing with African Nationalism, policy statements of the African National Congress,
and statements by African leaders. (Wilson and Thompson 1971: v)

Under these accepted “rules” of apartheid, or acquiescence, Africans could not be
written about for a South African readership, or write about themselves because,
as the Oxford History editors noted about themselves and their contributors:

We live, or have lived, in a caste society, and we are all white. This last imbalance
occurs because in South Africa today few Africans, or Asians, or Coloured people
have the opportunity for unfettered research and writing; and those who have the
training and opportunity are for the most part occupied with other commitments …
Analysis … by African and Coloured historians, economists, and anthropologists …
are long overdue. (Wilson and Thompson 1969: vi, xiii)

The historiography of apartheid began to change in the 1970s and 1980s,
through the influence of interpretive approaches that stressed the role of economics
in general and capitalism in particular in determining the way in which white
supremacy developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In these analyses
race was not absent, indeed practically all the texts focused primarily on black
actors, but the emphasis was on showing how policies that had a core racial com-
ponent – conquest, segregation, and apartheid – served the needs of big business
in mining and farming, especially for cheap labor. Three key texts written in the
1970s marked out distinct approaches for the next two decades. Rick Johnstone’s
Class, Race and Gold (1976), which analyzed the development of the gold indus-
try in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in terms of its

apartheid forgotten and remembered 439

dependence on cheap black labor to produce enormous profits; Colin Bundy’s
The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (1979), which examined the ways
in which initiatives taken by African farmers in the late 1800s were defeated by
white industrialists and farmers intent on turning them into migrant laborers; and
Charles van Onselen’s two‐volume set of essays, Studies in the Social and Economic
History of Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (1982), which focused on the social history
of urban areas. These works were the tip of the iceberg, with an enormous num-
ber of studies being published in the 1980s, many of them elaborations of work
which first saw print in a series of key collections coedited by Shula Marks:
Economy and Society in Pre‐industrial South Africa (Marks and Atmore 1980),
Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation,
Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (Marks and Rathbone 1982), and The
Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth‐Century South Africa (Marks
and Trapido 1987).

Several relatively commonplace arguments (but new for South African histori-
ography) constituted the core of the revisionist approach. First, mining, manu-
facturing, and farming were capitalist enterprises whose owners sought to
maximize their profits. Second, central to the maximization of profits in all sec-
tors of the economy, but especially in mining and farming, was the need for
cheap labor. Third, in workplace struggles race was used intentionally by employ-
ers to divide workers and to create hierarchical systems of production in which
whites were guaranteed privileged access to ownership and to supervisory and
skilled positions. Fourth, in order to secure a constant supply of cheap labor over
and above minimum needs so that in cases of worker strikes extra supplies would
always be available, Great Britain engaged in a massive process of colonial con-
quest in the late nineteenth century aimed at meeting the labor needs of the
diamond and gold industries, in the course of which Africans were deprived of
most of their land and subjected to onerous taxes in order to produce a constant
supply of black migrant workers. Fifth, the combination of these economically
based processes underpinned the development of segregation in twentieth‐
century South Africa and, by extension, of apartheid. Above all, the revisionists
stressed the importance of local struggles, between employers and workers, colo-
nizers and colonized, in accounting for the specific forms of racial rule and
oppression in South Africa. And in these struggles blacks – Africans, Coloreds,
and Indians – took very active roles.

The natural progression of this work led to an examination of the social costs
and struggles of communities under apartheid. Interest in social history gained
momentum in the 1980s, stemming from the pioneering work of van Onselen
and fueled by the conferences held at the University of the Witwatersrand organ-
ized by the History Workshop. Historians, political scientists, sociologists, and
geographers sent students and research assistants into the townships and the
countryside of South Africa to excavate the history of those who had been
silenced. The transcripts of many of those interviews (well over 1,000), under the

440 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

auspices of the African Studies Center, today are held at the Wits university library
and formed the basis of many important studies including those by van Onselen
(1996), Bonner (1983), Keegan (1988), Bozzoli (1991), Moodie (1994), and
others. Their work uncovered the many strategies employed by Africans to sur-
vive during apartheid and before; they rendered Africans as actors rather than as
objects, and opened up exciting avenues for further research.12 Unfortunately,
since 1994 much of this work has been abandoned, with the exception of Bonner’s
longstanding study of Johannesburg’s townships (see Bonner and Segal 1998;
Bonner and Nieftagodien 2001, 2008; and Bonner, Nieftagodien, and Mathabatha
2012). In the grip of the democratic transition, the voices of these actors had
presumably been heard and many social historians turned away from the apart-
heid past.

Still, for all the intellectual excitement of this work, which effectively domi-
nated academic discussion about South African history for two decades and left
the works of white liberals and Afrikaners alike largely unread for a generation,
there were still (with one or two exceptions) no black contributors, and much
of the work rendered Africans as people to be studied and perhaps engaged
as research assistants because of their language skills, but not as potential
colleagues to be welcomed to the profession (see especially Worger 1991; Desai
and Bohmke 1997).

