South Africa Holidays 1700s South Africa Art Music and Dance in the 1700s

Introduction Contents

The First South Africans |New Arrivals | Indian Immigrants | Gold, War, and Shifting Identities | Blackness South Africans Organize | Afrikaner Nationalism | Foreshadowing Apartheid

Between 1948 and 1994, Southward Africans lived under a racist system of laws chosen apartheid. The men and women who created, opposed, maintained, resisted, and dismantled apartheid are the discipline of this book. Some people in South Africa accept belonged to ethnic groups present in the expanse for centuries or even millennia; others trace their genealogy to Holland and England and other parts of Europe, while others arrived from Southeast Asia, the bulk equally slaves, and yet others from South Asia, more than a century ago. A long flow of colonial rule and the recent decades of apartheid helped determine how all of these groups conceive of their identities likewise every bit the identities of others. This history has shaped the way they see themselves and the way they see people of other identity groups.

This nineteenth-century map depicts the known boundary lines, cities, rivers, lakes and elevation changes in Africa.

The Showtime Due south Africans

People take lived in southern Africa for many millennia. In fact, remains of some of the primeval human being ancestors have been plant there, in an area known every bit "the Cradle of Mankind." Early humans migrated from this region, and migration has remained a major cistron in the formation of identities in southern Africa. Over the centuries, people from other parts of Africa, from Europe, and from Asia take migrated into what is today South Africa.

The diversity of the population has presented a challenge for how different groups live together. Conflict between the groups has never been inevitable; at times, various groups lived together peacefully. But equally the territory became increasingly prosperous, with lush farmland and the mining of diamonds and gilt, some groups sought to go along the country'southward wealth for themselves by controlling and excluding other groups. The history of struggle for control and for resources shaped how groups came to understand their own identities.

Prior to the arrival of European colonists, a diversity of ethnic and linguistic groups lived in the southernmost region of the African continent. The earliest known inhabitants were the Khoisan peoples. The more egalitarian San lived by angling, hunting, and gathering, while the more than hierarchical Khoikhoi ("men of men") were primarily herders. For centuries, they lived in small communities of 20 to 80 families related by blood and marriage; a male leader was marked by a degree of wealth, distinctive clothing, and in some cases several wives. While these groups once occupied much of what is today South Africa, newcomers migrating from other parts of Africa gradually displaced them. Over thousands of years, the newcomers integrated many San and Khoikhoi into their communities and pushed the remaining San to the most arid regions of the interior and the remaining Khoikhoi to the territory'due south southwestern edge.

The new arrivals were mostly farmers and herders who spoke languages from a big African language group known as Bantu. Every bit the migrants settled in various parts of the territory, people living in close proximity gradually developed distinct languages and cultures, creating new ethnic groups. For example, the modernistic Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Swazi ethnic groups all trace their origins to an earlier grouping, known equally the Nguni, and their languages today remain mutually understandable.

Over fourth dimension, many smaller groups gradually merged into larger political communities, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes past force. The process of group formation remained fluid until relatively recently. For example, until the late 1700s, the Zulu were a small grouping in the due east. Under the leadership of several powerful kings, especially Shaka Zulu, who came to power in 1816, the Zulu conquered a number of neighboring groups. Those who would not submit to Zulu rule had no choice but flight, and some moved as far north as modern-mean solar day Zimbabwe. Today, South Africa includes 10 big African indigenous groups and a number of smaller groups. Together these African ethnic groups constitute over 80% of South Africa's population.

The inflow of Europeans in South Africa and their gradual conquest of African peoples, the establishment and exercise of colonial control over Africans, and, later, apartheid all had major impacts on group identity formation and change. European colonial practices, wars betwixt the Dutch and the Koi, and Dutch "hunting raids" over time caused the disappearance of the Khoikhoi as a distinct ethnic group as they lost control of their state to white colonists or fled colonial control and were incorporated into other indigenous groups, peculiarly the neighboring Xhosa.

