How was apartheid codified and implemented, 1948-59?

Question 1

What was the basic principle behind apartheid?

By 1948 was there yet a clear way of how apartheid could be implemented?

Answer 1

That via separate development, all racial groups would progress
No

Question 2

What are two examples (amongst many more) of preexisting legislation that the National Party was able to build on for apartheid?
What did the NP have “great respect for” which was the way they began to fully instigate apartheid?
Name one black “problem” that could be fixed quickly with legislation
Most other apartheid laws required a greater understanding of the distinctions within SA society. What ‘groups’ were formed to investigate the best ways to advance the apartheid agenda?

Answer 2

Laws removing blacks from the franchise and limiting where they could buy land
The law (used parliament)
Sexual relations across the colour line
Commissions

Question 3

What was an early priority of the National Party?
How did they achieve this (and what year)?
Why were they able to do this?

Answer 3

To stay in political power
6 members of parliament were added for whites in South West Africa (now Namibia) where the Nationalists had support, 1949
They ruled the former German colony as a mandate under the UN

Question 4

Despite coloured people sharing much of the same cultural history with whites, and speaking Afrikaans/English, Why were the nationalists keen to move them into a separate racial category?

Answer 4

They still had a vote in parliament and they voted overwhelmingly for the united party

Question 5

In what way was the SA legislative system very similar to that of the UK?
Where was the coloured vote specially protected, how was it protected?
What did the nationalists pass to change this (and when)?

Answer 5

Any majority in parliament could enact new legislation with very few checks and balances
In the Cape, it needed a two-thirds majority of parliament to change it
They passed a Separate Representation of Voters Act (1951).

Question 6

What was the court judges initial reaction to the Separate Representation of Voters Act?
What two things did the NP government do to deal with this?
In what year did the NP increase their vote by almost 200,000, what did this increase from-to?
How did this stack up against the UP?
What did the NP not win?
Despite this, what did they gain?
How long did the NP stay in power for?
Name three examples of senior positions in the state which Afrikaners moved quickly to take
How much did state employment increase from-to in the 1950s (and who were the majority of new employees)?

Answer 6

They fought a constitutional battle with the NP, stating that the Act was invalid without a two-thirds majority
Appointed new Afrikaner judges to get in their way, packed the senate with sympathetic Afrikaners
1953,400,000-600,000
They narrowly outpolled them
The majority of the white vote
A comfortable majority of parliamentary seats
the next 40 years
Military, Police, Bureaucracy
482,000 to 799,000, Afrikaners

Question 7

Afrikaner nationalists did not have a complete blueprint of apartheid when they took power, name two types of Afrikaner views on how apartheid should work
Name an example of a group of Afrikaners who backed the NP yet needed black workers
Despite Apartheid literally meaning ‘separateness’, what did the policy not entirely create?
What, rather, did it aim to cement?

Answer 7

Hardliners-Looked for a tighter separation of the races
Pragmatists- recognised that the economy requires African workers in large numbers
White rural farm owners + communities
Complete segregation between blacks and whites
A hierarchy of rights and power

Question 8

Whilst black rights were being diminished in white-controlled areas, what new political strategy did the NP party believe would reach the aspirations of blacks?

Answer 8

Self-governing territories based around old reserves with more rights

Question 9

Who first coordinated apartheid, when was he PM?
What did he and his staff convince themselves (about Africans)?
Which act of what year was the first step to separate development?
What did it aim to do?

Answer 9

Hendrik Verwoerd, (1958-66)
That they still saw themselves as tribal people with their primary identity and loyalty to their own kingdom/chiefdom, their language and specific rural zone
Bantu Authorities Act (1951)
Place responsibility for local government onto a conservative rural African leadership that would cooperate with the government.

Question 10

Which act, of what year envisaged self-governing African units based around the traditional authorities?
How did Afrikaners hope that Africans would react to ethnically separate, separate development?
What did Verwoerd argue he was offering?

Answer 10

Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959)
Hoped that they would welcome it
A form of internal decolonisation

Question 11

What were two different reasons for Afrikaner nationalists disliking sexual relations between blacks and whites?
Which two acts of which two years prevented marriage and sex across the colour line respectively?

Answer 11

Religious reasons, Racist reasons
Mixed Marriage Act (1949)
Immorality Act (1950)

Question 12

Which act of what year attempted to assign everyone in SA into one of four racial categories?
What two things meant that one’s race would be public knowledge?

