ABSTRACT

For many people the epic struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, which reached a climax with the country’s first fully democratic election in 1994, stands as one of the great moral and political achievements of the twentieth century. In order to understand this process it is necessary to go back at least a century, and probably more. The modern apartheid state was created in the years after the National Party came to power in 1948. As a system, apartheid distilled the practices and assumptions arising out of some 300 years of racially exclusive rule extending back to the beginnings of European settlement at the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century. For almost half a century, apartheid subjected the majority black population to a degree of institutionalized racism that is probably unprecedented in world history. During the apartheid years every aspect of black life was scrutinized and regulated. Blacks were deprived of their most basic citizenship rights, exploited for their labour, permitted to work and live in the cities and towns only under strict conditions, subjected to a grossly inferior educational system, and denied access to most public amenities and facilities. The methodical and comprehensive manner in which the apartheid bureaucracy routinely humiliated the majority of South Africans involved an assumption-implicit or otherwise-that blacks and whites constituted different forms or branches of humanity.