How did the people of South Africa fight back against oppressive region
Answers
In 1948, the National Party (NP), representing Afrikaners, won the national election on a platform of racism and segregation under the slogan of 'apartheid’. Apartheid built upon earlier laws, but made segregation more rigid and enforced it more aggressively. All Government action and response was decided according to the policy of apartheid. In turn, apartheid failed to respond effectively and adequately to concerns that had led to intermittent labour and civic unrest that erupted in the aftermath of World War II. Consequently, throughout the 1950s unrest in African, Coloured and Indian communities escalated, becoming more frequent and determined. Labour unrest too was in evidence during this period.
After the 1948 elections, as the liberation movements intensified their efforts, the Government came down heavily on them. It introduced the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950. However, in a determined reaction, the liberation movements had assumed a more combative posture. This was spelled out in the Programme of Action adopted by the ANC in 1949. Under this policy the first major action was the Defiance Campaign launched in 1952. . This Campaign brought Africans, Coloureds and Indians together against the common enemy and was a direct reaction by the liberation movements to the unjust laws passed by the government. Some Whites also joined the struggle alongside Africans, Indians and Coloureds in different campaigns.
Other campaigns included the Western Areas Campaign from 1953 to 1957 and intended to undermine efforts to forcibly remove the community from Sophiatown to Soweto. The Bantu Education Campaign was a reaction to the introduction of Bantu Education in 1953. The Congress of the People gathrered in Kliptown in 1955 to adopt the Freedom Charterand the women’s anti pass march in 1956 expressed women’s abhorrence of the extension of pass laws to them was expressed.
There were other forms of unrest that were spontaneous, largely unorganized reactions to apartheid measures. Foremost among these were bus boycotts that were responses to increased transport costs, boycotts and attacks on municipal beerhalls that were intended to undermine African Women’s source of livelihood from proceeds of beer brewing and reactions to stricter enforcement of influx control regulations.
Institutionalising Apartheid
National Party leaders D. F. Malan and Hendrik F. Verwoerd were the architects of apartheid. Malan used the term "apartheid" from the 1930s as he distanced his party from British traditions of liberalism and the earlier policy of segregation, which he saw as too lenient towards Blacks. Verwoerd, educated in the Netherlands, the United States, and Germany, was the main ideologue of apartheid. He became Native Affairs Minister in the early 1950s and Prime Minister in 1958.
Non White Persons Only Railway Sation Platform, Johannesburg 1983. Photograph by Rodney Barnett © South Photographs.
In principle, apartheid did not differ that much from the policy of segregation of the South African government existing before the Afrikaner Nationalist Party came to power in 1948. The main difference was that apartheid made segregation part of the law. Apartheid cruelly and forcibly separated people, and had a fearsome state apparatus to punish those who fought against it. Another reason why apartheid was seen as worse than segregation was that apartheid was introduced in a period when other countries were moving away from racist policies. Before World War Two, the Western world was not as critical of racial discrimination, during which period Africa was colonized. The Second World War highlighted the problems of racism, making the world turn away from such policies and encouraging demands for decolonization. It was during this period that South Africa introduced the more rigid racial policy of apartheid.
Various reasons can be advanced for the introduction of the policy of apartheid and support for it, which are all closely linked. Among the reasons, are those of racial superiority and fear. In South Africa the white people are in the minority, and many were worried that they would lose their jobs, culture and language which explains how people were thinking.
Apartheid Laws
Numerous laws were passed in the creation of the apartheid state in the 1950s; this decade can be described as the era of 'petty apartheid,’ when the Nationalists passed many new racist laws to enforce a racially separate and unequal social order. The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, for instance, imposed segregation on all public facilities, including post offices, beaches, stadiums, parks, toilets, and cemeteries, and buses and trains as well.
Here are a few of the pillars on which apartheid rested:
By Steven Nelson, Staff Writer Dec. 6, 2013, at 2:58 p.m. Four current members of Congress voted in 1986 against the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which demanded freedom for Nelson Mandela and imposed stiff economic sanctions to end minority white rule in South Africa.