In mod South Africa, particularly in urban settings, blackness South Africans of diverse ethnic groups alive together in diverse communities, where individual ethnic identities are less important. Withal the traditions of the dissimilar ethnic groups are not entirely lost. Ceremonies such as namings, weddings, and burials often follow the traditions of specific ethnic communities. Craft and music and dance that bear the marks of specific groups are function of the modern scene of both rural and urban S Africa. More chiefly, as the reading African Identities illustrates, pride in the traditions and cultures of the various African groups was an important resources and inspiration for black Due south Africans as they fought against apartheid and other forms of oppression.

This Tswana-Venda wedding demonstrates the continued importance of traditional culture in gimmicky South African society.

Various locations, experiences, and traditions have shaped black Due south African cultures and promoted an array of different identities with many overlapping features. References to a uniform oppositional identity—the thought that black South Africans' identity was shaped exclusively by the feel of apartheid—are misleading. While about black Southward Africans recognize a shared experience, most remain very much members of a specific ethnic group as well. The challenge of maintaining control over their culture was i of the factors in the African struggle confronting colonialism, equally reflected in the reading and verse form My Name.

New Arrivals

The arrival of Jan van Riebeeck, a Dutch navigator and colonial administrator, at Table Bay (Cape of Good Hope) marked the outset of permanent European settlement in the region.

Dutch colonists, known every bit Boers (the Dutch word for "farmers"), settled in the Cape of Skillful Hope region beginning in 1652 to provide fresh food and water for ships passing from Europe to Asia. They lived the hard frontier life of settlers, supporting themselves through farming, ranching, and hunting. They developed an outlook of self-sufficiency and independence, at the center of which was their strict Calvinist Protestant faith. The Boer population expanded when French Calvinist Protestants fled Europe to escape persecution subsequently the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

Equally the number of Dutch-speaking colonists grew, they began to push farther inland and up the coast, forcibly taking over land for their farms and causing a dandy deal of conflict with indigenous African peoples. Although white Southward Africans historically portrayed their settlement of Southward Africa as a peaceful procedure, in fact the European occupation of the territory involved considerable violence and is better understood as colonial conquest. One of the groups the Europeans sought to readapt, the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape, put up successful resistance to the European invasion for a number of decades, simply the Dutch-speaking colonists possessed better weaponry that they used to subdue the Xhosa and drive many of them off their land. By the start of the eighteenth century, many of the original African inhabitants had been dispossessed of almost of their land and were forced into positions of servitude as laborers on the farms of the European settlers. The Boers employed many local people in exploitative arrangements, and they likewise imported slaves from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Republic of madagascar, people who eventually came to be known collectively as "Cape Malays" and were considered part of the "coloured" population, forth with people of mixed ancestry. Exploitative economic practices enabled the Boers to dominate the region until they gradually lost power to a 2d group of colonists: the British.

In 1795, as part of a large conflict between United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, France, the Netherlands, and other European states, the British dispatched troops to the Cape, which its merchants trading with India had long relied on for supplies. They captured Greatcoat Town subsequently vi weeks of fighting. John Barrow, an Englishman who founded the Purple Geographical Social club, traveled to southern Africa 2 years afterward. In An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa, he alleged that the Dutch had neglected their responsibility to humanity by treating blackness Southward Africans (whom he described as "mild, rational, and in some degree civilized") as objects. Barrow and others who followed were interested in possessing the Cape, and they made a moral justification for colonialism past arguing that British colonialism was more humane. In 1803, the Cape Colony was briefly returned to the Dutch, but in 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, the British took permanent control.

English speakers began to drift to the colony in large numbers and quickly dominated urban areas, taking control of politics, trade, finance, mining, and manufacturing, while Boer farmers remained largely rural. Boer encounters with the local black South African populations led to countless conflicts over stolen cattle and crops. While the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, and Boers fought among themselves, the same groups besides struggled, ultimately unsuccessfully, confronting encroaching British domination. The British oft exploited the divisions between the other inhabitants of the region.

Dutch colonists (Boers) load supply-filled wagons in preparation for their migration into the interior of Due south Africa in the 1830s.

