Apartheid

Definition

Apartheid is a particularly South African racial engineering program that was used by European invaders to maintain their dominance between 1948 and 1994. It was developed by the Afrikaner segment of the minority white population with the additional goal of promoting exclusive Afrikaner nationalism. Dutch colonists who came to the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th and 18th centuries gave rise to the Afrikaners, an ethnic group in South Africa.

Explanation

Apartheid is the racial segregation system that existed in the Republic of South Africa. By legislation, the population is divided into “whites,” “blacks,” and “colored” or “mixed race” groupings in society. This division is mirrored in limits on where people may live, marry, work, and utilize public spaces like parks, beaches, and hospitals.

Although racial mingling and miscegenation were common in a rapidly industrializing culture, Anglo-style informal segregation had comparable results prior to official racism. The apartheid ideology, which was heavily inspired by theories of evolution, hierarchy, and racial supremacy, provided justification for the official division of racialized groups in South Africa. Under the leadership of Hendrik Verwoerd in particular, the Afrikaner Nationalist Party organized these customs into a cogent philosophy. Preachers, academics, and Afrikaner periodicals like Die Burger exploited the assimilationist United Party’s repression of the Afrikaans language as a rallying cry. Then, they added a program to build up capital (“buy only Afrikaans”) for building societies and banks that were just starting up in Africa.

In order to gain political benefit, non-black people of different ethnic backgrounds were racialized into one category, the whites, while black ethnic groupings were divided and dispersed via the process of ethnicization. Through the concept of separate development, apartheid divided the people based on various histories and cultures. Whites had exclusive political power over a majority of “non-white” people who were disenfranchised. At first, most business owners were of English descent, but as time went on, the government started to support more and more Afrikaner business owners.

Following painstaking negotiations, persistent ANC campaigning, and international pressure, Nelson Mandela was ultimately released unconditionally on February 11, 1990, marking the beginning of the end of apartheid after almost 27 years in jail. Apartheid was kept in place via the use of force and judicial penalties, which included locking up its critics like Nelson Mandela. The end of apartheid and the establishment of a democracy in South Africa happened after Mandela’s release.