what encourage the police of apartheid in South Africa
Answers
For most people, the police were the face of apartheid representing force against the majority of the South African population, without whose consent the state ruled. What followed from apartheid dispossession and disenfranchisement was a series of laws displacing people or making their location in one or more place insecure or vulnerable. It was the police who cemented this vulnerability, often with brutal beatings and killings. At the very least they were in the forefront of the denial of human dignity to the majority of South Africa’s peoples
The police harassed people for not carrying passes, removed them from their homes when an area was designated a “white area”, under the Group Areas Act or in implementing the Bantustan policies. There was also the general harassment of black people in a number of ways on the basis of a generalised suspicion and identification of black people as likely perpetrators of crime.
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The laws were in themselves extremely repressive but the police tended to have a modus operandi that made things worse. The manner in which many or most police conceived their role and the extent to which the repressive arms of the apartheid state had imbibed into their consciousness notions of repugnance towards black people, meant that they regarded black people as a threat to the wellbeing of whites or as representing values and practices that ran against those cherished by white people. Treating black people as subhuman implied that being full human beings was a quality reserved for whites.
In later periods, when black people were recruited into the police force there was an expectation that they would have to prove their loyalty by even more brutal actions than their white counterparts.
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At the same time, it is important to record that there were some within the police - most of whose names may not even now be known-who did what they could to mitigate what they were told to enforce. These included police who specifically acted to help the then illegal forces of liberation. Some were captured and put on trial. These were heroes and heroines who need to be more adequately acknowledged.
But the generalised view of police conduct under apartheid was one of terror against black people. The image that recurs in interviews with people recounting their childhood, some of whom saw this as formative in their joining the liberation struggle, was in seeing their fathers and mothers humiliated by police. Thus, MK veteran Matthews Ngcobo describes his father being humiliated before his eyes by the police and the entire notion of his status within the family being undermined:
“There was something that…started to worry me-there were searches…Then when you are a child you always think your father is very powerful, but when you see your father being harassed one day by other men, you see that there is something wrong. You see that you miscalculated. Then you realise that, no, my father, there is other power that is beyond him-because when these police come at night they’re forcing, they kick the door-he doesn’t fight…So that was the worst humiliation that I experienced in my life when I grew up.” (Interview 12 October 2005, Johannesburg, in Raymond Suttner, The ANC Underground, Jacana Media 2008, p 110. See also interview with Nomboniso Gasa regarding her father’s sense of powerless in his attempts to prevent her being arrested by the Transkei Bantustan police at pp 110-111. This thwarted attempt of the father to act as “protector” of his family raises important questions relating to variable forms and meanings of patriarchy, how the notion of protection in this context was not oppressive or decorative and its undermining was a denial of a duty and capacity to protect a weaker person from oppression).
The police attempt to humiliate and dehumanise black people is one reason why Michael Dingake calls his “struggle memoir” Better to die on one’s feet! (South African History Online, 2015).
Given this history, the framers of the constitution and the founding fathers and mothers were aware of the need for a completely new police service, located within a democratic constitutional and legal order focused on the protection and promotion of human rights and the dignity of all persons within the land of South Africa. Initially it was conceived as requiring that a civilian secretariat had oversight over the police service whose name was changed from being a “force” to a “service” in order to demilitarise it.
In this thinking, the whole relationship between police and the public was meant to be fundamentally changed and police to be understood as protectors of the public and no longer identified with oppression. As with all public servants, the police, were intended through their actions, to be purveyors of the values of the democratic constitution. Regrettably, this initial objective has been repeatedly frustrated and the notion of demilitarisation has been ditched.
Apartheid had created a significant and permanent lasting wound in people. During the decades of repression and injustice, heroes such as Sislus, Tambo's and others were created. Such Afro-American heroes were extraordinarily brave, intelligent and compassionate. South Africa's real fortune was theses people with such strong integrity, not in its gold and gems.
Explanation:
- The Apartheid system signified injustice, corruption and a profound human tragedy. The White dictatorship was embedded in bigotry. The Blacks were stripped of their rights, their freedom and their integrity in South Africa.
- The White parties patched up their divisions during the Boer War in South Africa. They enforced a ethnic apartheid scheme over their own country's Black citizens. It was one of the most cruel and harshest governments ever established in the world.
- After the National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, its all-white government immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation.
- White supremacy and racial segregation had become central aspects of South African policy long before apartheid began.
- South Africa was profoundly affected by the Great Depression and the Second World War and the country was persuaded to reinforce its ethnic separation policies. In 1948, under the slogan "apartheid" (literally "apartheid"), the Africans National Party swept the general elections.Their goal was not only to separate South Africa’s white minority from its non-white majority, it was also at splitting non-whites from each other, and at dividing black South Africans along tribal lines in order to suppress their political influence.
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