ABSTRACT
This phrase was emblematic of white domination and an unmistakable symbol of pervasive racial segregation in South African society. By the time the apartheid regime reached the height of its power in the 1960s, the sentiment the phrase denotes was so fully ingrained in the South African psyche that prohibitive signs were no longer necessary to achieve white privilege and black oppression. Almost no one needed to be reminded that economic advancement was intended for whites and that access to better forms of employment, education, housing, and land was simply out of the question for blacks. Most fundamentally, apartheid was an explicit and comprehensive program of social engineering, the goals of which were to establish and guarantee white supremacy. It was founded on the colonial conviction that whites, by virtue of their presumed superior innate and acquired abilities, had attained a more advanced and morally superior way of living than indigenous people. Privilege was therefore the birthright of whites. Furthermore, white privilege was to be preserved by separation from and subordination of blacks. 1 Extensive laws, both substantial and petty, were instituted both to express this conviction of white racial superiority and to ensure its continuation. Apartheid, or “separate development,” implemented a system of selective development through which whites became entitled to all the benefits and protections the state could provide and blacks were tolerated only to the extent that they served the economic interests of the white minority. Job reservations imposed race-based restriction on the jobs individuals could hold, regardless of education and abilities, in much the same way that restrictions were placed on areas of residence. The same result was produced. The choicest, high-status, high-leadership, and highly remunerated positions were reserved for whites, followed by Indians and Coloreds, with Africans on the very bottom. Accordingly, in employment, for example, blacks were restricted to the unskilled and semiskilled sectors of the labor market and, even here, were systematically paid less than whites. A policy of Bantu Education was adopted with the passage of the Bantu Education Act to prepare black people for the subservient economic role reserved for them. Apartheid touched every aspect of life. To maintain it, whites had to continue to believe and convince everyone that blacks were inferior. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, apartheid effectively produced and reinforced the very inequalities it used to justify itself. By promoting and sustaining white hegemony and racial separation, apartheid efficiently reproduced racial inequalities in every aspect of life.