Answer 12

The Population Registration Act (1950)

A national register, identity documents

Question 13

From what year were Group Areas Acts implemented?
What did they do?
Give three key examples of places where blacks felt the cruelties of Group Areas and urban dispossession

Answer 13

1950
Made it so that no coloured, Indians or blacks could own or let places within cities or the closer suburbs
Sophiatown (Johannesburg), District Six (Cape Town), Cato Manor (Durban)

Question 14

Where was Sophiatown?
How many did SophiaTown house?
Being close to the city centre, who did it attract?
What was the wealth/poverty like?
Give four examples of what the culture/what it became a venue for/was like
Because of this reputation, it was the first town to be targeted by the NP, what year did planning for its removal begin?
How many years did it take for it to be largely bulldozed into rubble?

Answer 14

Johannesburg
Nearly 60,000 people 
Writers and journalists 
Very mixed, lived side-by-side
African politics, new music, shebeens (illegal bars), tsostis (youthful street criminals)/gangsters
1950
6 years

Question 15

How many people did Durban, SA’s third-largest city, house in 1951?
What fraction were Indian, African or white?
Where did Indians own property?
Up until the 1940s, why did Cato Manor have a semi-rural feel?
What however happened to land in there in the 1940s?
What year did Africans attack Indians, why?
How many were killed and over how many were injured during riots and subsequent police suppression?
By what year had the shacks been largely removed from Cato Manor and tens of thousands of Africans sent off to distant townships?
What Act was this due to?
Around how many Indian people were also moved and mostly to where?
Why was this place chosen?
What was allowed in the Indian suburbs that wasn’t in the African townships?

Answer 15

450,000
roughly 1/3rd each (equally split)
near the city centre, Cato manor (area adjacent to white suburbs)
Indians let land out to African tenants who built shacks/houses and Indians grew vegetables for family use and sale
It began to fill quickly with shack settlements
1949, they felt that landlords and shop keepers were exploiting them
142
over 1,000
1965
Group Areas Act
41,000, an exclusively Indian zone south of the city
it sited as a buffer between the white suburbs and the large African township of Umlazi
Private property ownership

Question 16

Where was District Six and what was the majority race there?
When was Group Areas enforced there?
How many people were forcibly removed and resettled on the distant Cape flats?
Alongside communities, what else was bulldozed?

Answer 16

Near the heart of Cape Town city centre, Coloureds
From 1966
about 60,000
Valuable inner city architectural heritage

Question 17

What act of what year reinforced petty apartheid?

What did this act make legal?

Answer 17

The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953)

Providing separate facilities for black people that were not of an equal quality

Question 18

What was influx control?
What three things did the NP aim to protect Whites from in the cities through influx control?
Before which year did all African men outside the reserves have to carry a pass?
How did the NP build on this legislation (what was the act called, what did it do, when was it passed)?
Which act specified this further, what year?
What did the act state?
Why did the NP still allow some Africans Urban rights?
What hugely undermined African security and ability to accumulate wealth in the cities and townships?

Answer 18

the Afrikaner policy of reducing African migration to the cities
cheap black labour, African protests, Crime
1948
the Natives Abolition of Passes Act, required each African adult to carry a reference book which they had to present on-demand, 1952
Urban Areas Act, 1952
It gave Urban rights to the minority of African people who had been born in town, worked for ten years in town, or who had lived there for 15 years; rights were extended to their children
They recognised the need for a relatively stable urban workforce in services and industries
They could not buy houses

Question 19

What year were reference books extended to women?
Why were the pass laws so deeply resented by the African people?
Why were most police seen as brutal and cruel?
Convictions under the pass laws increased from ___,___ in ___ to ___,___ in ___
How many people were turned into criminals for attempting to exercise their rights to move, how did this affect the magistrate’s courts?

