Professor Colin Bundy
The Heyday of Apartheid, 1948-1972

Professor Colin Bundy - The Heyday of Apartheid 1948 - 1972

- A warning to everybody who is listening. This lecture is coming to you via a head cold. I hope it’s not too distracting. And I certainly hope that it sounds better at your end than it does here. On Friday morning, 28th of May, 1948, South African radio bulletins at breakfast time carried astonishing news. Election votes had been counted and Dr. Malone’s National Party had defeated the incumbent United Party led by an ageing General Smuts. I’m going to refer to them henceforth as NP and UP, National and United Party. Five years previously, the United Party had swept to a handsome victory. It had shared in the Allied War victory, and Smuts was not only a local politician, but a much-admired international elder statesman. And those advantages saw the UP enter the election with a complacency to match its majority. Smuts himself assured the British ambassador in private, “We are sure to obtain a majority.”

And an NP cabinet minister in his first day in office admitted to a journalist that his party had not expected to win. Adding salt to a gaping wound, Smuts lost his own seat. Now this unexpected outcome proved to be highly significant. The victorious party remained in power for the next 46 years. It introduced apartheid as a set of policies that gave South African society a distinctive profile, and cast a long shadow. Apartheid, literally separateness, was a major plank in the N.P.‘s platform. White farmers anxious about labour supplies, white Afrikaner workers, blue-collar workers, fearful of competition from cheaper black workers, and the Afrikaans middle class all interpreted apartheid in different ways, but they all heard it as a rallying cry of Africana political unity. There was certainly no apartheid master plan in 1948. A virtue of the slogan in the election campaign was precisely that it provided a general direction of travel and not a route map. Today’s lecture covers the period 1948 to 1972, and I split it into two sections.

The first runs from 1948 to 1960, and those are years that saw the key apartheid measures legislated. But it was also a period that really only prepared the way for my second period, 1960 to 1972. That is the period of grand apartheid. I’ll make clear what that means. During which an increasingly powerful state quashed all opposition, presided over an economic boom, and implemented a programme of sweeping social engineering. So, my first block, 1948 to 1960. These years saw apartheid as a set of policies seek to entrench and extend segregation, seeking to make racial separation more rigorous and more systematic. The torrent of laws that were written into the statute could be variously described and characterised. I’ve grouped them in five broad categories of apartheid policy. Firstly, there was a greater emphasis on racial identities and racial boundaries.

The Population Registration Act, 1950, was central in this respect. It required every South African to be identified and registered as belonging to one of four races, African, coloured, Indian, or white. At the time, the legislation in 1950 referred to Africans as natives. From 1951 onwards, it referred to them as Bantu. I use the term African. As the Minister of the Interior pointed out, the determination of a person’s race is of the greatest importance in the enforcement of any existing or future laws. And an elaborate bureaucracy was created to determine the race that an individual belonged to. The process was demeaning and often traumatic, splitting families and other. Anxieties about racial mixing were flagged in the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949, and the Immorality Act of 1950. The first outlawed any marriage other than that between two people of the same racial group, and the second made sexual activity across race lines a criminal offence.

The Areas Act of 1950 enabled government to designate business and residential areas in towns, and cities for particular races. The Separate Amenities Act of 1953 removed any obligation on government to provide equal public amenities. This law translated into the infamous white-only and non-white-only signs that punctuated urban landscapes as public transport, parks, cinemas, restaurants, and beaches were more rigorously segregated. Secondly, my second category, the NP, took steps to ensure that the control of the state was exclusively reserved for whites. Coloured voters were removed from the voters’ roll in the Cape, and the splendid provisions for representing Africans at the central political stage, that was three white MPs elected by African voters, and a consultative body, the Natives’ Representative Council, these were simply swept aside.

And the total exclusion of African political participation in the central political institutions was accompanied by the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951. This act created an elaborate system of limited local government in the rural reserves, and it was premised on the apartheid argument that all cultures were unique and that therefore every ethnic unit should have its own channels of expression. It was pointless, said the Minister of Native Affairs, H.F. Verwoerd, and I’m quoting, “Pointless for the Bantu to engage in general apartheid, sorry, to engage in the general principles of higher politics.” And it was on this platform that the next phase of apartheid, the grandiose scheme of self-governing Bantustans, was erected, that I’ll discuss in my second part. Verwoerd, who became Prime Minister in 1958 and remained in office until he was assassinated on the floor of Parliament in September 1966, was more ideologically confident and ambitious than any other NP politician, and I think he is correctly regarded as the central architect of apartheid.