Having lived as independent pioneer farmers for many decades, the Boers resented British dominion. When the new rulers of the Cape abolished slavery in 1834, many Boers objected. To maintain their fashion of life, Boer farmers moved n in search of new land outside British control. The migration of thousands of Dutch-speaking families into the southern African interior became known equally the "Great Trek" (die Groot Expedition); those who migrated were known as "Trekboers." Some of the land where the Trekboers arrived was lightly populated, because of the disruptions of the Zulu wars, but some places were already inhabited. After killing or violently driving out these local blackness Southward African populations, similar the Ndebele, and decisively defeating the Zulu in the Battle of Claret River in 1838, the Trekboers occupied large portions of land, particularly in a fertile plateau area known equally the Highveld. The black South Africans who had formerly lived in some of these territories were pushed increasingly into more remote and less fertile territories. The Trekboers created three new independent states: Natalia, the Due south African Republic (or Transvaal), and the Orangish Gratuitous State. The British occupied Natalia, strategically located along the coast, in 1843 and changed its name to Natal.

Because Transvaal and the Orange Gratis State were far from the coast and seemed to take picayune value, the British immune them to be for a while every bit contained states. Eventually, withal, diamonds and gold were discovered on the lands the Trekboers claimed. In spite of this extraordinary opportunity to enrich themselves, the Boers chose to maintain their rural agrestal lifestyle, assuasive outside interests to exploit the new resource—peculiarly British investors, who established mines. Many British thought of the Boers as backward farmers, while the Boers referred to the newcomers as rooineks, a pejorative reference to sunburned necks. Afrikaners like the Boers, descendants of the region's earlier European settlers, considered the British to what would somewhen be South Africa, with 1 foot in England and the other in Africa, while they saw themselves equally the rightful owners of the territory.

The Boers, semi-nomadic farmers of Dutch descent, often lived in impoverished conditions due to social isolation and their views on racial superiority.

Hither, in an early and simple form, are the roots of the identities the two main European groups would come to embrace in South Africa. If the Boers saw themselves as pioneers, fighting to fulfill their destiny in the vast landscape imagined as uninhabited, the British fancied themselves enlightened and rather liberal rulers. Both groups saw themselves equally superior to the local blackness S African populations, whom they considered uncivilized, unproductive, and vehement. These racist attitudes shaped European interactions with black South Africans and served to justify the increasing oppression of the majority of the population in the territory.

As the British and Boers competed for control of the region, the British offered promises of security to some blackness S African groups threatened by the Boer republics. In practice, these protectorates became British colonies, where the leaders gradually lost control over their own territories. At the aforementioned time, as the British sought to extend their control and gain access to more land in the Cape Colony and later Natal, they used strength to suppress other groups, such as the Xhosa, who faced a serial of British attacks throughout the 1800s, and the Zulu, who faced a large-scale British attack in 1879.

When the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 launched the "scramble for Africa," where European powers met to separate and make their claims on the African continent, the British pushed farther into the interior of southern Africa, creating new colonies in what are today the countries of Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. For all of their talk of enlightened attitudes toward black South Africans, the British proved themselves to be as interested in colonial conquest and domination as the Boers.

Indian Immigrants

People from the British colony of India began to arrive in S Africa in large numbers subsequently the British abolished slavery throughout their empire in 1833, forcing settlers to seek new forms of inexpensive labor. Although these people came from territories that now constitute the countries of Bharat, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, in southern Africa they were known collectively every bit "Indians." Some came as indentured servants, often committing to serve under harsh labor conditions, especially on sugar plantations. The workers agreed to v or more years of labor in exchange for—in principle—being immune to immigrate and begin a new life, simply equally the terms of their service concluded, they were encouraged to renew their "contracts" or return to their home land. Many chose to stay.

Other immigrants were "rider Indians" who paid for their travel by themselves with the goal of finding better economic prospects. They generally came from a merchant background and ready retail shops; competition with European shop owners led to widespread discrimination.¹

Indian merchants, who initially operated in Durban, expanded inland to Transvaal, establishing communities and settlements between Johannesburg and Durban.

