Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Apartheid is a uniquely South African policy of racial engineering with which European colonizers tried to ensure their supremacy between 1948 and 1994. Invented by the Afrikaner section of the minority white population, it also aimed at advancing exclusive Afrikaner nationalism. Prior to the institutionalized racialism, Anglo-type informal segregation had achieved similar effects, although racial mixing and miscegenation was widespread in a rapidly industrializing society. The apartheid ideology, strongly influenced by evolutionist, hierarchical, and racial supremacist ideas, justified the formal separation between racialized groups in South Africa. The Afrikaner Nationalist Party, particularly under its leader Hendrik Verwoerd, systematized these practices into a coherent doctrine. Afrikaner newspapers, such as Die Burger , preachers, and intellectuals used the suppression of the Afrikaans language by the assimilationist United Party as a mobilizing tool, subsequently supplemented with a program of capital accumulation (“buy Afrikaans only”) for fledgling Afrikaner building societies and banks. When the Nationalists unexpectedly came to power through a restricted franchise in 1948, Afrikaners formed 57 percent of the white population controlling 29 percent of total personal income, as against the English-speaking whites who held 43 percent. Africans, although comprising 68 percent ... log in or subscribe to read full text