G08: Revolution: Apartheid

An Afrikaans word for “apartness,” apartheid is the name that South Africa’s white government applied to its policy of discrimination—racial, political, and economic—against the country’s nonwhite majority in the second half of the 20th century. From the 1960s the government often referred to apartheid as “separate development.”

In 1948, the National Party (NP), representing Afrikaners, won the national election on a platform of racism and segregation under the slogan of 'apartheid’. Apartheid built upon earlier laws, but made segregation more rigid and enforced it more aggressively. All Government action and response was decided according to the policy of apartheid. In turn, apartheid failed to respond effectively and adequately to concerns that had led to intermittent labour and civic unrest that erupted in the aftermath of World War II. Consequently, throughout the 1950s unrest in African, Coloured and Indian communities escalated, becoming more frequent and determined. Labour unrest too was in evidence during this period.

On February 11, 1966, the apartheid government declared Cape Town's District Six a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act of 1950. From 1968, over 60 000 of its inhabitants were forcibly removed to the Cape Flats, over twenty five kilometers away. Except for the local houses of worship, the buildings were systematically bulldozed throughout the 1970s, and by 1982, almost all evidence of the district had been destroyed. Originally named the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867, the neighbourhood was home to almost ten per cent of the city's population. Its unique culture was a composite of the dynamic and diverse population of Malay, Eastern European, Indian and African immigrants, ex-slaves, artists, musicians and activists. District Six was famed for its proximity to the City Centre, as well as its view of the picturesque Table Mountain and harbour. District Six had experienced a long history of removals, with black residents forcibly removed as early as 1901. This was intensified in the early 1960s, when residents were perfunctorily given notice and informed of their new homes. By the mid 1960s the apartheid government regarded the district as both physically and morally tainted by miscegenation, wholly unfit for rehabilitation. Over the next two decades, they systematically razed it to the ground.

African National Congress (ANC), South African political party and Black nationalist organization. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, it had as its main goal the maintenance of voting rights for Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and Black Africans in Cape Province. It was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. From the 1940s it spearheaded the fight to eliminate apartheid, the official South African policy of racial separation and discrimination. The ANC was banned from 1960 to 1990 by the white South African government; during these three decades it operated underground and outside South African territory. The ban was lifted in 1990, and Nelson Mandela, the president of the ANC, was elected in 1994 to head South Africa’s first multiethnic government.