Thirdly, legislation driven by Verwoerd extended state central with the control by the central state over education and housing. These were aspects of African life that have previously been allocated to churches and to municipalities. In 1953, Verwoerd introduced the bond to Education Act in terms that could not have been plainer. I’m quoting, “The Bantu must be guided to serve his own community. There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.” At this stage, South Africans use European as a synonym for white. “Mission schooling, he continued, drew him away from his own community and misled him by showing him the green pastures of European society in which he was not allowed to graze” Verwoerd then extended educational apartheid to tertiary education, technical colleges, and to universities in 1959. He closed access that handfuls of African, Indian, and coloured students had enjoyed over the years to the so- called three liberal universities, and he pressed ahead by instead creating half a dozen universities designated for specific racial and ethnic groups, a Zulu university, a Xhosa university, a Tswane university, a coloured university, and so on.

And he did so, he said, and I’m quoting again, “To produce native leaders who would accept and propagate apartheid.” And then housing. In 1954, an act gave central government sweeping powers to rehouse Africans living in racially mixed areas. And the most famous of such removals was Sophia town in Johannesburg. Sophiatown was an exuberantly cosmopolitan community, home to South Africans of all colours and creeds. It was also a black cultural hub, housing, musicians, artists, writers, journalists. It was South Africa’s equivalent of Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. But now, Sophiatown was destroyed. Its buildings were bulldozed. Its African residents were relocated to Soweto. Sophiatown was re-zoned for whites, rebuilt, and renamed. It was called Triomf, Africans for Triumph, a classic instance of apartheid hubris. Ofli, and also emanating from Verwoerd department, was a far-reaching drive to control the labour and the movement of African people. Legislation already existed so-called influx control to try to control the rate at which Africans urbanised but that legislation had been pretty consistently breached, especially during the 1940s, when the pace of African migration to towns accelerated.

The key mechanism of the new effort was an overhaul of the pass laws. Previously, African men in cities carried a plethora of passes and permits. In 1952, the cynically named Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act had two central features. Firstly, it did coordinate all passes and permits into a single document, the reference book. This entailed the registration of every adult African and the production of a booklet with the details, their tax status, their work history, official prescriptions on for whom and where they might work, and their fingerprints, one of the earliest attempts to introduce biometric identification at a national level anywhere. Secondly, the past law now became the reference book became compulsory for African women who had previously been exempt from the past laws, and failure to produce the document, which was an instrument of surveillance and control, led directly to a court appearance and usually to prison. In the 1950s, an annual average of 318,000 people were charged with breaking the past laws in each year.

In the 1960s, the number of arrests reached an astonishing annual average of 469,000. In 1952, the influx control arsenal was given further ammunition in the form of the infamous Section 10 of the Native Laws Amendment Act. Section 10, and it was used as a shorthand thereafter, people spoke about Section 10 rights. The only Africans who had any hope of rights to permanent urban residents were those who could prove either that they were born in the city, that they had lived there for 15 years uninterruptedly, or that they had worked for the same employer for 10 years. Otherwise, no rights to remain. Fifthly, the NP substantially strengthened the coercive powers of the state and restricted existing civil liberties. The Suppression of Communism Act in 1950 did what it says on the tin, it outlawed the Communist Party of South Africa, which incidentally, it’s worth knowing, regrouped as an underground structure called the South African Communist Party in 1953. We will talk about that another time.

The act gave the Ministry of Justice, under the terms of the Suppression of Communism Act, the power to impose banning orders on named individuals. These would prevent them playing any public role. He could also issue a banishment order used particularly to banish trade union activists from urban areas to remote rural quarters. A kind of cycle set in during these years. Protests against government were met by tough new laws, and in turn, these spurred new forms and new levels of protest. By 1949, the ANC had been radicalised by trade union militancy, by community protests, by apartheid itself, and in particular, by its own youth league. So that at its annual conference in 1949, the ANC abandoned its traditional approach of polite deputations and delegations, and instead embraced a strategy based upon mass action and upon civil disobedience. This included boycotts, stay-aways, and deliberate transgression of the law, civil disobedience.

