Apartheid and the state

In 1948, the Nationalist government inherited a system of segregation that was showing signs of collapse. Industrial development had so accelerated the urban movement of Africans that many ‘white’ areas were in fact largely black. A government commission set up by the former administration, under Justice Fagan, concluded that total segregation was impracticable and advocated the acceptance of a permanent ‘native’ population in urban areas. The Nationalists rejected this recommendation and set about entrenching segregation by rooting it in the ideology of apartheid. The country would be divided into racial zones. Like the old segregationist policies of the 1920s, geographical segregation was to be the key to white domination, since it removed blacks from the field of white competition and contained them permanently in their own areas. One of the first speeches made at the opening of parliament in 1949 stressed the government’s intention ‘to take the necessary steps to give effect to their policy of segregation’. ¹ The flow of native labour to farms and cities would be ‘channelled more effectively’ and the natives would be ‘encouraged to equip themselves for increased participation in and responsibility for their own services … within their own territory and their own community’. ² As James Barber makes clear, the National Party did not wish to halt industrialisation and economic growth but rather ‘to control its social implications by imposing strict segregation based on racial hierarchy’. ³