Introduction
Conspiracies I’ve known - Part I, Part II, and Part III addressed the complicated relationship between the two white population groups in South Africa, the Afrikaans and the English.
Conspiracies I’ve known - Part IV compared the local South African conspiracy, the Broederbond, with the international conspiracy of covid. It also brought up similarities and differences between the Broederbond and Q.
Conspiracies I’ve known - Part V and Part VI introduced the non-white population groups of South Africa.
In this post, we are going to get a feeling for what apartheid was like.
Apartheid’s Doublespeak
The National Party that introduced apartheid in 1948 called it Separate Development. They claimed that it provided separate but equal amenities and opportunities for different racial groups.
Yet its application to black South Africans seemed to emphasize separation while being skimpy with development.
Racial separation was pervasive.
Where you lived
The traditional black tribal reservations were declared to be independent countries called Homelands.
Think about it.
Those territories were kicked out of South Africa. Expelled. Cut adrift.
The people who hailed from there had no choice in the matter.
If blacks wanted to work in [white] South Africa — which was where most of the jobs were — they had to apply for passes (essentially passports and time-limited visas).
Even when their passes got them into [white] South Africa, they still had to live in the black residential district, called a Location, that was adjacent to the relevant white town or city.
It was difficult for a black worker to get permission to bring his family with him to [white] South Africa. In most cases, black wives and children had to stay behind in the Homelands.
This led to loneliness, alcoholism, and other problems that a husbandless / fatherless society creates.
But there were some black women and children in the Locations adjacent to white towns or cities. The Locations had their own schools, hospitals, buses, trains, sports fields — invariably inferior to those that were provided for whites.
Job Reservation
A system called Job Reservation precluded blacks from skilled trades. Only whites could become electricians, mechanics, plumbers.
Even the job of wheel tapper on the railways was reserved for whites.
Segregation
When they were in a park designated for whites, blacks could not sit on park benches, drink from water fountains, use toilets, etc. If a black nanny was looking after white children, for example, she could take her white charges to the park, but she couldn’t sit on a bench.
Black people couldn’t go to white restaurants or white theaters. In a bank or a post office, there were separate teller lines for black people and white people.
There were different beaches for black people and white people.
Black students couldn’t enrol in white universities.
Sex
Sexual relationships across racial lines were illegal. Interracial marriage most certainly was illegal.
Destruction of the black middle class
When blacks and whites first encountered each other in Southern Africa, the blacks were illiterate and the whites were literate.
In that sense, they weren’t on a level playing field. Because of blacks’ illiteracy, there were many jobs that blacks couldn’t do1.
But, over the decades, some blacks did become educated. By the time of WWII, some blacks owned small businesses. Some, like Nelson Mandela, were studying law. There was an emerging black middle class.
Before apartheid was imposed in 1948, some of these middle-class blacks had businesses and homes in traditionally white areas.
If things had been allowed to progress organically, I believe this black middle-class cohort would have expanded.
That would have been a good thing. They say that the middle class is the backbone of a society.
Who wouldn’t want a strong middle class, you might ask. Well, the architects of apartheid apparently didn’t care about a strong black middle class.
When apartheid was introduced, the black business owners in white areas were plucked out of their homes, trucked hundreds of miles, and unceremoniously dumped in a tribal Homeland that their ancestors had left three or four generations previously.
Apartheid made it exceedingly difficult for a black person to attain a middle-class standard of living. Most blacks were poor. And, as we know, a massive economic underclass leads to massive social problems and crime.
The architects of apartheid were obsessed. They were willing to cut their noses off to spite their faces.
Black unrest later came back to bite whites in the ass. I hope the masterminds behind apartheid rued the day they had destroyed the black middle class. Come to think of it, that’s a pipe dream on my part. When the shit hit the fan, they simply moved on to their Plan B, which I’ll touch on in Part VIII.
Oh, the irony!
At some point along the way, the apartheid regime introduced a measure that blacks deeply resented.
They insisted that black school children be taught in Afrikaans.
Blacks hated this.
Firstly, English was a more useful language for business and for communication with the rest of the world. If blacks couldn’t study in their own native languages, they would have rather studied in English.
Secondly, blacks regarded Afrikaans as the language of their oppressors.
The staggering incongruity is that the Afrikaans did to blacks what the British administration had done to their Dutch ancestors when it had taken over the running of the Cape Colony back in 1815. The British had imposed English on the Dutch residents of the Cape.
And that was why the Voortrekkers had climbed into their ox-drawn wagons and headed into that interior in which they were to meet so many perils.