Forgetting

But what happened to historical analysis of apartheid after the end of National
Party rule and the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994? Did van
Jaarsveld’s 1964 prediction that “If the somber predictions of internal revolution
and external pressure are realized,” then the “main field of study will be ‘causes of
the South African Revolution?’” (1964: 154). Did the Oxford History editors’
concern that the long overdue “analysis … by African and Coloured historians,
economists, and anthropologists” get resolved (Wilson and Thompson 1969: xiii)?

To start with the last question first, the simple answer is no. Twenty years after
the formal end of apartheid, black scholars (meaning African, Colored, and Indian
scholars from South Africa) of history employed in South African universities
constituted well under 10 percent of professional historians in the country. The
professoriate remained much as it had been for the past century, overwhelmingly
white males whose academic training and specialization were in researching and
teaching South African history (see Worger 2014). There was not a single South
African‐born African full professor of history in the country. What this meant for
the practice of history was the near complete absence of university scholars who
had experienced life under apartheid and who had the language expertise to fully
utilize the vast amount of sources available in indigenous languages.

What about the other question – the main field of study being the causes of
the South African revolution? In some ways one might have expected that the

apartheid forgotten and remembered 441

biggest contribution of the revisionist scholars to the postapartheid history of
South Africa would have been to utilize their analytical approaches and research
skills to investigate the origins and development of apartheid in much the same
revealing ways as they had the history of industrial development, manufacturing,
and race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After all, the gov-
ernment and private records for the apartheid period that had largely been off‐
limits to researchers during the apartheid era were now much more accessible in
the postapartheid period. The state archives reduced their closed period from up
to 100 years or more to just 20 years. All the records of the National Party and
of most of its leaders became publicly accessible for the first time. And mining
company records, available in partial and inconsistent ways during the apartheid
years, could potentially have been opened up to broad examination if the schol-
arly demand had been there. But in a strangely appropriate way – since it had
been the Oxford History editors and contributors who had initially borne most of
the wrath of the revisionist critique of white liberal history – the comment of
Wilson and Thompson about black scholars in the 1960s – that “those who have
the training and opportunity are for the most part occupied with other commit-
ments” (1969: vi) – applied to the revisionists in 1990s South Africa. Many
hoped to influence government policy in South Africa but found few opportuni-
ties in the black majority ANC, and instead aligned with the Democratic Alliance
Party, which was always likely to be the perpetual opposition party much like the
Progressive Federal Party before it.13

The social historians who had worked hard to study the repercussions of apart-
heid on South African society approached the question of the “revolution” with
greater effort. Many of the township studies of the 1980s continued, especially
with a focus on resistance and the efforts and contributions of Africans outside of
the organizational structures of the liberation movement. As these studies dem-
onstrated, the effort to dislodge the government was primarily driven by the
South African population, although the ANC eventually brokered the change.14
Unfortunately, as the hopes of the transition have soured, the focus of much of
this work has turned away from an examination of the popular movement against
apartheid and toward denunciations of the ANC and the ANC liberation narra-
tive.15 In an especially strange twist, the chair of the History Workshop, Noor
Nieftagodien recently called for greater access to government records from the
apartheid period, not to learn more about apartheid but rather because “archived
documents might reveal more about “what happened in transition,” including
any “dirty deals” that took place behind the scenes and whether these established
a template for what came after. There has been much speculation, he continued,
about whether Nelson Mandela “sold out” in meetings with state officials;
“whether economic deals were struck that allowed existing powers to remain
intact”; and whether and how far the security apparatus managed to infiltrate the
ANC. It is also sometimes assumed that one reason why current politicians get
away with so much is because they know the secrets of their rivals. Scholars should

442 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

now get a chance to test the truth or falsehood of all these claims: “understanding
transition can help us understand South Africa today,” said Professor Nieftagodien”
(Reisz 2017). In some recent work, apartheid has even come to be seen with
some nostalgia for a system that was “well organized”! (Dlamini 2009: 4).

Another more promising area of historical inquiry has blossomed since 1990:
cultural history. As with the historical discipline generally, many historians have
moved away from political and economic concerns entirely and are borrowing
from sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists to study the cultures that
arose under apartheid. Studies of sports, movies, leisure, religion, language, and
music have provided a much richer view of South African life and generally intro-
duce Africans as actors rather than as the objects of culture. Nevertheless, in most
cases, because of the quotidian nature of these studies, there is little analysis of the
overall impact of apartheid on culture. With the exception of works on protest
songs or art, much of this work isolates culture from politics.16

In practice, academic historical analysis of apartheid post‐1994 largely reverted to
the two groups of historians whose work had been overturned in the 1970s and
1980s – the Afrikaners and the English liberals. In postapartheid South Africa whites
by and large are the only people who have enough money to buy books, and so it
was not surprising that the works that most appeal to this audience are those which,
for the Afrikaner section, suggest that apartheid was not all bad and had positive ide-
als and outcomes, and for English‐speaking whites, suggest that they were not to
blame in the past nor should they be held responsible in the future for the clear
economic advantages held by whites in postapartheid South Africa. For this audi-
ence, forgetting is a very appealing feature of the historical texts that they buy.

