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One of the most repressive apartheid restrictions was the law requiring that blacks and all other nonwhites carry a pass book stating their legal residence and workplace. Those without the proper papers could be stopped by police and summarily expelled to the countryside. Interracial Marriage and Immorality Acts prohibited marriage and sexual relations across color lines. Group Areas Act defined residential areas by race. Under it, Colored and Indians were removed to special segregated townships. Bantu Education Act gave the central government control of African education, and closed private schools for Africans and forced them to attend a separate, inferior education system.
Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister, states Native education should be controlled... in accord with the policy of the state... If the native in South Africa today in any kind of school in existence is being taught to expect that he will live his adult life under a policy of equal rights, he is making a big mistake... There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor. Extension of University Act segregated higher education sharply. It prohibited things such as established universities to accept black students except by special cabinet permission.
The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act permitted the systematic segregation of train stations, buses, movie theatres, hotels, and virtually all other public facilities, and barred the courts from overturning such restrictions. Labor regulations in the 1950 's all but outlawed the formation of trade unions except by whites, and reserved most skilled occupations for whites. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 furthered geographic divisions between the races by creating ten so-called homelands or Bantustans for the black population. The government had power to grant each independence and thereby deprive the people of South Africa citizenship. The Homelands remained economic backwaters.
They simply could not support the masses of people confined to them. The government tried to move all Africans, accept those needed by white employers, into the Homelands. Each Homeland consisted of fragments of land, separated by white farms. Kwa Zulu consisted of 29 major and 41 minor fragments. It is estimated that 3. 55 million Blacks were removed between 1960 and 1983.
The social implications were severe. Two examples: in Soweto (a township near Johannesburg), with a population of over one million by 1978, seventeen to twenty people were living in a typical four room house; in Crossroads, outside Cape Town, there were more than six people to a bed. Despite the conditions, the government continued to implement new apartheid regulations decade after decade. The Bantu Laws Amendment Act of 1964 gave the government complete authority to banish blacks from any urban area and from white agricultural areas. During the 1970 s, the government stripped thousands of blacks of their South African citizenship when it granted nominal independence to their homelands. Most of the homelands had few natural resources, were not economically viable, and being both small and fragmented, lacked the autonomy of independent states.
Apartheid extracted a huge human cost. In its efforts to create completely segregated residential areas, the South African government destroyed thousands of houses in racially mixed areas. With their homes destroyed, tens of thousands of people were forced into small, substandard houses, located in bleak townships and neighborhoods with poor services. Limits on black residence in urban areas also broke apart families in cases where one parent obtained a residence permit but the other did not. Restrictions on the size and location of black businesses squelched the economic aspirations of many blacks, preventing them from competing effectively with white-owned businesses. Apartheid educational policies condemned black South Africans to a severely overcrowded school system with educational policies designed to limit achievement.
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Research essay sample on Residential Areas South African