I’m sitting here and shaking my head at the insanity of it all.
In any case, I do know that the imposition of Afrikaans on black schools ratcheted black resentment up to a new level.
Degrees of restrictions
The limitations that I’ve described applied to the Bantu (blacks).
At the other end of the spectrum, the whites had the most privileges.
Coloureds, Indians, and Chinese fell somewhere in the middle.
These “in between” groups had fewer privileges than whites, but fewer restrictions than blacks. The public amenities that were provided for them — schools and such — were not up the the standards of those provided for whites, but they were better than those provided for blacks.
Of the “in between” ethnic groups, the Chinese fared best. For example, they were allowed to attend private white schools.
In Part VI, I mentioned that I had a Chinese classmate at my [private Catholic] high school [in Johannesburg, South Africa]. Because my parents lived in Swaziland, I was a boarder. My Chinese classmate was a day scholar. Not only did she and her brother attend private Catholic schools, but their family lived in an upper middle class, white neighborhood.
When apartheid had come into force and they ordinarily would have had to leave the neighborhood, her family received an exemption because her grandfather was a doctor who had performed outstanding service for the community. The government told them that, for the duration of her grandfather’s life, they could keep their house.
About halfway through high school, my classmate’s grandfather passed away. Her family then had to move out of the white neighborhood they were living in. Instead of moving to the residential area that was designated for the Chinese in Johannesburg, her parents emigrated to Vancouver, Canada.
I kept up with my former classmate sporadically. Her family did well in Vancouver, where her brother still is. My former classmate’s career took her to Los Angeles. There she met and married a Scot. She and her husband divide their time between Los Angeles and Scotland.
I’m glad for my former classmate that she and her family found a very satisfactory solution. But millions of people living under apartheid didn’t have that escape hatch.
Some incivilities were customary, not mandated
It was common for white South African families to have black servants. It also was common for white South African children to treat their families’ servants disrespectfully. For example, a white family might have a fifty-year-old black cook, and the seven-year-old child of the family would address her by her first name.
This was in stark contrast to the way in which white children were expected to address white adults. White children addressed white adult acquaintances as Mr. Smith or Mrs. Smith. They addressed close family friends as Uncle John or Aunt Mary (even if they weren’t related).
My parents also had black servants. However, my parents taught us children to use the formal salutation when we addressed Swazi men and women. It was the equivalent of addressing an adult as Mr. Jones or Mrs. Jones. If we met a black adult whose name we didn’t know, we followed the Swazi custom of addressing them as Father or Mother. In the case of an elder whose name we didn’t know, we addressed them as Grandpa or Granny.
My parents modeled the behaviour themselves and ensured we did it no matter whom we were speaking with.
The Swazi people started out being illiterate. But, as time went on, more of them became educated. More of them opened businesses. More of them got skilled jobs. They became nurses and teachers, then school principals, then doctors.
In Swaziland the situation evolved as I said it would have done in South Africa if organic progress had been permitted.
As a Swazi middle class emerged, my parents entertained Swazi people in our home.
I’m grateful that my parents brought us up differently from the way in which white South African children were raised.
Writing this post has been painful
Laying bare the skeleton of apartheid has reminded me what a mind fuck2 the whole thing was. I have been feeling angry and sad as I’ve been remembering it.
And I’m speaking as someone who was on the privileged side of the equation! I cannot imagine how I would feel if I had been on the other side of the divide.
When I first embarked on this series of posts, I somehow deluded myself into thinking that I wouldn’t have to tackle the gory details of apartheid.
But then, as the series evolved, I realized that I couldn’t avoid writing this post.
Next …….
Post-apartheid
Books about South Africa
Movies about South Africa
This explains why, when English-speaking whites enlisted for WWII, essentially the only people who could fill the resulting vacancies were Afrikaans-speaking whites. A generally racist attitude that had not yet been formalized into apartheid would have made some contribution to the exclusion of blacks from those jobs. But, back then, there genuinely would not yet have been enough literate blacks to fill the positions. This was an issue that I raised in Conspiracies I’ve known - Part II and that I promised to address more fully later in the series. Now that you’ve read this post, I’m guessing you have enough context to understand the dynamics.
If you’re offended by my swearing, let me ask you this: What’s more obscene, my swearing or the system of apartheid? For all the horrors it imposed on blacks, white South African society was polite. White men opened doors for white women and all that good stuff. As I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, white South Africa was a society of manners without morals. So, take your pick, Buttercup. Do you want manners or morals? I know what my choice is. After writing this post, I can’t do manners.