The most prolific Afrikaner historian, Hermann Giliomee has also been one of
the most influential in current historiography. He has, in his own account, moved
from being an enthusiastic supporter of apartheid in his youth to being perceived
as a “snake in the grass” by National Party‐supporting historians in the 1960s,
1970s, and 1980s, to his current role of leading Afrikaans‐language proponent
for formerly white universities, Stellenbosch in particular (Giliomee 2016). In his
historical accounts of apartheid he has emphasized Afrikaners’ search for “white
survival and justice,” most clearly in a multiauthored text written for university
students (Giliomee 2014). Instead of the emphasis on “white supremacy” as the
driving force behind apartheid found in Giliomee (2016), we have a mix of ahis-
torical arguments, false binaries, and imagined idealistic origins. With regard to
the ahistorical, Giliomee argues that apartheid must be

weighed up in light of how people viewed it in the years 1948 to 1958, when the
policy was in place … [and] not what most political leaders and commentators have
done since 1994 … to judge apartheid according to the liberal values which only
began to find acceptance on a wide basis in the 1990s. (2014: 434)

Leaving aside the odd dating (1948–1958 – a typo?), and the general problem
of moral relativism, to make the argument as Giliomee does, one must ignore

apartheid forgotten and remembered 443

everything written and spoken by critics of segregation and apartheid, especially
by members of the ANC Youth League in the 1940s and by Nelson Mandela and
others in the 1950s (all quoted earlier). Giliomee also presents the reader with
curious and ahistorical binaries such as: “Rapid racial integration could have
taken place, or the country could, for the greatest part of 25 years, have experi-
enced a reasonable measure of stability. There is no way, however, that both
these two things could have happened” (Giliomee 2014: 446). Here the key
word is “stability.” Stability for whom? What form of stability? Are political assas-
sinations and police death squads part of stability? Giliomee does refer somewhat
generally to black suffering under apartheid but it is all very generic and very
impersonal, with his reference to the damage done to the country (whose?)
rather than to individuals:

Apartheid cost the country dearly, especially in the form of poor quality education
for black, coloured and Indian children; an unproductive labour force; a lack of
skills; and a large turnover of workers as a result of the enormous scope of migrant
labour. (2014: 444–445)

As with the earlier work of Afrikaner historians, blacks remain largely objects of
history, not people who through their own struggles helped create the course of
events. And, just as Verwoerd argued that apartheid was an attempt to create
separate development, not a way to enable whites to rule blacks, Giliomee in his
stress on the origins of apartheid as tied up with religious ideas of justice in the
1930s, and with the development of separate political institutions for Africans
(the bantustans being a way to compensate them for having lost political rights in
the 87 percent of South Africa under white rule), provides an intellectual cover
for both the rise and the expansion of white supremacist rule post‐1948.17

Whereas Giliomee harks back to the National Party defenses of apartheid in the
1960s, David Welsh (1971) disinters the English‐speaking liberal scholarship of
the 1960s to which he had himself contributed with his first book on the origins
of segregation in nineteenth‐century Natal. As Giliomee notes approvingly and
without irony in a blurb for Welsh’s 2009 book, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid,
“This is liberal history at its best.” The first two chapter titles signal the core argu-
ment: “Afrikaner Nationalism and the Coming of Apartheid” (i.e., it’s all about
the Afrikaners); “The Black Experience: A Prelude to Apartheid” (where again
blacks are objects, people who suffer, because of the impact of “three interrelated
issues … security, land and labour,” essentially imperialism and farming). What
about a reverse order – labor, land, and control – as suggested by the revisionist
historians, nearly all of whose work is absent from Welsh’s bibliography? There is
in Welsh’s index no reference to De Beers Consolidated Mines or to the Anglo‐
American Corporation. There is no discussion of the impact of apartheid on the
economic and social life of ordinary people. It is as though nothing had been
written, or at least read, between 1969 and 2009 (Welsh 2009).18

