guiding principle for how society was structured. The white rulers were predominantly Afrikaners, who were descended from the Dutch colonists of the 17th and 18th centuries. They maintained a firm grip on politics, the economy and land ownership and had, since the 17th century, enforced increasingly strict and regulated racial divisions and separations. The development of apartheid – from isolated, casual racist oppression within regions and communities to outright national policy – was gradual, taking over two centuries, and it then lasted in its most strict and brutal form for a little less than fifty years.
A very brief history of apartheid
Pre-20th century racial oppression and discrimination was more freewheeling and casual: there was a slave era, the increasing theft of land and resources from native peoples by European (mostly Dutch) settlers, and with the coming of the British there was a rise in industrialisation and a great expansion of mining projects (South Africa is home to some of the most profitable diamond mines on the planet, with roughly 49% of all diamonds still being mined in Central and South Africa). Black people were pushed off their land when the white settlers wanted to use it themselves; they were forbidden from living in certain places and doing certain work; they were not allowed to vote or enter white churches; and criminal acts against blacks were barely noticed and rarely dealt with seriously by white authorities. The Dutch settlers had already introduced a hierarchy of race, with whites at the top, Indians and Asians somewhere in the middle, and blacks at the very bottom.
By the mid-20th century, however, the central government began to institute stricter and more precise legislation to enforce the system of white supremacy.
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in 1949 is considered to be the first step in the institutionalisation of white supremacy as state policy. This law, and the Immorality Act of the following year, made it a crime to marry or have sexual relationships across racial lines.
Another 1950 law, the Population Registration Act, defined the four legal racial groups: black, white, coloured and Indian. Your race defined where you could live, what job you could have, and who you were allowed to interact with. Identification papers included these racial designations, and citizens were not able to cross the boundaries of their assigned region without these papers.
In 1953 the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act defined racially-specific public services, such as hospitals, universities and public parks, which were not allowed to be used by members of other races.
Also passed in 1953, the Bantu Education Act segregated national education, effectively cutting black South Africans off from the better-financed and organised educational infrastructure, which was from this point on only available to whites.
In the 1950s the government also created the “pass laws”, which stopped black South Africans from being able to travel freely in the country. The pass laws in particular limited blacks’ ability to enter urban areas; black South Africans were now required to provide authorisation from a white employer to be able to enter specific towns and cities (when China vanishes, Mandisa first believes he may have been arrested for just this crime: “Maybe he had been arrested for a pass offence”, p. 144).
These laws led to the forced relocations of the 1960s–1980s, during which millions of non-white Africans were removed from their homes and made to live in so-called “tribal homelands” – although these areas often had no historical validity or relevance for the tribes. These regions were also largely unsuitable for larger populations, with very poor agricultural potential and little or no infrastructure. Some of these so-called bantustans became independent republics. The goal of the white supremacist governments was to strip black Africans of their South African citizenship as they moved into the bantustans, thus removing all remaining rights from the blacks and freeing the white rulers of all remaining responsibility for the blacks.
Petty and grand apartheid – Very broadly speaking, apartheid in South Africa came in two forms. Petty apartheid is the segregation of public facilities (hospitals, public toilets, churches, public transport etc.) and social events, meaning that blacks and whites are not allowed – by law – to share these facilities or to mix with one another in “social events”. Grand apartheid is concerned with housing and employment. So the relocations which play such a huge role in Mandisa’s youth are an example of grand apartheid: the government telling her and her family where they are allowed to live (see p. 28, where Mandisa describes the shock of being relocated to Guguletu). Black labour was necessary to uphold South Africa’s industries – particularly mining – because the blacks could be exploited with poor wages, little or no labour law protections, and inadequate security for dangerous jobs. This government control of work is also a case of grand apartheid.
The apartheid system was hugely controversial and widely denounced all around the world. As well as activism and resistance within South Africa, there were global movements aimed at stopping and removing the institution of white supremacy as state policy. Many countries joined in arms and trade embargoes against South Africa. In 1973 the United Nations officially defined the apartheid system as a crime against humanity, which would allow criminal prosecution of individuals responsible for upholding and enforcing the system. Not all member states signed the declaration: by 2008, nearly 90 states had still not signed.
Sport under apartheid – The world of sports is not relevant to Mother to Mother, but a brief look at the subject highlights the injustice and absurdity of white supremacist policies on a social as well as international level. Because the apartheid system forbids multiracial sports teams, it was almost impossible for teams from other countries to play any kind of sports in South Africa. No teams were permitted to compete if they contained members of different races.
The International Table Tennis Federation cut all ties to the South African table tennis organisations in protest. South Africa was banned from the 1964 Olympics, and again in 1968.
The Australian Cricketing Association refused to compete in South Africa or against South African teams as long as they selected their teams on a purely racial basis. In the Chess Olympiad of 1970, the Albanian team forfeited rather than face a team of chess players from an apartheid state. South Africa was suspended from FIFA (the international governing body for football) in 1963. The South African tennis team was banned from the 1970 Davis Cup tournament, and when they were allowed to participate in 1974 they won because the Indian team refused to travel to South Africa to compete in the final.
Following the end of apartheid in 1991, the various boycotts against South African athletes and teams also quickly ended.
By the 1980s increasing number of Western companies and organisations were withdrawing from South Africa in response to louder and louder calls for boycotts and embargoes, taking their money with them, and this, combined with structural flaws in the South African economy, was having a devastating effect on the country. These economic pressures combined with increasingly potent and at times violent resistance within the country, as militant and activist groups grew bolder and angrier. Under increased pressure from within and from the rest of the world, the South African government began to release anti-apartheid political prisoners, which further electrified and revitalised anti-apartheid activism within the country as these political prisoners – or, in the phrase made famous by Amnesty International, “prisoners of conscience” – were welcomed back as heroes and martyrs by the anti-apartheid movement.
Attempts made by the central government to reform apartheid – such as giving “coloureds” and “Indians” voting rights in 1983 – were widely seen as inadequate responses to the problem. The government under P. W. Botha (1916–2006, leader of South Africa from 1978 to 1989) claimed it was about to make reforms to the apartheid laws which never came true.
By the end of the 1980s the South African economy was in terrible shape, and when Botha suffered a stroke and resigned as leader, F. W. de Klerk became the leader of the state, and moved quickly to begin dismantling the discriminatory legislation underpinning apartheid. The changes he initiated included lifting the bans on anti-apartheid groups and organisations like Nelson Mandela’s