And in 1952, the ANC, together with the South African Indian Congress, launched a defiance campaign, a programme of Gandhian civil disobedience, calling for the repeal of six unjust laws. Thousands of volunteers followed their leaders by seeking arrest for deliberately breaking past laws and curfews. Over 8,000 were arrested and charged, but more importantly, scores of thousands of women and men now joined the ANC. By the end of 1952, its membership had swelled from 7,000 to over 100,000. The government retaliated immediately. The Righteous Assemblies Act was extended. The Criminal Laws Amendment Act set swinging penalties for civil disobedience. And a Public Safety Act gave the government powers to declare a state of emergency in part, or all of the country for the sake of public order. In response, this is that cycle I was talking about, the ANC now entered a formal alliance. Its partners were the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People Organisation, the Congress of Democrats with white leftist members, and finally the non-racial trade union federation, the South African Congress of Trade Unions.

And in 1955 this Congress alliance held a Congress of the People at which it adopted the Freedom Charter, a document which began with the ringing declaration, “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black, white,” and which then proceeded to set out a vision of democratic government, social security for all, and a guarantee of basic civil rights. Determined to extinguish such political defiance, in 1956, the government security police in dawn raids arrested 156 ANC-aligned leaders, trade unionists, and activists. They were all charged with treason and conspiracy. After lengthy court proceedings, the case finally collapsed in 1961. However, the stage had been set for even more ruthless and more authoritarian measures. Legislation beginning in 1963, and then a couple of years after that, allowed for detention without trial security police could detain somebody without trial and hold them for 90 days, and then for successive periods of 90 days in solitary confinement.

Sabotage and terrorism were declared, defined quite ludicrously widely. It was possible to be charged for sabotage by having a political, having a coffee cup with political slogans. There was such a case. Torture became increasingly widely used against political detainees. In 67 known cases, it led to the death of activists held by the security police. Steve Biko is probably the best-known of these. Let me sum up. This first phase of apartheid, entrenched white supremacy, imposed exhaustive bureaucratic controls over black people, strengthened and centralised, centralised and strengthened the capacity of the state, and decisively delimited acceptable forms of political behaviour. Weight of apartheid legislation lay heavily across the lives of black South Africans in the most public and the most intimate spheres. Africans, as Deborah Posel has written, I’m quoting, “All my new CI of everyday life, where and with whom they lived, worked, had sex, travelled, shopped, walked or sat down, what they owned and consumed were governed either by the issue of permits and passes or by public prohibitions.”

Apartheid created an intensely regulated society which coexisted alongside zones of lawlessness. There was very little policing of the townships. And yet not even for a book in the 1950s could stem the flow of Africans to urban areas at this time. And from about 1960, there was a marked gear shift in apartheid, which I discuss in the next section. Excuse me. In 1958, there was a split within the African National Congress, the ANC. A breakaway group objected to the non-racial message of the Freedom Charter, and what they perceived to be an undue influence of white and Indian communists on the ANC leadership. They formed the Pan Africanist Congress, the PAC, and then competed with the ANC for the support of the black working class, each matching the militancy of the other. In 1960, both the PAC and the ANC announced campaigns against the pass laws. And on March the 21st, it was at a PAC rally in a township of Sharpeville, some 40 miles south of Johannesburg, that police opened fire on protesters, killing 69 people, mostly shot in the back as they fled.

The massacre sparked strikes and demonstrations across the country, culminating in a march to Parliament in Cape Town by 100,000 Africans. This in turn triggered a draconian response by Verwoerd’s government. The young man who led the march on parliament was promised to meet him with the Minister of Justice, but when he arrived the next day, he was arrested, and a cordon of police and army troops blockaded the Cape Townships. On the same day, nine days after the Sharpeville shootings, this national state of emergency was declared, and thousands of political activists were arrested and held without charge under its provisions. During April 1960, the Unlawful Organisations Act was rushed through Parliament and then used instantly to ban the ANC and the PAC. They were declared unlawful organisations. Any support for either party was a criminal offence. Now, a few weeks before Sharpeville, Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, had toured a number of African countries with South Africa as his last stop.