444 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

Like the work of Giliomee and Welsh, Saul Dubow’s recent study Apartheid,
1948–1994 (2014) focuses primarily on politics to the exclusion of economics and
social history, deals primarily with white actors, and engages with some dubious
“what if” theories reminiscent of Giliomee’s flawed binaries. Dubow aims to be
more provocative, however, rather than apologetic. For example, he speculates
that if the ANC had not committed to the violent overthrow of the government
in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the Nationalist Party govern-
ment might not have outlawed all protest organizations and initiated the con-
struction of a police state (Dubow 2015). Raising the question of whether the
ANC was somehow responsible for the subsequent creation of the South African
police state completely ignores Mandela’s famous speech at the Rivonia trial
where he carefully laid out the history of ANC activities and their failed attempts
to initiate peaceful change. And, like the other liberal historians, Dubow lays the
blame for apartheid squarely on Verwoerd (read Afrikaners); but, rather than res-
urrecting the old arguments about the Afrikaner “frontier” mentality and reli-
gious justifications, he argues that apartheid was the by‐product of Verwoerd’s
ambition to create an empire of his own within the Native Affairs Department
(Dubow 2014: 60). There is no mention of the economic benefits for
whites – Afrikaners and English alike – of apartheid policies. Dubow’s critique,
speculative and unconvincing, has nevertheless gained popularity among white
South African historians.

Although South African academia has failed to develop that coterie of “African
and Coloured historians, economists and anthropologists” who could provide a
different context for our understanding of apartheid, scholarship in the twenty‐
first century has nevertheless expanded through different mediums, giving voice
to a broader population than that within the academic community. Life stories, in
particular autobiographies, have blossomed through new outlets for publication
including online publications, blogs, and even Facebook posts. As one review of
the field states, “Individual’s stories have become a legitimate aspect of making
new national history” (Jayawardane 2008). These voices are no longer silent and
they remember their own apartheid experiences.

Remembering

Since 1990, many South Africans have described their own apartheid experiences
through their autobiographies. Especially prominent are those of politicians
including Nelson Mandela, F. W. de Klerk, and many others who focus on the
political intrigue and present justifications for their actions (Mandela 1994; de
Klerk 1998; Heunis 2007; Eglin 2007). As Tom Lodge (2015: 687) has noted,
however, we get very little of their personal lives or the context in which they
made their decisions; instead most of these works are heavy on justification with
a touch of insider gossip. There are also the works by South Africa’s journalists,
noteworthy for their style and their ability to tell a story but often gliding over the

apartheid forgotten and remembered 445

gritty realities of daily life in favor of the more sensational aspects of apartheid
(Pauw 1997; Sparks 2016). Memoirs by the military combatants on both sides
abound, along with what Neelika Jayawardane calls the “My Apartheid Boyhood”
genre, in which mainly white male authors recount their innocent childhoods free
from the knowledge of apartheid (Manong 2015; Van der Walt 2008; Coetzee
1998; MacRae 2012). Nevertheless, what is strikingly different in the autobiog-
raphies as opposed to the academic postapartheid scholarship is the shift of focus
away from the motivations of whites in implementing apartheid to the impact and
effect of apartheid on communities and individuals. While Giliomee, Welsh,
Dubow, and others focus on explaining the intent and actions of white politicians,
primarily describing Africans as the objects of these actions, the autobiographies
reverse the lens and give us a microscopic view of the painful consequences of
apartheid’s policies and actions.

While the form of autobiographical narrative is rapidly changing, including
online blogs, Facebook pages, auto‐ethnographies, oral recordings, and so on,
South Africans in the postapartheid era have eagerly embraced the genre and their
stories have been published through old and new avenues. The most interest-
ing – and least touted – are the stories told by the unknowns recounting their
everyday experiences. Although these stories are obviously subjective by defini-
tion, and they can only present an individual narrative rather than a comprehen-
sive, contextual view of apartheid, they demonstrate a central truth of life under
apartheid: their lives were defined by their race. And they explain the impact of
apartheid on the totality of a life. Alongside a depiction of the grim realities and
daily pleasures of a very difficult human existence, these stories demonstrate how
the best efforts of hardworking Africans could be derailed by the smallest of injus-
tices under apartheid.

The remaining discussion will focus on the life stories of five South Africans.
Sindiwe Magona and Letitia Stuurman, both born in 1943, witnessed the begin-
ning of apartheid and experienced the impact of its policies throughout most of
their lives until the end of apartheid in 1994 (Magona 1990; Stuurman 1995).
Tlou Setumu, Jamela Robertson, and Fred Khumalo were all born in the 1960s
(Setumu 2011; Robertson 2007; Khumalo 2006). Some grew up in townships;
most were moved from rural to urban locations and eventually to the townships.
One family resided in a “homeland,” forced to renounce citizenship in South
Africa. Some were lucky enough to grow up with their parents but few were able
to keep their own families together as the pass laws and the Group Areas Act
together conspired to keep them apart. Education was not the panacea for
advancement in all cases, primarily because their families were often too impover-
ished to pay the fees. And, even with the proper training and qualifications, job
reservation and lack of resources often stymied such plans.

