The Codification and Implementation of the Apartheid Regime

Hello. My name is Doctor Elizabeth Williams.

I'm based at the University of Edinburgh.

I am the author of The Politics of Race in Britain and South

Africa.

And most recently the author of Nelson Mandela

and Black Britain.

Today I'm going to talk to you about the introduction of

apartheid to South Africa in nineteen

forty eight.

When the National Party came to governance in South Africa in

nineteen forty eight,

it came on a platform of a policy known as apartheid.

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word that means separateness,

apartness, literally.

They were able to get into government because they

promised that they would be able to separate the races into

various categories.

And the premise of this was really based on the fact that

Africans outnumbered whites quite considerably.

And whites were very concerned about the preservation of their

culture and jobs and much more.

They decided through the system of apartheid that they would be

able to categorize people according to their ethnicity, white,

Bantu or African,

colored, and Indian and or Asian.

Eventually, the Chinese were added to this as well.

They were given the category of honorary white, if you like.

Now apartheid wasn't something that was new at all.

There had always been a system of, if you like,

sex separation and segregation,

particularly after the act of union in nineteen ten.

However, what was new and distinct about apartheid was the fact that now

it was codified.

It was put into law as a practice.

One of the problems with apartheid when it was

introduced in terms of an international perspective was

that in many ways,

it went against what was happening in the rest of the world.

After the second World War,

it was quite clear that racism was not a system that was right

nor was it working for anyone concerned.

It was a much more liberal world and less tolerant of

racism in any form.

So apartheid seemed to be a reverse of that.

As a matter of fact,

many other countries in the rest of Africa were moving

towards and calling for independence

and freedom.

And as I said, apartheid was a retrograde step.

Apartheid itself, when it was introduced,

had many pillars and many laws that would structure and keep it up.

I did say that it was to codify and and define people

according to their races.

So the population registration act in nineteen fifty set about

putting people into various categories.

This was followed by a whole panoply of different laws such

as the Group Areas Act, the Separate Aminities Act,

the Morality Act.

So all of these acts regulated, and if you like,

readjusted where people would live,

work, whom they would marry, whom they would associate with,

where they would study, how they would live, and more.

And from the get go, there were many,

many protests against this.

The main opposition came from these distinct ethnic groups.

For instance, you have the African National Congress,

which was formed in nineteen twelve.

By time apartheid was introduced,

it was a fully honed national movement and represented mostly the Africans.

There was also the South African Indian Congress

representing Indian South Africans and then a series of

others such as the Colored People's Congress and many more.

The Group Areas Act was an act that drew

its antecedents

from the nineteen thirteen Land Act.

The nineteen thirteen Land Act reserved most of the land

for the white population,

pushing the Africans to thirteen percent of the land

even though they made up nearly seventy percent sixty eight to

seventy percent of the population,

while the white population made up thirteen percent of the population.

So the land act was quite significant and apartheid

further built upon that.

From the very beginning when apartheid was introduced,

it was opposed by most of the non white population.

The ANC in nineteen forty nine, during their conference,

came up with their program of action.

And in the program of action,

they decided that they through civil disobedience and other

acts such as strikes and boycotts,

they would protest against the imposition.

They also wrote to the prime minister protesting and asking

for him to rescind the apartheid laws.

This also included the pass laws that program

of

action, there began

the defiance program of action,

there began the Defiance Campaign.

The Defiance Campaign of nineteen fifty two was a

combination of a series of groups that opposed the

introduction of apartheid, and it was led by the ANC.

Also, the South African Indian Congress,

the Colored People's Organization,

Congress of Democrats, and the South African Communist Party.

They encourage people to defy the unjust laws that were introduced via

apartheid.

These laws and this defiance saw itself

manifested in going into public facilities

that were a assigned for whites, refusing to go to work,

stay aways, boycotting buses, also not carrying their passes with them.

The government's response to this was large scale arrests

and detentions and bannings.

About eighteen thousand Africans in all

were jailed for defying the government laws.

What the defiance campaign did do, however,

was to alert the world to what was happening in South Africa

and the racism within South Africa.

It's also spurred the UN to form a committee and a

commission to start looking at apartheid more broadly.

It was a spur to the international anti apartheid movement.

After the defiance campaign came the nineteen fifty five

Congress of the People, where, again,

the ANC and other groups representing other ethnicities

within South Africa came together.

And out of this emerged the People's Charter.

It was a vision of how this multiracial

group wanted their country to be governed.

And it was a total opposite to what apartheid was trying to do,

which was to separate people and to have inequity

economically, politically, socially,

financially, and through every other system.

The People's Charter started out with the people shall govern.

And then it went through a series of dictates or

statements saying that South Africa

belongs to all.

There should be sharing of wealth,

sharing of the land.

People should have security.

There should be equity in every shape or form.

This, however, was a challenge to the government,

and they saw it as communism and decided

to arrest the main people that they saw as the drivers

behind this, the leaders of the various groups.

They then decided to put them on trial,

and this was known as a treason trial

that lasted from nineteen fifty six to nineteen sixty one,

which was the longest trial in South African history.

Through this trial, they tried to expose what they saw was

communism amongst these groups and the intent of these groups

to overthrow the government.

They tried in particularly to be in control of the judges

that would sit at the trial.

Instead of one, there there were three judges,

and the minister of justice himself picked the judges.

However, after many hearings and a series of indictments,

indeed, seventy three were withdrawn even before the end of the trial,

the judges ruled that the ANC and the other group were not

guilty of trying to overthrow the state.