The Indian population was concentrated in the Natal colony, where, by 1904, they had expanded enough to outnumber the white South Africans in the region. Their economic ability swelled at that time, and in coal mines they made up 44.5% of the workforce.² This growth of the largely gratis Indian customs, whose members at present considered Due south Africa their dwelling, caused many European settlers, specially those in rural areas, to push the colonial government for restrictions on further clearing. It was also during this time period that European settlers, believing that they were losing their monopoly on power, insisted on legislation prejudicial to Indians—attitudes evidenced in the reading Indian Identities: Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Gold, War, and Shifting Identities

The discovery of diamonds in 1869 in the Orange Free State and gold in 1886 in Transvaal marked a major turning bespeak in S African history. The diamond and gold fields—all in the hands of entrepreneurs with ties to England—turned out to be extremely productive. The Kimberley mines increased world diamond production tenfold, and the Witwatersrand plateau nigh Johannesburg turned out to hold nearly half of the world'due south known gold reserves.

The Dutch-speaking population in southern Africa increasingly viewed themselves as a singled-out national group. Calling themselves Afrikaners, they developed an identity based on an cover of rural life, the sense that they were pioneers bravely resisting both British oppression and black Due south African "savagery," and their strong Dutch Reformed faith, a strict and austere version of Protestantism drawing on the teachings of Swiss Reformation leader John Calvin. They came to believe that they were God's new "chosen people" who had been given the territory equally a new promised land.

Favoring a farming lifestyle, the Afrikaners had limited interest in developing the resource newly discovered in their territories at first, but the British regarded this as a great opportunity. The British easily gained control of the Kimberley diamond mines, simply annexing the area to the Cape Colony. But the Witwatersrand in Transvaal, where the gold reserves were located, was in the eye of the territory controlled past the Afrikaners. The British had originally moved to annex the South African Republic (Transvaal) in 1880, even before the discovery of aureate in the territory, but the population of Transvaal rose up against the British endeavor at occupation and successfully defeated the British in an 1880–1881 war, regaining independence for the Due south African Republic.

When gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand a few years after, British interest in the Transvaal intensified. Big numbers of Europeans from Great Uk, Wales, Deutschland, and elsewhere migrated to Transvaal to work in the mines. British capitalists invested heavily in developing golden mines, and British-run conglomerates soon monopolized the mining manufacture. Facing taxes and authoritative obstruction from the Transvaal government, the mine owners appealed to the regime of Great United kingdom to intervene on their behalf. For their role, the Afrikaners had considerable contempt toward the British, every bit reflected in the reading Afrikaner Identity, and their governments moved to limit growing British say-so. The determination by the Afrikaner government to build a railroad line that would link the gilt mines to the coast through the Portuguese territory of Mozambique rather than through Natal proved to be the final straw.

In 1887 and 1888, Cecil Rhodes consolidated a number of individual diamond mine claims around Kimberley to grade a single company called De Beers Consolidated Mines.

The British moved to occupy Transvaal again in 1899. Through a bloody conflict known by the British as the Second Boer State of war and by the Afrikaners as the Second Freedom State of war (1899–1902), the British took permanent control of both Transvaal and the Orangish Free State. While both sides suffered immense casualties during this state of war, the Afrikaners regarded British actions as particularly fell. The British torched farms in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, destroying crops and killing cattle, and they placed families in concentration camps, where some 26,000 Boers died of famine and affliction. The British effectively drove the "chosen people" out of their land, humiliated them, and committed a massacre that was seared into the commonage memory of the Afrikaners. The memory of the war played an integral role in the solidification of modern Afrikaner national identity in the 1920s and 1930s.³ This second state of war was fueled by the British desire to seize control of the gold mines, particularly given the fear that the rail line through Mozambique would shut the British out of the golden trade. Having been occupied repeatedly and ultimately defeated past the British, the Afrikaners regarded themselves as a persecuted group whose God-given rights to control South Africa were being denied past the British. As the Afrikaner nationalist motion grew over the course of the next century, these Africans of European descent asserted their ain rights in part past denying those of the indigenous black South African population.