He addressed the South African Parliament and he famously declared that, quote, “The wind of change is blowing throughout the continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” He also warned that racial discrimination was unacceptable in the contemporary world, and that this carried consequences for the relationship between Britain and South Africa. Now, African nationalism might be blowing away colonial rule elsewhere in Africa, but in South Africa, it was defined as illegal, it was proscribed, and it was prosecuted. And this introduces an important dimension of apartheid history, its international reception, and how this changed over time. In a very real sense, apartheid was out of step with history. By this I mean it was introduced in the post-war world in years that rapidly became a decade of decolonization, and the extension of civil rights, particularly around racial civil rights, racial rights.

Apartheid began to be implemented in 1948, the same year as the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Humanoids. And at the first-ever sitting of the UN’s General Assembly, India raised the issue of discriminatory measures against South African Indians, South Africans of Indian descent. South Africa invoked the clause in the UN’s charter that said that a country’s domestic matters lay outside the UN’s jurisdiction. But a pattern had been established, and it had two elements. Firstly, newly independent countries like India, Pakistan, Burma, Ghana, together with what were called the non-aligned bloc, Egypt, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iran, Turkey, and others, these were consistent and persistent in their denunciation of Apartheid at the UN. So were the Soviet Union, its East European allies, and the People’s Republic of China. Second element of this pattern was that their efforts to hold South Africa to account were deflected and diluted at the United Nations by Britain, America, and by European countries that still held colonies, France, Belgium, and Portugal.

Powers like Britain, America, and France did not wish to appear supporters of racism, but they abstained, or they use their veto power to turn down, or smother criticisms of apartheid. They did so for two reasons. Britain and America had what they considered vital economic interests in South Africa. Secondly, in Cold War terms, they viewed the country as a strategic ally against Russia and China. This pattern was briefly disrupted by the international reaction to Sharpeville. The massacre prompted the most sustained negative responses to apartheid yet experienced. And both Britain and America voted in the UN for a resolution that called South Africa’s race policies a flagrant violation of the Charter of Human Rights. Within a year, however, the major Western countries once again sought to find their balance on a tightrope, formally disapproving of apartheid policies, yet continuing to trade and invest heavily in South Africa, and resisting calls for more punitive measures, such as sanctions, or diplomatic isolation.

In the United States, for example, despite the rhetorical opposition to apartheid, during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, American relations with South Africa, if anything, grew closer. An internal State Department document characterised American policy as, and I’m quoting, “Non-cooperation in matters related to apartheid policy, but cooperation in all other fields.” This was taken further in 1969, when Kissinger was Nixon’s national security advisor, and he recommended a new policy which Nixon endorsed. It started from the premise, quote, “The whites in South Africa are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come is through them. If black South Africans sought rights through violence, this will lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists.” And Nixon and Kissinger accordingly saw the, presided over the United States, relaxing its stance towards the white regime and increased contacts and communication between the two states. But let me return to South Africa itself in the decade or so after Sharpeville.

Immediate aftermath of Sharpe and after the state of emergency, both the ANC and the PAC set up clandestine structures and both launched explicitly violent forms of struggle. Sabotage by the ANC’s uMkhonto we Sizwe, which I’m going to call MK, the armed wing from now on, and armed attacks by the PAC’s Porto. Verwoerd and his Minister of Justice, B.J. Forster, responded by ratcheting up the piles of police, especially the special branch, the security police. The high-profile Rivonia trial in 1964 led to life sentences for Mandela and seven co-defendants, and then was followed by thousands of rank-and-file members of the ANC and the PAC being rounded up, tried, and imprisoned. By the mid-1960s, organised African opposition inside the country had been extinguished. In the narrower sphere of white politics, Verwoerd announced a referendum on republican status and won that referendum in 1960. He hoped that a republican South Africa might remain in the Commonwealth, but he withdrew his application in the face of criticism from other Commonwealth heads of government. It was at this point, in the early and mid-1960s, that English-speaking whites now joined Afrikaners in admiring the prime minister’s apparent omniscience and strength of will.

