ABSTRACT
Apartheid was introduced into South Africa in 1948, with the advent of the National Party government. Many Nationalists were Nazi sympathizers during the war, and apartheid – literally, ‘separateness’ – proved to be an experiment in social engineering so nakedly racist that it aimed to introduce racial criteria into every aspect of social policy, and to ensure that even the most intimate aspects of family life conformed to the requirement of separation of the ‘races’. Since February 1990, when the State President announced that apartheid would be dismantled, the policy has been increasingly viewed both within and outside the country as an aberration which will vanish without trace. Our concern is to examine the extent to which the suppositions underlying this view are borne out by fact, focusing on child care as a crucial area for the development of society. Were the social policies introduced by the Nationalists totally new, and how effectively were they actually implemented? This chapter discusses preliminary work on these issues, concentrating on various attitudes towards caring for children not provided for within the family, and therefore most dependent on state or other non-familial care and provision. 2 Given the dearth of secondary material on this topic, the investigation was limited to Cape Town, the earliest, and one of the three largest, cities in South Africa.