With Great britain in control and the region becoming more urban and industrialized, Afrikaners felt increasingly marginalized by their young man whites. An English-speaking urban population dominated the Marriage of S Africa, which was created in 1910 when the British brought together the Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State, and Transvaal as a self-governing rule of the British Empire. The farmer's lifestyle that was at the core of Afrikaner identity was on the turn down, as British tactics in the 2nd Boer War had devastated the livelihood of many rural farmers. Many moved to the cities, joining a multitude of immigrants and local people clamoring for industrial employment. Some sought work in the mines, competing for jobs with blackness South African migrants.

Owners of the mines, most of whom were either English or had strong ties to England, grew concerned about the labor situation. The owners viewed the workers on whom they relied as a threat. The Afrikaners, though defeated in the war, remained resentful and could potentially plough to violence over again. The mines relied on extensive human labor, and the owners encouraged blacks from throughout southern Africa to migrate to the mines. Yet they besides worried that blacks increasingly outnumbered whites in the region. The owners were peculiarly worried that the white and black workers might unite across racial lines to forcefulness extensive and expensive concessions in terms of wages and improved working atmospheric condition.

The British capitalists crafted a compromise to co-opt the Afrikaner miners by reserving managerial and skilled-labor positions for whites, while low-skilled and heavy labor jobs, which paid much less, were to be held by blacks. This immune a pay calibration to develop that boosted the wages for whites while lowering the wages for black Southward Africans, who became the vast bulk of the workforce.⁴ This system of racially based labor differentiation, an invention of English-speaking white Southward Africans, won backing from the government of the Matrimony of Due south Africa, which enacted far-reaching legislation afterward independence in 1910. Among the laws were restrictions on the mobility of black S African laborers, virtually of whom were required to live in designated areas and prohibited from bringing their families with them. These laws were the antecedents to apartheid.

As the search for gold drove the workers deeper into the earth, the manufacture entered into a new technical stage that required more skilled labor. A dispute between mine owners and 20,000 white laborers sparked the bloody 1922 Rand Defection. The government declared martial law and employed war machine force to restore order, but the white strikers were ultimately successful: they won concessions that shored up and exacerbated the two-tiered pay calibration for whites and blacks. As the reading Mines in South Africa indicates, the piece of work that blackness South Africans carried out in mines was back-breaking, difficult piece of work, and they were treated as subhuman.

South Africa'south English-speaking population maintained close ties with Great Britain and identified themselves equally British, often speaking of places similar Cornwall or Cardiff as home. Furthermore, England'due south cult of individualism hindered the development of a unmarried group identity. Many European immigrants to Southward Africa—such as High german miners—learned English language and were integrated into the English-speaking community. While British immigrants and their descendants had commitments to local concerns, they did non develop a clear identity as uniform and contained equally that of the Afrikaners.⁵

Black South Africans Organize

South Africa's wealth was built more than on the cheapness of black South African labor and on slavery than on its gold and diamond mines. To brand a profit, the gilded mine companies needed to find hundreds of thousands of men who were willing to work for little pay. Wages were more often than not beneath the cost of survival for a family unit. Withal the companies were able to attract black South Africans, in large part because they had been deprived of their land and many other ways to earn a living. Men lived in crowded compounds for the period of their (unbreakable) contracts of nine months or more than. Families were forbidden from visiting. Conditions underground were both dangerous and physically exhausting.⁶ The scholar Francis Wilson described a typical miner's work:

[I]t is perhaps easiest to starting time past thinking of a road labourer digging up pavement with a jack-hammer drill. At present imagine him doing that work thousands of feet underground, in intense heat, where he cannot even begin to stand upright, and where the drill . . . has to be held horizontal and driven into the wall in front end. Add to this moving-picture show the noise of a road-drill magnified several times by the bars space . . . and the possibility that the roof of the mine might suddenly cave in nether pressure . . .^vii

