Comment: Racialism in South Africa. (1991, 20 Marks)
Racialism is the belief that humanity divides into ranked races, together with the political order built on that belief. South Africa made it state law as apartheid (“separateness”) after the National Party of D. F. Malan won power in 1948. It codified racial hierarchy just as the post-war world moved to outlaw it. In 1991 that edifice was being dismantled; the question is whether repeal ended racialism or only its statutes.
Apartheid as a system
- Roots in segregation: the Natives Land Act (1913) confined Africans to about 7% of the land (later 13%) and fed a migrant-labour system. Mohandas K. Gandhi first developed satyagraha against South Africa’s anti-Indian laws.
- Classification and space: the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act (both 1950), pass laws, forced removals and Bantu Education (1953).
- Bantustans: the 1959 law created ethnic “homelands”; four were declared “independent”, stripping Africans of South African citizenship.
- Repression: the Sharpeville massacre (1960, 69 killed), the banning of the ANC, the Rivonia trial that jailed Nelson Mandela for life (1964), the Soweto uprising (1976) and Steve Biko‘s death in detention (1977).
Explaining it: rival readings
- Liberal: apartheid was economically irrational, and growth and skill shortages would erode it (Merle Lipton, Capitalism and Apartheid, 1985).
- Marxist-revisionist: Harold Wolpe (1972) argued that it served capital by securing cheap migrant labour, fusing race and class.
- Post-colonial: following Frantz Fanon, settler racism was the very structure of colonial rule, not a deviation from it.
- Constructivist: Audie Klotz (Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid, 1995) shows a global norm of racial equality driving sanctions even against Western material interests.
The international campaign
- India raised the treatment of South African Indians at the first General Assembly session (1946) and cut trade that year, the first state to impose sanctions over racial policy.
- The UN built pressure step by step: Resolution 1761 (1962) set up the Special Committee against Apartheid; Security Council Resolution 418 (1977) imposed a mandatory arms embargo; the 1973 Apartheid Convention made apartheid a crime against humanity.
- NAM, the Commonwealth (Gleneagles, 1977), oil embargoes and sporting isolation added pressure. The US Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986) passed over Ronald Reagan’s veto.
- The Cold War shielded Pretoria by casting the ANC as a Soviet front; Soviet decline removed that cover.
The moment of 1991
F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC in February 1990 and freed Mandela. In June 1991 the Population Registration, Group Areas and Land Acts were repealed, and CODESA negotiations opened that December, leading to the 1994 election.
Racialism after apartheid
- The structure persists: the World Bank ranks South Africa the most unequal country it measures; the 2017 land audit found whites, about 7% of the population, owning 72% of individually held farmland; and about a third of the workforce is jobless.
- Race in today’s politics: the ANC lost its majority in 2024 and formed a Government of National Unity. The Expropriation Act (2025), which permits nil compensation in narrow cases, fed US claims that Afrikaners are persecuted: Washington boycotted the Johannesburg G20 (November 2025) and in September 2026 announced visa curbs on officials it blames. Pretoria rejects the charge.
- A norm entrepreneur: South Africa hosted the 2001 Durban conference against racism (its 25th anniversary marked at the UN, September 2026) and brought the 2023 ICJ genocide case against Israel.
Conclusion
Legal racialism ended between 1990 and 1994 through internal resistance, global norms and sanctions working together, with India among the campaign’s first movers. But apartheid was a system whose inequalities have become a structure, so racialism in South Africa now survives as economic exclusion rather than as law.