Page 215 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

100 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my
idea of Democracy.Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the
difference, is no Democracy. • Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)

refers to the everyday examples of racial discrimination, the government as a Communist; the Reservation of Sep-
such as marriage restrictions and segregated facilities and arate Amenities Act (1953); and the Bantu Education Act
amenities, housing, jobs, transportation, and education. (1953). This last denied government support to private
During the first decade following the 1948 elections, and church-run (often mission) schools and placed the
apartheid policies developed in a rather crude manner entire national education system under the government’s
under the label of baaskap. This Afrikaans term roughly direction, resulting in a significant decline in the quality
translates as “mastery,” or white supremacy, with a very of black education.
explicit notion of a master (the “boss”) and servant rela-
tionship between white and black.The Afrikaners’ obses- The Baaskap Period and
sion with cultural survival and almost pathological fear Hendrik Verwoerd
of the swart gevaar (“black peril”) resulted in a series of During this baaskap period, the apartheid government
laws enforcing strict segregation and white supremacy. set about enforcing a strict separation between the races
These included the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act in urban areas. Thousands of Africans, Asians, and col-
(1949); the Immorality Act (1950), which made sex oreds were forcibly removed from so-called white areas
between people of different racial groups illegal; the and relocated to dreary, desolate townships outside the
Population Registration Act (1950), requiring everyone cities. These harsh measures are best exemplified by the
to be registered in one of the official groups; the Group forced removal of an entire colored community living in
Areas Act (1950); the Suppression of Communism Act “District Six” in Cape Town, and the destruction of the
(1950), which effectively identified anyone who opposed African township of Sophiatown, near Johannesburg,
which was then rebuilt as a white town, to be renamed
Triomf (Afrikaans: “Triumph”). It is estimated that from
the passage of the Group Areas Act in 1950 to the end
of forced removals in the late 1980s, more than 3.5 mil-
lion people were forcibly relocated by the government.
In 1958 Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) became
prime minister. He is remembered as the chief architect
of apartheid. Under Verwoerd, apartheid evolved away
from baaskap and toward a more sophisticated racist pol-
icy called separate development. Under separate devel-
opment, each of the nine African (or Bantu) groups was
to have its own nation, or Bantustan, located roughly on
the 14 percent of land set aside in the Native Land Acts
of 1913 and 1936. The remaining 86 percent of the
country was reserved for whites only; that land included
the best farmland, the main urban areas, and major min-
eral deposits and mines. The underlying philosophy of
This is the town of Graaff-Reinet in South separate development was that Africans should return
Africa and clearly shows how apartheid to their independent homeland, and there develop
looked in practice. In the center is the white socially, economically, culturally, and politically according
town of Graaff-Reinet. Set off in the upper to their own freely determined desires. The argument
left and right are smaller settlements went that in this way, all South African nations—the
housing coloreds and Africans. white “nation” and the nine black “nations”—would