As long equally whites labored to legislate racism, black South Africans stood upwards to them. It is important to remember that the resistance that took concur at this time was preceded by centuries of resistance to colonial oppression. One political activist of this menstruum, John Tengo Jabavu, was an early on foe of laws that raised the holding qualification for voting and in fourth dimension also became a champion of women's education. In 1884, he established a newspaper that he used to promote resistance to the Cape Legislative Assembly; his vision and drive led to the creation of the Spousal relationship of Native Vigilance Clan. The most successful protestation association, the Southward African Native National Congress, was founded in 1912 to protest the treatment of black Southward Africans. In 1919, the group changed its name to the African National Congress (ANC).

Prior to 1910, the rights enjoyed by "citizens of colour," as journalist Sol Plaatje referred to black South Africans at the time, varied widely in the 4 carve up colonies. In the Cape Colony, for instance, voting rights were based on property buying rather than skin color. The establishment of the Union of South Africa, however, proved a considerable setback for the citizens of colour, as an exclusively white parliament was announced. John Tengo Jabavu said at the fourth dimension: "The colour bar in parliament has taken away the prized guarantee of political liberty and political contentment, and has made the African franchise illusory."

An important ingredient in the responses of black South Africans was a conversation in 1911 between Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a black South African lawyer who conceived of the group that would become the ANC, and Mohandas Gandhi, an Indian-built-in immigrant to South Africa who enjoyed early successes leading passive resistance in that location before returning to his homeland and leading India to independence. They met at Gandhi'south subcontract, before long before Seme attended the meeting that founded the ANC, for a long conversation about the importance of an organisation that could rally the black Due south African population. In the first years following the ANC's formation, its founders regularly consulted with Gandhi over strategies for organizing their grouping and influencing policy. Gandhi encouraged them to embrace a irenic arroyo that included participation from people of all races.

The politics and popularity of the ANC shifted over the years. The ANC operated alongside a host of other associations for not-whites, labor unions, and even the Communist Party. The ANC leadership believed that the identity of South Africa could just be understood as a composite of all its indigenous groups—their analogousness to other Africans across the continent was secondary to their alliance with other South Africans, including those of European descent. The ANC has always included in its ranks white, "coloured," and Indian members.

Afrikaner Nationalism

In response to a sense of political and economic marginalization, Afrikaners rallied effectually a nationalist motility in the early on twentieth century. Leaders emphasized the alleged racial superiority of Europeans over black Due south Africans and insisted on the cultural superiority over the British of Afrikaners, with their history of self-reliance and strict Christianity. This was very much a dogma that appealed to the Afrikaner grass roots: working-class white men and women who believed that they had been mistreated past the British.

To be an Afrikaner was to speak Afrikaans, a dialect of Dutch with many words borrowed from the languages in Due south Africa: English, German, Portuguese, Malay, and Khoikhoi. Some non-Europeans, including the Greatcoat Malay and the mixed-race populations of the Greatcoat, spoke Afrikaans every bit well. As part of a movement to strengthen Afrikaner nationalism, white elites moved to standardize Afrikaans, purging the language of some of its non-Dutch influences. In the 1920s, Afrikaner nationalists fought to replace Dutch, recognized as one of the country's official languages, with Afrikaans.

In the following decade, efforts were made to restore the Afrikaner self-confidence crushed by the Boer War. A reenactment of the Bang-up Trek in 1938, on the 100th anniversary of the Afrikaner victory over the Zulu in the Battle of Blood River, climaxed with the formalism laying of the foundation for the Voortrekker Monument outside of Pretoria. Afrikaners revisited military victories over black Due south Africans, emphasizing their own innate superiority to the groups they defeated.

The Voortrekker Monument, located in the Pretoria region of South Africa, commemorates the history and migration of the Afrikaner people. The structure was designed past Gerard Moerdijk and was completed in 1949.