The general election of October, 1961 saw a hardening of white opinion. The newly formed progressive party was reduced to a single MP, the redoubtable Helen Sussman. And the MP had more than twice as many seats as the official opposition, the anaemic UP. The UP offered little more than what amounted to apartheid light. I can give details if anybody wants it. And then in 1966, the next general election, Verwoerd won an electoral landslide. The NP won 126 of 166 seats, 126 out of 166, and was supported by 60% of those who voted. Both of these figures represent the peak of NP political ascendancy. Helen Sussman, whom I mentioned, from 1961 to 1974, was the only member of parliament unequivocally opposed to apartheid. She was, in effect, the sole voice of conscience in a body largely lacking that quality. Now, why did white South Africans flock to support for Verwoerd’s this way?

Well, one reason was the decade after Sharpeville saw the economy boom. Between 1960 and 1970, GDP, gross domestic product, grew at over 5% a year. Manufacturing increased at 8.5% a year and investment at over 12% a year. Middle-class whites dabbled in the spectacular share boom. They discovered foreign travel, and they bought houses, pools, and cars with unprecedented ease. Foreign investment rapidly recovered its nerve after Charcot. Capital appreciated that political authority had been asserted, and they were prepared to ignore the terms on which this had been done. In 1970, the Wall Street Journal reported that for 260 American companies with significant foreign investments, South Africa provided the highest returns. The investors magazine Fortune in its July 1972 issue was effusive, “South Africa is regarded by foreign investors as a gold mine, one of those rare and refreshing places where profits are great and problems small. Capital is not threatened by political instability or nationalisation. Labour is cheap, the market booming, the currency hard and convertible.”

And so, dollars, pounds, marks, francs, and yen poured in. Direct foreign investment in the economy more than doubled between 1960 and 1972. Excuse me. There were two other developments during the second block, this post-apartheid, post Sharpeville decade. One was a grandiose rewriting of the apartheid project itself, and the other was a ruthless exercise in social engineering. And as we shall see, the two were intimately linked. Actually, launched what came to be called Grand Apartheid in 1959 when he told Parliament that in due course, black South Africans, whom he called the Bantu, would be led to full development and full authority in their own areas. And months later, a new act laid the groundwork for what was called separate development, although it was rarely implemented during the 1960s.

The act was premised on this claim, quote, “Whereas the Bantu people do not constitute a homogenous people, but form separate national units, they should therefore exercise self-government in each of eight designated ethnic units.” That eight was later increased to 10. And the apartheid regime would guide these African ethnic “Nations,” to govern properly and to assume responsibility in their homelands. Homelands now became government speak for the reserves. Now, it was no coincidence that grand apartheid carried echoes of decolonization and self-determination. In a 1965 speech of some candour, Verwoerd explained that the quote, “‘The old position where nobody doubted the white man supremacy no longer prevailed in the post-war world.”

Now he said, “It is clear that no country could continue as they did in the past. The old traditional policy of the white man as the ruler over the Bantu could not continue.” The alternative ran this logic was to give the Bantu rights in an ethnic enclave as a justification for denying them any political rights at all in white South Africa. Now, the central fallacy of this specious proposal was that the territories identified as homelands were simply the old native reserves, several of them geographically fragmented and all of them desperately poor. The rate of deterioration, falling food production differed from one Bantustan, one homeland to another. But by the 1960s, they had all become areas where they become a world where labour, migrant labour, was almost the only defence against poverty. Average population density in the Bantustans almost doubled between 1956 and 1969. Per capita food production fell sharply, and growing numbers of families had no access to arable land. In 1963, the Transkei became the first homeland or Bantustan, as these areas were dubbed, to accept the offer of self-government proposed by Verwoerd.

