The Elaboration of Segregationist Ideology

Historians hold a multiplicity of views as regards the historical origins of segregation. Some writers, like Marian Lacey and Richard Parry, trace segregation back to the nineteenth-century Cape and the provisions of Cecil Rhodes’s 1894 Glen Grey Act. ¹ It has been suggested too that the experience of British rule in Basutoland provided a model for some of the early theorists of segregation. ² During the interwar years and beyond there was a widespread assumption (especially among liberal scholars) that the origins of segregation were to be found in the racial attitudes characteristic of the ‘frontier tradition’ and in the institutions of the nineteenth-century Boer republics. Against this view, David Welsh has claimed that the antecedents of segregation and apartheid are to be found in the Shepstonian policies of colonial Natal. It is in Natal, Welsh argues, that the demarcation of native reserves, the state’s use of chiefs for administrative purposes and the recognition of customary law, were pioneered. ³