The two world wars served equally a major source of tension betwixt the Afrikaners and the Anglophone population of South Africa. Given their anti-British sentiments, a meaning group within the Afrikaner population resented South Africa'southward entry into Earth War I on the side of Dandy United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, even though the decision was made by Prime number Minister Jan Smuts, who was himself an Afrikaner. In the 1930s, as Afrikaner nationalists were developing their ain ideas of racial superiority, many came to admire Nazi Deutschland'southward policies on "racial purity." They urged Southward Africa to remain neutral in the growing conflict between Federal republic of germany and U.k. and objected when Southward Africa joined World War 2 on the side of the Allies.

Foreshadowing Apartheid

In the prelude to the formal implementation of apartheid, the largest groups in S Africa redefined themselves. Black South Africans set aside ethnic divisions, forming national organizations to oppose oppression. Afrikaners reacted to the destruction of the Boer War with lasting antipathy to British South Africans and with campaigns to formalize Afrikaans as a distinct language.

Identities were recast by outsiders, as South Africa's native peoples were pressed into legal categories originally created to identify and control slaves. Slaves who had been formally freed from slavery lacked freedom in practice, as past the 1790s they could leave their area of residence only by permission of the colonial government. This organisation was extended to all black South African men and women in the Transvaal and Orange Free State by the mid-nineteenth century. Segregation was reaffirmed in the Representation of Natives Act, the Native Trust and Land Human activity, and the Native Laws Amendment Act, passed in 1936 and 1937.

Scores of laws and regulations separated the population into singled-out groups, ensuring white Southward Africans admission to education, higher-paying jobs, natural resources, and belongings while denying such things to the blackness South African population, Indians, and people of mixed race. Between union in 1910 and 1948, a variety of whites-only political parties governed South Africa. As the understanding that created the Union denied black S Africans the right to vote, a major focus of the government was on keeping the big Afrikaner population happy—for example, by providing the agronomical sector with cheap black labor. Regulations prepare aside an increasing amount of the most fertile land for white farmers and forced most of the black South African population to alive in areas known as reserves. Occupying the least fertile and to the lowest degree desirable land and lacking industries or other developments, the reserves were difficult places to make a living. The bad weather condition on the reserves and policies such every bit a requirement that taxes be paid in cash drove many black Due south Africans—particularly men—to farms and cities in search of employment opportunities. Regulations on motion forced many families to separate up, as men went in search of work while women were left in rural areas to farm and enhance children. By the belatedly 1940s, the shantytowns set on the outskirts of white cities past poor blacks who depended on the cities for income had grown enormously, and the failure of President January Smuts of the United Party to cope with this demographic shift tuckered the party of support. As seen in the reading Africans Resist White Control, black South African groups and individuals pushed back against each of these laws in order to stand for their rights.

The opening offered by the flagging authority of the United Party after the Second Globe War was seized by Daniel François Malan, leader of the Herenigde ("Reunited") National Party. Malan and his colleagues were very shut to the Afrikaner Broederbond ("brotherhood"), a secret organization dedicated to the promotion of Afrikaner interests. The Broederbond included many influential Afrikaners in its membership and had considerable political influence. Near every Afrikaner full general, high-ranking political leader, law enforcement officeholder, educator, and gauge became part of the Broederbond, which was ofttimes called the "nerve center of apartheid." The Broederbond was sympathetic to the Nazi Party in Germany and opposed Due south Africa's entry into the 2d World War. The organization threw its weight backside Malan's Herenigde National Party, assertive that the party would serve the interests not simply of whites but specifically of Afrikaners. Malan campaigned on a promise to "protect the white character of our cities" and to eliminate many of the already meager rights that black South Africans enjoyed.^eight

Handed a majority in the national House of Assembly on May 26, 1948, the Herenigde National Political party and its Afrikaner Political party allies strengthened South Africa's discriminatory laws, implementing the apartheid system to segregate the state's races and guarantee the dominance of the white minority.

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Citations

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Source: https://www.facinghistory.org/confronting-apartheid/chapter-1/introduction

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