And in 1976, the Transkei became the first of four, what were known as the independent Bantustans. These were no longer homelands; these were now self-governing states, said the South African government. Because by then, the logic of grand apartheid had been taken to new extremes. Legislation of 1970 provided that every African was to become a citizen of one or other homeland, whether he or she had ever lived in that homeland or not. And each of the four Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, and Venda, the self-governing homelands was ushered into its fictive independence, with new flags, new airports, new stamps, new anthems, and other trappings of Ruritanian statehood. Their citizens automatically lost South African citizenship. Connie Mulder, Minister of Verwoerd’s Erstwhile department, congratulated himself in 1978. “If our policy is taken to its logical conclusion, as far as black people are concerned, there will not be one black man with South African citizenship.

Every black man in South Africa will eventually be accommodated in some independent new state in this honourable way.” And it was these, this is my social, I’m moving to the social engineering side of things, because it was these impoverished areas, successively, reserves, homelands, Bantustans, self-governing states, were now called to play a different function, a further function during the heyday of apartheid. They were to become the dumping grounds of apartheid, receptacles for discarded people or surplus people. I noted earlier that in the 1950s, the apartheid government was unable to slow the rate of African urbanisation. Jan Smuts, when he was prime minister, warned that one might as soon, I’m, “Sweep the ocean back with a broom,” as stemmed the flow of Africans into the cities. Where brooms had failed, the social engineers under Verwoerd and Forster used bulldozers. A massed programme of forced removals in the 1960s and 1970s was a ruthless use of state power to fight the human flow and to force it against the laws of social gravity back into the Bantustans. May I have the slide?

• [Moderator] Yes, just give me one second.

Slide is displayed.

• I’ve called this social engineering. What it is illustrating is the proportion of the African population that lived in each of urban areas, on white-owned farms, and in the Bantustans, successively from 1960 to 1980. Because women were seen as the key to urban family life, apartheid planners were determined to limit the number of women in towns and cities. In the grim language of general circular number 25, 1967, it was stated that the, it was accepted government policy that the Bantu are only temporarily resident in white cities. People who quote, for some reason or another, are no longer fit for work, or who are superfluous to the labour market, would be relocated to one or other Bantustan. The circular continues. The Bantu in the European areas, who are normally regarded as unproductive and as such have to be resettled in the homelands include the aged, the unfit, widows, and women with dependent children. This assault on Africans’ residential rights in the cities meant, as you can see, that the proportion of the total black population living in cities actually fell during the 1960s and the 1970s.

Years of huge economic growth, years of manufacturing expansion, when you’d expect an inflow of people from the countryside to rural areas, their proportion falls. And in the reserves, whereas in 1960, 39% of the total population lived there. By 1970 it was nearly half. And by 1980, a staggering 52%, 52.7%. Thanks, we can remove the slide. I’ve been teaching and reading and trying to write about South African rural history for most of my academic career and I still am taken up short. I’m shocked every time I look at that particular table. After the social engineering of apartheid, these forms of forced removal, the overall, the population of the homelands rose from 4.2 million in 1960 to 11 million in 1980. 4.2 to 11 million. In addition to those endorsed out of cities, there are other casualties of forced removals. African communities that had bought land before 1913 in white, in the area scheduled for whites under that act, were now declared black spots, and they were removed.

African tenants on white-owned land and farm labours displaced by mechanisation actually made up the largest single category of relocated people. Communities were moved to make room for dams and roads. And in all, some 3.5 million people were relocated between 1960 and 1983. Now 800,000 of those were urban, forced removals of city dwellers from their homes and neighbourhoods into other parts of the city to townships specifically for Africans, Coloureds, or Indians. The remaining 2.7 million were relocated to the Bantustans. The great majority were placed in what we call resettlement sites, or new columns, new towns of various kinds. There were many hundreds of resettlement sites, bleak and desolate places, beacons of despair. There was a labyrinth of broken communities, broken families and broken lives created by government policy. Joe Lelyveld of the New York Times described a vast resettlement belt in Kwan-de-Berly homeland, a serpentine stream of metal shanties and mud houses stretching for 30 kilometres.