How were these relatively “ordinary” South Africans affected by apartheid?
Those who have been fortunate enough to be in a position to write and to publish
their life stories are by definition already exceptional, and yet their stories can

446 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

stand in for the less fortunate. There is little remarkable about their circumstances
other than the fact that they survived those circumstances. To be clear, each
author wrote of their childhood as happy: “childhood, by its very nature, is a
magic‐filled world, egocentric, wonderfully carefree, and innocent. Mine was all
these things and more” (Magona 1990: 4). This, despite the fact that few lived
with both parents, or even with either parent. Either one or both parents worked
in a city, to which they were not allowed to bring their families (Magona 1990:
15; Khumalo 2006: 33; Robertson 2007: 4; Stuurman 1995: 1). Later, when
they became adults, the pattern would be repeated with their own children. In the
cities, their mothers turned to selling prepared food or liquor “illegally as she did
not have a permit for selling anything from her home” (Magona 1990: 26). In
the rural areas, “without good rains and harvests, [mother] was literally left with
nothing, absolutely nothing to live on” (Setumu 2011: 48).

Where they lived determined much about their lives, yet their residence was
restricted by apartheid laws. As Tlou Setumu recounts, “A place to stay was an
important factor that determined one’s fortunes in the big city. You couldn’t
just go there without knowing where you would be put up” (2011: 76). And,
even with residential rights, Africans were continually shifted from place to
place. As a child, Sindiwe Magona first moved from a rural village to Blaauvlei,
a “location” of corrugated iron shacks; then to a new location, Zwelitsha, where
each plot holder built their own house; and, under the slum clearance policies
of the 1950s, to one of the massive townships engineered by the apartheid gov-
ernment, Guguletu:

The windswept, treeless miles from anywhere township, they were told was their
home. Our Pride, Guguletu, the powers that be would have the gall to baptize it,
openly declaring to all skeptics their unwavering pursuit: the destruction of African
family life, communal life, and all those factors that go toward the knitting of the
very fabric of a people. (Magona 1990: 85)

When Jamela Robertson first traveled from her small village near Tzaneen to
Mamelodi in Pretoria, she concurred: “Unlike in Dan Village where everyone
minded everyone else’s business, in Mamelodi it seemed to be ‘a man for him-
self ’” (2007: 34). Some were moved from the multiracial neighborhoods such as
Butts Location in Aliwal North, as Letitia Stuurman remembered: “In 1958 we
had to move. The government didn’t want white and ‘non‐white’ people to be
mixing in the towns so they forced blacks to live in the locations” (1995: 22).

Of course not all experiences were horrible. Fred Khumalo remembers finally
moving to his family’s own home in a brand new township in the early 1970s with
“a palpable sense of joy in the air. Everything about the township – the neat rows
of four‐roomed brick houses, the tarred roads – was new” (Khumalo 2006: 42).
The catch was that the township – Mpumalanga – was within the KwaZulu home-
land, was paid for by the South African government, and that “by moving here we
had, by law, renounced our South African citizenship” (Khumalo 2006: 43). The

apartheid forgotten and remembered 447

township was built as a labor reservoir, adjacent to the South African town of
Hammarsdale which employed cheap labor from Mpumalanga in the textile facto-
ries. This was part of grand apartheid, and the vision of “separate development”
that would later result in the removal of over 3.5 million South Africans to the
ethnically determined apartheid “homelands” (see Surplus People’s Project 1983).

But for those who could not survive in the countryside or find housing in the
cities or in the homelands, the infamous single‐sex hostels housed workers for the
mines, factories, and municipalities, and there were even female quarters for
nurses and domestic workers. Tlou Setumu landed in one of the hostels in Pretoria
as a last resort and described them as institutions designed to separate workers
from the local communities:

The high walls that enclosed the hostels separated the inmates from the surrounding
community both physically and socially. Besides the fact that almost all of the hostel
dwellers came from the rural “homelands,” the hostels themselves completely iso-
lated men from township life. As a result of this isolation, relations between the
hostel dwellers and the township community were usually not harmonious … This
type of tension fitted well into the plans of the National Party government, in which
people had to be separated so that they could be hostile to each other. After all, the
unity of the black people was the last thing the apartheid government wanted to see.
(Setumu 2011: 78)

It is clear that Africans understood that the government created by design resi-
dences that undermined African communities, whether in one of the massive
townships like Guguletu or Mamelodi, in an ethnically separated homeland like
KwaZulu, or in the impersonal hostels of every white town or city. Apartheid’s
grand design was thorough and transparent.

While these autobiographies can explain the comprehensive impact of apart-
heid, what they reveal even more clearly is how one incident or misstep could
completely transform a life in which there was absolutely no margin for error.
Being in the wrong place could land one in jail, or missing one rent payment
could lead to years of homelessness. The turning points in these lives moved on
an apartheid axis that was unforgiving.

