Apartheid in South Africa 3
Apartheid in South Africa
How would you feel if when you came to school, you had to sit in a specific area based on, let’s say the colour of your hair. This would mean that who you associate with would be based on these characteristic. My topic is very vast as it is spanned over 46 years so today I’m going to touch on the side that follows the way the blacks were forced to live and how they were seen as lesser human beings.
To put it simply it was due to a long history of settler rule as well as Dutch and British colonialism. The essential thinking behind apartheid was that although South Africa was a unitary nation, it was comprised of four racial groups. This sparked internal resistance to which the government responded with detention without trial and torture. Whites in their own eyes were seen as sophisticated and therefore entitled to rule South Africa.
So to begin at the beginning, during the lead up to the 1948 elections the national party began to campaign their ideas on Apartheid and began to pass legislation on their laws shortly after to coming onto power. Classifying individuals began by segregating everyone into black, white coloured or Indian. Those in the coloured group included those of Bantu and European descent. Officials would perform tests to determine which group someone belonged to and often members of the same family ended up in different groups. The East Asian population was the hardest to classify because the just didn’t seem to fit into any group. The descendants of the chinese who came to Johannesburg in the late 19th century were classified as Indian and hence, non-white. In contrast, immigrants of Japan and South Korea were considered honorary whites and were given the title “worthy oriental gentlemen” and given the same privileges as whites.
In South Africa under apartheid, the blacks were stripped of their citizenships and became one one 10 homelands. The natives were discriminated against and legislation stated where and
How would you feel if when you came to school, you had to sit in a specific area based on, let’s say the colour of your hair. This would mean that who you associate with would be based on these characteristic. My topic is very vast as it is spanned over 46 years so today I’m going to touch on the side that follows the way the blacks were forced to live and how they were seen as lesser human beings.
To put it simply it was due to a long history of settler rule as well as Dutch and British colonialism. The essential thinking behind apartheid was that although South Africa was a unitary nation, it was comprised of four racial groups. This sparked internal resistance to which the government responded with detention without trial and torture. Whites in their own eyes were seen as sophisticated and therefore entitled to rule South Africa.
So to begin at the beginning, during the lead up to the 1948 elections the national party began to campaign their ideas on Apartheid and began to pass legislation on their laws shortly after to coming onto power. Classifying individuals began by segregating everyone into black, white coloured or Indian. Those in the coloured group included those of Bantu and European descent. Officials would perform tests to determine which group someone belonged to and often members of the same family ended up in different groups. The East Asian population was the hardest to classify because the just didn’t seem to fit into any group. The descendants of the chinese who came to Johannesburg in the late 19th century were classified as Indian and hence, non-white. In contrast, immigrants of Japan and South Korea were considered honorary whites and were given the title “worthy oriental gentlemen” and given the same privileges as whites.
In South Africa under apartheid, the blacks were stripped of their citizenships and became one one 10 homelands. The natives were discriminated against and legislation stated where and