Answer 19

1956
They would be frequently stopped and searched in streets and their houses and even those who had rights to stay in the cities experienced constant harassment
White police were mostly Afrikaner, although black police were also essential to the system
164,000 in 1952 to 384,000 in 1962
3 million, clogged them up

Question 20

The African Urban population of South Africa rose from . million people in ____ to . million in ____ (more than the whole white population)

Answer 20

1.8 million, 1946, 3.5 million, 1960

Question 21

Prior to 1948, what were the two types of African schooling in SA?
In the ____ census, only __% of Africans were recorded as literate

Answer 21

Elite mission schools-broad syllabus etc, Government funded schools- managed by local churches (primary level education)
1951, 24%

Question 22

What act of which year aimed to extend African education, but also to segregate the context of education?
What part of African youth were the government concerned about which became a major driver behind the expansion of education?

Answer 22

The Bantu Education Act- 1953

Youth in urban gangs (tsotis)

Question 23

What was the key reason for the Bantu Education Act?

What did Henrik Verwoerd (minister of native affairs) believe about state education for blacks?

Answer 23

Unskilled workers were no longer adequate for an efficient black workforce
That the state should provide basic education for a greater number of people, but that Bantu education should should prepare African people for only limited roles/opportunities after school

Question 24

Prior to the 1950s, what universities were wealthy black school-leavers able to attend were they received the same training as white students?
Which University became a key centre of black opposition to apartheid, what did the government pass (and which year) to deal with this?
What did this Act also plan for?

Answer 24

the University of Fort Hare- the Universities of Cape town and Witerwatersrand
Univeristy of Fort Hare- the Extension of University Education Act, 1959 (ensured that Fort Hare came under government control)
The full segregation of the largely-white English language universities, set out plans for new universities for African ethnic groups and other racially defined minorities

Question 25

Who was Professor F.R Tomlinson and when did he make his report?
How much did he estimate would need to be invested into the bantustans (=£7 billion in todays money)?
What did he state about agricultural plots and tenure?
Where did Tomlison advocate major industry investment?
What was a third key point that Tomlinson made?

Answer 25

An agricultural economist, 1955
£100 million
Agricultural plots had become too small, tenure should be made private rather than communal
Rural areas
Private enterprise should be encouraged to invest in these areas

Question 26

Economically, what were two reasons for Verwoerd ignoring the Tomlinson report?
What were two more social/political reasons?
What did the Native affairs department warn?

Answer 26

He did not believe that white South Africans would support expenditure on this scale, he did not want to create subsidised industries that might compete with urban white businesses
Enlarged landholdings would mean millions of Africans potentially losing land and therefore moving to the cities to find work, believed that private land ownership would undermine the chiefs (who gave him political support)
“Individual tenure would undermine the whole tribal structure”

Question 27

What policy did the government use instead of listening to the Tomlinson report?
What international concern was this based off of, which supposedly undermined peasant agriculture and drove more African people to the cities?
What did they hope that that this policy would achieve?
How did they attempt to solve the “problem” of over-grazing?
How did the government create enough space for this policy?
Over how many people were moved between the ____ and ____?
What were some farmers also forced to do to support this policy?
How did Africans feel about this policy/why, so much so that the culling of livestock was largely abandoned in the 1960s?

Answer 27

“Betterment”- (later called rehabilitation)
Concerns about soil erosion
Intensified farming, without the destruction of soil and vegetation
By dividing pastures into smaller paddocks so that livestock would be moved throughout the year
They moved rural families from scattered settlements into compact villages
1 million (1950s and 1960s)
Sell their livestock- to ease pressure on the pastures
Deeply resented- cut across traditional ways of living

Question 28

What were two key problems with the bantustans (social/geographical)?

Answer 28

They made up a very limited percentage of South Africa’s land area
They were subdivided into historical chieftaincies and language groups despite the fact that they often didn’t chose to identify only in this way

Question 29

What was the Congress alliance?
In what year were how many members of the Congress Alliance arrested in dawn raids?
What were those arrested accused of?
What did prosecutors try to prove?
How long did it take for the trial to be fully resolved?

Answer 29

(a broad coalition of anti-apartheid organisations, inc. the ANC, Indian Congress, Trade unionists etc)
1956, 156
High treason
That the congress movement planned to overthrow the government by force and they espoused communist ideals
5 years

Question 30

Where was the trial of the Congress alliance leaders held?
What was one way that it benefitted the Congress allaince?
What was a negative effect on ANC leaders?
What was the result of the trial, what year was this determined?

Answer 30

A court room in Pretoria
They were able to use the trial to speak about their ideas (much media interest)
They were tied up in legal proceedings for several years
Prosecutors were unable to prove their case, accused were aquitted in 1961