What was the point of Apartheid?

The short answer is that the goal was the eventual division of South Africa in "homelands" for the various nations, with the bulk of the land being retained for Whites and a minority of other groups. To a certain degree this was implemented with the Bantustans and internal passports and such. Ironically for all the talk about Apartheid being about economic power, in my opinion it's economics that kept the final vision of Apartheid from coming to be. In order to divide the country a lot of valuable land would have to be given up by wealthy whites, and given that they were the ones running the country they weren't going to take that step.
 
There was a "they took our jerbs" aspect. Companies were hiring black workers because they could do just as good a job as Afrikaaners and made lower salary demands.
 

hammo1j

Donor
One thing I remember is this Greek girl said her mother had told her Blacks were 'the Dirties' at a young age. Thus she had an association of people with toilet training.

Thus the segregation is implanted at a young age. She had passed this on to her daughter too.

Please note because I describe this behavior I am in no way in it's favour.
 
The short answer is that the goal was the eventual division of South Africa in "homelands" for the various nations, with the bulk of the land being retained for Whites and a minority of other groups. To a certain degree this was implemented with the Bantustans and internal passports and such. Ironically for all the talk about Apartheid being about economic power, in my opinion it's economics that kept the final vision of Apartheid from coming to be. In order to divide the country a lot of valuable land would have to be given up by wealthy whites, and given that they were the ones running the country they weren't going to take that step.

I thought the idea was that all the non-white citizens would be officially registered to the diminutive 'homelands', they'd actually be living all over the place, as would be necessary to properly exploit them. The grand vision was only that they'd live in 'homelands' and commute to work outside every day. Only very unlucky wealthy whites would have to give up land, and they'd be compensated.

There was a "they took our jerbs" aspect. Companies were hiring black workers because they could do just as good a job as Afrikaaners and made lower salary demands.

That was the main tension there. 'Should we get rid of them or enslave them'? Nasty business.
 
Fear of being dominated by the black majority, but deeper than that, I think it was fear of intermixing occuring between whites and blacks, specifically black men and white women. This was the main impotence behind Jim Crow.

The fear of racial mixing at least in the history of English colonialism was created as a means to divide poor whites from enslaved blacks. Since such a mixing would undermine the extremely profitable plantation system that was supporting the wealth of the whites on the top of the pile.

Given that the Colonial Dutch/Afrikaner economy also went for an economic system with a heavy dose of slaving local populations and eventually importing slaves from elsewhere in Africa, I wouldn't be surprised if there too miscegenation taboos arose from the need to keep the slaves dehumanized in the eyes of lower-class colonials/Afrikaners.

What was the purpose of Apartheid if it only segregated people based on race and exacerbated tensions that nearly went into civil war? Can anyone explain?

The Afrikaners wanted to retain the advantages of black labour upon which the South African economy relied, but also keep blacks out of power, out of their communities and economically repressed so that they could not successfully demand higher wages.

It was basically an attempt for the elite to have their cake and eat it.

fasquardon
 
I thought the idea was that all the non-white citizens would be officially registered to the diminutive 'homelands', they'd actually be living all over the place, as would be necessary to properly exploit them. The grand vision was only that they'd live in 'homelands' and commute to work outside every day. Only very unlucky wealthy whites would have to give up land, and they'd be compensated.



That was the main tension there. 'Should we get rid of them or enslave them'? Nasty business.


Sort of, if one assigns a certain degree of ideological commitment to the architects of apartheid then the intent of the homelands was to be actually functioning environments, under Pretoria's auspices of course, that could absorb the Black populations. There was also talks of trying to get some of the neighboring Black countries, like Botswana, to take land and a bunch of people from South Africa.

I don't think the massive dependence on Black labor, to the point of large populations of Black people living outside their Bantustans, was part of the original vision. Certainly there was some expectation of some Black people remaining in the reduced South Africa, as one can see if they look at the demographic projections drawn up at the time.

There'd be more than a few Whites that would have to be compensated, you can see the map of the Bantustans here, they're so disjointed because there was a lot of prime real estate that Pretoria didn't want to either take, or purchase and give away.

iu
 
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