The End Of Apartheid

Black History Month -February 2, 2019

On February 2nd 1990, F.W de Klerk gave a speech to the South African Parliament after winning the general election on September 6, 1989. The speech effectively ended apartheid after 40 years of black subjugation under the white South African minority. Nine days later, on February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela would be freed from Robben Island prison after serving more than 27 years as a political prisoner. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990’s.  It was characterized by an authoritarian political culture based on baasskap (or white supremacy), which encouraged state repression of Black African, Colored, and Asian South Africans for the benefit of the nation’s minority white population. It was a very evil system and is beyond the scope of this article. However you can read more about it here.

The father of apartheid was Cecil Rhodes. After becoming Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in 1890, he introduced the ” Glen Grey Act.” Cape Colony was the name of South Africa at the time. The Glen Grey Act was enacted to push black people from their lands and make way for industrial development. Rhodes’s view was that black people needed to be driven off their land to “stimulate them to labor” and to change their habits. “It must be brought home to them that in future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in manual labor, and the sooner that is brought home to them the better.” In 1913 Rhodes introduced the Natives Land Act of 1913, which would limit the areas of the country that black Africans were allowed to less than 10%. The act was a little more complicated than that, but it’s basically what it came down to. Now remember, the blacks outnumbered the whites 10-1. At the time, Rhodes would argue that “the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India, in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa. He is talking about the subservient position the British held over the people of India. Although Britain at the time was a bastion of racist ideologues, Cecil took it to the next level. Cecil was also the founder of the De Beers Consolidated Diamond Mines and set up the Rhodes Scholarship. 

The architect of apartheid was a guy named Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd.
As leader of South Africa’s National Party he served as the last prime minister of the Union of South Africa from 1958 until 1961. In 1961 he proclaimed the founding of the Republic of South Africa, and continued as its prime minister from 1961 until his assassination in 1966 by Dimitri Tsafendas. No, a black man didn’t kill him. Tsafendas was from Greece. I highly recommend you read his story. He paid the price for killing Verwoerd. They show him no love.. not one bit. Anyway, Verwoerd was an authoritarian, socially conservative leader and an Afrikaner nationalist. His goal in founding the Republic of South Africa, thereby leaving the Commonwealth, was to preserve minority rule by white Afrikaners. Under Verwoerd the following is some of the legislation that was passed:

Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) – This law laid the cornerstone for the classification of black South Africans into eight ethnic groups and their allocation to ‘homelands’.

Bantu Investment Corporation Act (1959) – A law that offered financial incentives for industrial corporations to transfer their capital from White South Africa to the Black Homelands.

Extension of University Education Act (1959) – Legislation putting an end to black students attending white universities and creating separate tertiary institutions for the different races.

Colored Persons Communal Reserves Act, Act No 3 of 1961 – The Coloured Persons Communal Rerserves Act had the effect of lowering wages by denying Africans rights within urban areas and by keeping their families and dependants on subsistence plots in the reserves.

Preservation of Colored Areas Act, Act No 31 of 1961 – The Preservation of Colored Areas Act had the effect of causing mortgaged land to be seized with compensation then paid to a white “Guardian” in place of the colored owner

As I said in the beginning, after de Klerks speech and the release of Nelson Mandela, the system of apartheid was dismantled. Since 1994, all ethnic and linguistic groups have held political representation in the country and the day of the Afrikaner was mercifully ended.