For these authors, education was an important key to a better life, and all of
them were able to excel in their schoolwork. Nevertheless, their success did not
guarantee their future. Fred Khumalo, now a famous journalist and author, was
given perhaps the greatest opportunity after graduation: a full scholarship to med-
ical school. But this was not his goal. He had already become sensitive to his
country’s political situation and sought a career as a journalist. Despite his high
grades and qualifications, he was routinely turned away from journalism programs
and was ultimately given no financial aid when he finally gained admission to
Technikon Natal. It seemed that, while the government was ready to finance his
career as a doctor, a career as a journalist was not a path it was going to encourage.
After graduation, Khumalo struggled to find a publication that would hire him.

448 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

But he was fortunate in that history overtook apartheid South Africa and he has
since become one of the country’s leading journalists.

Others were not so lucky. Tlou Setumu’s family lived in the rural northern part
of the country and survived on whatever his mother could grow on a small plot
of land. Their home was built of mud; they literally had nothing. But when
Setumu graduated from high school – at the top of his class – he was offered a
temporary teaching position at a local school. The idea was that over a couple of
years he would save his money, go to university, and qualify as a full‐time teacher.
Yet, when his temporary position ended, he found that he had saved nothing:
“the underlying poverty in my family meant that the few rands that I earned were
reduced to nothing because each and every aspect at home needed to be taken
care of by that meager amount” (Setumu 2011: 68). Nevertheless, he gained a
scholarship to the University of the North and traveled there to register, only to
be undone by the bureaucracy of apartheid education. There is tragic frustration
in his account of the situation:

I joined a long queue outside the campus and slowly moved with my large bag,
approaching the caravans where the officials did the registration… I took out the
letter which indicated that I was a bursary holder… one of the officials just said:
“Here we only want cash money.” … I went to the nearest public phone at the post
office where I dialed the bursary section … The lady who answered said there was
nothing she could do because the person who was dealing with the bursaries was in
a meeting. I realized there was no way I was going to be helped and I dropped the
phone with bitterness … There I stood motionless, not knowing what to do next.
Time was moving on and I was increasingly becoming concerned about what was
going to happen to me in the next few hours. I knew nobody in Turfloop, and if I
was not admitted to the university, where was I going to sleep? That was the imme-
diate problem. The bus [home] was leaving Polokwane at about two o’clock in the
afternoon, so I had to take that into consideration in the process of deciding what I
was going to do next … This led me to decide to go back home. Yes, indeed … the
registration period at universities came to an end and my dream of being a university
student evaporated like dew in the rising sun. (Setumu 2011: 75–76)

A simple misunderstanding and no legal place to sleep changed the course of a
life. Although Setumu eventually completed a BA, MA, and PhD over the course
of the next 20 years, he had to survive as an itinerant worker and teacher in the
meantime, and was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown in his mid‐twenties.
One phone call could have made a huge difference, but under apartheid Africans
seldom had access to a second chance.

A combination of cruelty and poverty also ended Jamela Robertson’s educa-
tion. After accompanying a friend to the hospital and thereby missing a two‐hour
study period at school, she and her friend were flogged by the principal. Rather
than continue with additional punishment, at the age of 16 she left school. She
believed at the time that she could resume her education at another school, but a

apartheid forgotten and remembered 449

relative who had been paying her school fees died, and she had no resources to
continue her final year of school (Robertson 2007: 86–92). What followed was an
escape to Johannesburg and an attempt to continue her education through a
clerical college in Johannesburg. But, after she graduated, “at each and every
door that I knocked on asking for clerical work, I was told the jobs were reserved
for whites” (Robertson 2007: 175). Women like Sindiwe Magona who had earned
ther teaching credentials, were ultimately forced to work as domestic “servants”
in white homes because they could not find jobs or qualify for urban residence
because of the legal strictures of apartheid.

Mention should also be made of the long‐term impact of Bantu Education,
Verwoerd’s attempt to curtail black aspirations. Sindiwe Magona, who was born
in 1943, had already finished much of her schooling by the time Bantu Education
was fully implemented, but she noted the change: “Those students who were
from the old stream were faring much, much better than the products of this
exclusively African system” (1990: 72). According to Bantu Education goals, stu-
dents were taught such subjects as housework and gardening although with
important limitations:

Incredible though it may sounds, it is the truth: in this urban environment, where a
few students had electricity at home, we were being taught to use irons heated on
the stove. The stove itself was a wood or coal burner. As far back as I can recall,
mother has always had a Singer sewing‐machine. Granted, a manually operated one
… and here I was, learning to sew a garment using needle and thread. Talk about
“keeping the native in her proper place”! White and even coloured schools had
modern appliances. (Magona 1990: 67)

While it has been argued that overall literacy rates improved under Bantu
Education, this system also undereducated generations of Africans while directing
a steady stream of racist invective at the students (Robertson 2007: 81–83).

