An historical study of apartheid in South Africa.

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Topic: An historical study of apartheid in South Africa.

Task…

Respond to the following hypothesis:

The repressive laws of the apartheid system introduced and practiced by the white minority National Party government after 1948, certainly made black resistance difficult but not impossible.

Research Assignment

Ashley Tucker

10/06/2005

“Apartheid creates and separates them; black and white live as strangers in the same land.” (Cowie, H.R, p 246) The apartheid system was a social and political policy of racial segregation and discrimination which was enforced by the white Afrikaner government in South Africa. The apartheid system was enforced by a series of repressive laws and regulations which prohibited social contact between races, enforced segregation of public facilities, the separation of educational standards, created race-specific job categories, restricted powers of non-white unions and curbed non-white participation in government. This racist system was accompanied by tremendous suppression of opposition, and continual resistance which was met by severe reprisals from the South African government. The government reacted to internal resistance by passing further repressive laws which caused even more resistance to the apartheid system. While the white minority National Party government passed and implemented oppressive apartheid laws, black South Africans responded by intensifying their political opposition in the form of protests, marches, strikes and boycotts. The repressive laws of the apartheid system introduced and practiced by the white minority National Party government after 1948, certainly made black resistance difficult but not impossible.

In 1948, the National Party government under Daniel Malan came to power and systemised apartheid as law, and so began the introduction of a series of unjust and repressive laws which set the seeds for black resistance within South Africa. Initially, the aim of system of apartheid was to maintain white domination while extending racial separation. A statement made by J.H. Hofmeyr, who was a member of a minority party in parliament explained the fear of black domination. “It is a perfectly natural fear…,fear of the White man being drowned in a Black ocean, and we have all got that fear of race mixture and miscegenation…”(Sorrenson, 1976, p33) The implementation of the policy of the separation of races was made possible by the Population Registration Act of 1950. This law was to officially classify people into racial categories: whites, coloured, Bantu or blacks, and Asian.  To impose this policy, the government imposed different race laws which touched every aspect of social life. Under the apartheid system, hundreds of repressive laws and regulations determined where the racial groups may live, work, own land, where and who they can go to school with, where they could seek entertainment and even whom they could or could not marry. The system aimed to lock black South Africans into separately developed communities where they lived in abject poverty under repressive laws. The repressive nature of each law introduced was certain to provoke opposition to the system. Black resistance to the apartheid system was made difficult by the enormous power that the white minority National Party Government had given itself in order to control the population. However, the government was clearly using this power in a way that would provoke black resistance, because it was so repressive.

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The 1950’s brought about the introduction increasingly repressive laws practiced by the white minority National Party government which made black resistance difficult, but slowly the majority black population started to organise their opposition. Black resistance movements became organised and effective through groups such as the African National Congress (ANC) founded in 1921, and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) which formed in 1959. After decades of receiving no response from the National Party government to demands for justice and equality, the ANC launched the Defiance against Unjust Laws Campaign in 1952, in cooperation with the South African Indian Congress, an Asian ...

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