ABSTRACT
The relationship between economic growth and racial inequality has consistently confounded both liberal and revisionist interpretations of apartheid. At the beginning of the 1970s, revisionist scholars overturned the conventional liberal interpretation by showing that the wage gap between Africans and whites had actually widened during the economically prosperous decade of the 1960s. Conversely, during the subsequent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, which were characterised by recessionary conditions, or at best by a much lower growth rate in the Gross Domestic Product, the racial wage gap narrowed. These trends in the racial wage gap pose uncomfortable questions for revisionist and liberal scholars alike. If economic growth was the impetus behind the integration of Africans into more skilled and better-paid jobs, then why did the racial wage gap narrow during the recessionary conditions of the 1970s and 1980s and not during the boom period of the 1960s? Conversely, if, as the revisionists argued, the apartheid state and employers acted in concert to ensure white supremacy and the supply of cheap African labour, why did the racial wage gap narrow at all?