Indeed, apartheid levied a heavy toll on African physical and mental health.
While these authors escaped the worst dangers of apartheid, they were certainly
aware of them. Almost anyone – and sometimes everyone – in their lives were
the victims of police violence. As Fred Khumalo recounts, even obtaining the
necessary passbook to allow his father to live and work in the city was a humili-
ating ordeal. His father was forced to undergo a genital “inspection” by a white
official who “prob[ed] his penis and testicles with a stick” in front of all the
other men in the hall: “Outside the hallowed confines of the Native Affairs
offices, black men never spoke about their experiences at the Pipi Office as it
was called … they couldn’t joke about what happened [there]” (Khumalo 2006:
27–28). This pass, gained through such humiliation, was thereafter used to
effect continuing control over blacks. Police raids “with no other objective than
to arrest people whose passes were ‘wrong’ or who had forgotten their passes at
home” were commonplace, while “police presence in the township had abso-
lutely no correspondence to the committing of criminal acts” (Magona 1990: 87).

450 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

Blacks who were ordinarily granted rights to be in a city still could not be found
outside after curfew “even if you were in a car you were not supposed to drive
right through Aliwal North if you were black” (Stuurman 1995: 21).

Jamela Robertson’s experience of being arrested for not carrying a pass nearly
ended in tragedy for her; it most certainly did for others. She and her schoolmates
were arrested during lunch time in a park in Johannesburg for not having their
passbooks. They were loaded into the police van, threatened with deportation to
a “homeland,” and jailed in John Vorster Square for the weekend. While there,
they learned that they would be held for the weekend “for the entertainment” of
the guards. Although she was spared, she noticed that “every now and then a
policeman out of uniform would open the cell and pick a girl or two … hours later
the girls would be returned either crying or looking sheepish” (Robertson 2007:
149–150). Even worse, she heard people screaming in pain in the middle of the
night, “flying from some storeys above us and crushed way down below … fol-
lowed by a deadly silence” (Robertson 2007: 150). The worst of apartheid was
the creation of a police state to enforce its vision.

The most subjective but perhaps most lasting legacy of apartheid was the psy-
chological impact on society. As a small child, Jamela Robertson prayed every
night to God to make her white. Indeed, she found the lesson in her own home:

It was a picture of heaven and hell… The queue for black people proceeded straight
to hell: a pit of fire with the devil, a hefty naked black man with a tail and horns,
standing right in the middle of the fire, holding a huge fork and grilling the poor
black souls who were falling into the pit one after another. (Robertson 2007: 36–37)

By the time Sindiwe Magona was a teenager, she understood

my own impuissance … our voicelessness, meticulously designed by the powers that
be; our forever being blamed for the untenable conditions others [had] imposed on
us; and the squandering, the systematic extinguishing of the breath of a people by
rank bigotry and evil incarnate. (Magona 1990: 79)

In some cases, the continual overall stress of apartheid and its unending frustra-
tion drove many South Africans toward mental illness and worse. Both Setumu
and Robertson write of periods in which they could no longer cope and suffered
breakdowns. Setumu was hospitalized for six months, suffering a nervous break-
down brought on by his inability to find work and therefore support his mother,
and the guilt he suffered from these failures (Setumu 2011: 103–109). Robertson,
having endured an abusive relationship and the loss of two children, also broke
down. “I felt like a walking empty shell and often I’d find myself floating in and
out of reality” (2007: 209). Both of these people had set forth with great hopes
in life after enjoying happy childhoods and excelling in school, yet repeated frus-
tration and discrimination laid them low. Khumalo writes of another affliction,
criminal activity: “Gangsterism and crime are part of township life. Not because

apartheid forgotten and remembered 451

black people are inherently criminal but because they are driven to crime out of
desperation” (2006: 100).

The danger of recasting history through the perspective of current feelings of
disillusionment or resentment, is that the past will not only be distorted or forgot-
ten but that it will be forgiven. While many South Africans today suffer deeply,
they should not be led to believe that the country’s past was something other
than unjust and cruel. The people who lived through apartheid persevered and
led full lives in spite of apartheid. Yet the threat of the state, and the possibilities
for arrest, harm, and worse were always present. Freedom from those fears is not
inconsequential. As Letitia Stuurman wrote upon revisiting the township where
she grew up:

I went back again this year – it’s 1994 – and there is quite a big change. The apart-
heid is finished … Blacks can buy houses now in town. It was really funny to see
black children playing in the streets and going to cafes in the evening … The police
are very friendly, not like before … Even the white police, they’re not like the olden
days when it was really bad and you didn’t know what you did, right or wrong.
(Stuurman 1995: 33–34)

To acknowledge such change, history must be truthful.

Conclusion

Some South Africans have suggested that a remembering/forgetting dichotomy
is too crude, that “realities, of course, were a little more complex,” and have
argued “that beyond the dynamics of remembering and forgetting, a more pro-
found characterization of the struggle in social memory is one of narrative against
narrative, story against story” (Harris 1999). We disagree and we agree. Arguing
that a remembering and forgetting dichotomy is too crude is all too appealing to
white South Africans who now, above all, want to focus their criticisms on the
shortcomings of the ANC and to delete from memory what happened while white
supremacy was in vogue.