Such sites, he wrote, such sites can be seen in other countries, usually as a result of famines or wars. I don’t know where else they can have been achieved as a result of planning. Taken all in all, the use of already overcrowded Bantustans to house people displaced from white cities and white farms is one of the darkest chapters in the entire history of rural South African poverty and inequality. In this chapter, maybe read details of broken promises, naked force, shattered communities, desolate camps, and shallow graves. In conclusion, let me make a few general observations about the years I’ve characterised as apartheid in its heyday. Years during which white minority rule was at its most ambitious, most profitable, and most controlling. In the political sphere, these years witnessed an aggressive and unyielding exercise of state power in defence of white supremacy. Faced by black resistance, the apartheid government became more authoritarian and sought to crush dissent. For a decade after Sharpeville, it was largely successful in doing so, although this proved a short-lived victory.

In the economic sphere, South Africa today has the unhappy distinction of being the country in the world with the highest level of inequality. And without arguing the case in detail, I hope it’s obvious that it was during this phase of apartheid, that South Africa’s capitalist economy developed distinctive features, which directly increased inequality. There was a sharp discrepancy between in earnings between different population groups. And some African workers were more unequal than others. Migrant workers, contract workers, farm labourers, and women domestic service were at the bottom of the pile. In comparative terms, how distinctive was apartheid? On the one hand, it resembled general trends of development in late-developing or third-world societies, like those in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. David Yudelman has written that South Africa exhibits in almost caricatured form, “The ugly face of most developing industrial states.

The concentration of a disproportionate amount of growing wealth in the hands of the minority, a decline in civil and human rights, the centralization of power, and the systematic exploitation of the powerless.” But on the other hand, with those similarities, on the other hand, these general trends were given a particular racialized emphasis in South Africa. The German-Canadian scholar, Heribert Adom observes, of all modern regimes, the South African system of domination by a privileged minority is the only one in the world officially based on colour. In South Africa, a racial label profoundly shapes the overall life chances of any individual. And yet, no matter how bold and brazen were assertions of white supremacy and white superiority in these years, they were always simultaneously fearful and insecure. In 1948, the National Party used the slogan of Swart gevaar, black danger, Swart gevaar when it won power in 1948. And the years that followed saw this become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thank you very much. I’m going to open up some of the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

And this one says, Monty Golden writes, I’ve always been under the impression that the 48 government was a coalition made up of the National Party and right-wing fascists who wanted Hitler to win World War II, so they could set up an Africana Republic. I touched on this in an earlier lecture, that’s not quite accurate. There certainly were right-wing bodies who were explicitly pro-German and anti-Semitic and wanted Hitler to win the war, so that he could set up an Afrikaner Republic. But Milan’s National Party broke with those bodies in 1940. And as the tide of war changed, so did Afrikaner enthusiasm for a German victory. And Milan had himself indulged in some pretty virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric earlier on, but by the mid-1940s, attempted to put that behind him. And he was, interestingly, the first head of state to visit the newly independent Israel.

Q: Were all members of parliament from the Boer community?

A: No, no. During this period, the United Party, which is the minority party, mainly represented English-speaking voters. So did the Progressive Party for its brief duration, while the National Party generally represented Afrikaans-speaking voters. I’m asked to suggest books for further reading. I think what I’ll do is put up a post. I’ll find out from Lockdown University how to make some suggestions available to you.

Marian Roberts writes that my mother, Jean Burnett, was named and banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. She was also detained in 1960 during the emergency. Well, I would regard that, if I were you, as a badge of honour.

Sophiatown was then given by a Jewish man and named after his wife. That’s correct. And the streets include the names of his daughters. I can remember Gertie Street. Margie Gelb, Steve Biko was held in the 1970s, a decade after the period you’re covering so well. That’s correct. But he was one of the 67 who died in police custody, which is why I mentioned him.

I’m not quite sure what Stanley Canning means, what were South Africans and all this white South Africans in this legislation was elected. I’ve described the split between a majority of Afrikaans and minority English-speaking.

Q: Could you talk about district six in Cape Town?

A: And yes, certainly. District six, a little bit like Sophia Town, was an area of mixed residential race where black people had been able over the years to buy and own land freehold, same as in Sophiatown. It was also very close to the central business district in Cape Town. And so, District Six was completely demolished, and its inhabitants removed to the grim and distant so-called coloured location of Mitchell’s Plain. Please note today that countries I mentioned are not democratic at all. I wouldn’t argue with that.