But we do agree that the real future for history in South Africa lies in the stories
told by those most heavily affected by apartheid. Few if any of these have been
incorporated into the works produced by the historical profession in South Africa.
Likewise, almost none of the stories told in the course of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings have been addressed despite the fact
that the hundreds of thousands of pages of testimony available online provide
historians with a resource richer than any available during the apartheid era. When
historians use all these sources instead of complaining about the “failure” of the
TRC to establish the full “truth,” as if that was ever its aim or that such a task
could be accomplished, and instead of complaining about the supposed lack of
materials documenting the apartheid years when vast amounts of written material
are available that were not available 20 years ago and, more than that, there are

452 nanCy l. Clark and william h. worger

millions of living witnesses to apartheid willing to tell their stories if anyone will
listen, then we may well have a fundamentally new history of South Africa told
and heard and written.

Notes

1 Listen to Hendrik Verwoerd pronounce the word at https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=vPCln9czoys, accessed March 14, 2018.

2 South Africa Senate Debates, September 3, 1948, quoted in Hepple (1967: 111).
3 Suppression of Communism Act, 1950, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Suppression_

of_Communism_Act,_1950, accessed March 14, 2018.
4 Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the

Boer Rebellion went out of print soon after its publication in 1916 and did not become
widely available until its republication in 1982 (Plaatje [1916] 1982). A. T. Nzula’s
Forced Labour in Colonial Africa was published in Russian in 1933 and was not avai-
lable in an English edition until 1979, when it was banned in South Africa (Nzular
[1933] 1979).

5 The most useful analysis of state control of writing and publication in South Africa is
Merrett (1994).

6 For the reference to the 1959 Act as the Separate Universities Act, see Liebenberg
(1969: 430). For a useful analysis of the role of separate universities see Hefferan
(2017: 195–214).

7 The books he considered most important for advocacy and apology were all written
in Afrikaans and included G. Cronjé’s’n Tuiste vir die Nageslag (1945), Afrika Sonder
die Asiaat (1946), Regverdige Rasse‐apartheid (1947), and Voogdyskap en Apartheid
(1948), and N. J. Rhoodie and H. J. Venter’s Die Apartheidsgedagte:’n Sosio‐historiese
Uitensetting van sy Onstaan en Ontwikkeling (1960). For a critical analysis of Cronjé’s
ideas about race see Coetzee (1991: 30), in which he argues that Cronjé in the period
1945–1948 was “crazy” and that the electorate “which bought the package offered
by Cronjé and his friends, besides being deceived or self‐deceived, was also for a time
crazy, or at least crazed.”

8 Africans (termed “Natives”) are discussed in an appendix written by a “professor of
Bantu languages.”

9 Though now dated, the most useful text on Afrikaner history and historians is Smith
(1989); see also Thompson (1985). A similar text to Smith, dated but still useful,
which deals primarily with English writers on South African history is Saunders (1988).

10 For an informative personal view of the ways in which Afrikaner historians under
apartheid often viewed their academic work as needing to support the political aims
of the National Party, see Giliomee (2016).

11 See also Spence and his argument: “From 1948 onwards the elevation of apartheid into
a symbol of survival for Afrikaner nationalism made domestic policy a crucial factor in
governing South Africa’s relations with the outside world” (Spence 1971: 478).

12 For an historical overview of the History Workshop, see Bonner (1994). On a posta-
partheid assessment of the future of the field see Cobley (2001).

13 On the disappointed political hopes of white academics in black majority‐ruled South
Africa see in particular the scathing critique of Desai Bohmke (1997).

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Communism_Act

apartheid forgotten and remembered 453

14 For a good overview of much of this literature see Sapire (2013).
15 See works by Giliomee (2016), Anthony Butler (2017), and Johnson (2015), among

others. Also see further work criticizing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission: Posel and Wits History Workshop (1999).

16 See for example, among others, the works of Paul La Hausse on alcohol (1989),
Peter Alegi on sports (2004), Annie Coombes on visual art (2003), David B. Coplan
on music (1988), Keyan Tomaselli on film (2016) and Njabulo Ndebele on literature
(2006, 2007).

17 In a section of his book The Afrikaners: Biography of a People subtitled “A Christian
and Generous Political Approach,” Giliomee’s first sentence goes: “The peculiar fea-
ture of apartheid as an ideology was its attempt to reconcile the demands for white
survival and justice” (2003: 461).

18 Two historiographical studies published before Welsh wrote his book demonstrate
well the wealth of materials on which he could have drawn: Cobley (2001) and
Stolten (2006).

Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:

Turnitin Report

Formatting

Title Page

Citation

Outline

Place an Order