Janet Sussman was white, Jewish, and a woman, absolutely. In Cape Town, my mother took part in the Black Sash. Well done, she. That was an organisation for women who stood up against apartheid.

My mother’s, my grandmother’s sister was married to Hermann Tobianski, who owned the land that he named Sophiatown. How fascinating. Thank you for that. That is from Audrey Sobel.

Lucy Huberman is written at some length who interviewed me 1990 when she made a film on South Africa. Thank you, nice to renew contact.

Q: I’m asked, would you say this period of South African history was not taught in schools due to systemic, or structural racism?

A: But it certainly wasn’t taught in this way. And, you know, for reasons of racism or white supremacy, yes.

As an ex-South African, says Carol Kessel, I want to, she also enjoyed the lectures, thank you very much.

Q: Where did they expect the black household help to live when they were banned from white areas?

A: This is domestic. Again, this is one of the peculiarities of apartheid. On the one hand, you’ve got the formal, legislated separation of the races. On the other hand, you have a kind of interracial intimacy because black domestic servants lived on the premises, usually in tiny rooms at the back of the house that were known as the servants’ quarters. And so that is where they lived and they would have had to had a permit saying that they worked for that madam, for that woman, and that that’s where they were allowed to live.

I vividly recall the big march in Cape Town, but cannot recall who led it. Can you remind me, please? If you walk today, sorry, if you drive today, along the route where they walked, it’s called the Philip Kgosana Drive. And that was the name of the young man, who was a PAC activist, Philip Kgosana.

Q: Monica asks a huge question, what do I say when people accuse Israel of being apartheid?

A: I think it’s an analogy. I’ve never been to Israel, and I wouldn’t venture a comment myself, but I think when somebody of the moral stature of Desmond Tutu makes that, draws that analogy, I think it’s worth considering it.

Smuts party won in 1948, Smuts party won the popular vote, but the National Party won the constituencies. That’s accurate. The South African constitution loads rural constituencies. And so, you need fewer votes to win a seat in the countryside than you do in the cities. And most of the English-speaking votes were indeed in the cities.

Somebody, a couple of people here talking about working for Colin Eglin in Seapoint in the cities. Helen Sussman survived abuse and anti-Semitic taunts says Josie Adler from National Party MPs. Legislation required domestic quarters to be built physically separate from the main residences.

We Philip Kgosana met leading Orange cooperatives in the Winterveld are interesting Josie. Thank you. Absolutely right about Sussman being very, very badly treated on the floor of the House of Parliament. I particularly like the moment though, much later on when the minister, I think it was the Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee, accused her of thinking that she had seen Mandela on Robben Island a number of times and had raised issues around conditions there. And he asked her, he jived at her, as though you think he should be prime minister or could be prime minister. And she replied calmly, yes, I do.

I got to know Helen Sussman late in her life, but hugely enjoyed meeting such a principal. And I had an event at Wits attended by Nelson Mandela. And he came in and spotted Helen across the room and immediately went over to her. And they enjoyed really the warmest and most breathtaking friendship at that stage of their lives.

I haven’t got any more Q&A at this stage. So, I’d like to thank everybody who posted questions and I hope I’ve managed to answer at least a few of them. Thank you very much indeed.

Q: Thanks, thanks Conor. I just, I actually want to respond to one of the questions that said if things were so bad why didn’t we leave?

A: Well, you know, one has a choice, one can either run away or stay there and actually do your best to make a difference. We met, it was very difficult when you were chased, when we were chased by the police, where there was 90 days solitary confinement, but many of us who did stay there, and our families really did our best to make a difference. And I know from our, we were involved in radio, 702, my uncle ran 702. And we had a radio station outside of South Africa, but this is later, this is, you know, in the eighties. And I think that that radio talk show actually did make a difference, but you and I can talk about it offline, and maybe we can even have a discussion online. And it becomes very provocative and very emotional, and it becomes very personal. You know, we try not to make it personal, not political. I mean, that’s very important to have open discussion. But yes, they were very, very, very distressing, and turbulent times and core facing history. Facing history.

Thank you very much, Colin. Thank you. That was excellent. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for your questions. Very good. Thanks. Bye-bye.