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Separate Doors. Under Verwoerd's apartheid laws, the "non-Europeans" are constantly reminded of a permanent inferior status. They are forbidden to ride in white trains, buses or taxis, to use white public restrooms, attend white churches, send their children to white schools, even to sit on park benches bearing the insulting words Slegs vir blankes (For whites only). They may spend their money in white stores and invest in the stock market, but to mail a letter they must enter the post office through a separate door and buy their stamps at a separate window. "South Africa," says Laurence Gandar, editor in chief of Johannesburg's Rand Daily Mail, "is a nation that has lost its way."
Its troubles began in 1652, when three small ships under the command of Jan van Riebeeck sailed into Table Bay. On board were 200 men, and although some of them were accompanied by their wives and children, they had not come as colonists. Their sole mission was to set up a refreshment station to supply fresh meat, water and vegetables to the spice ships of the Dutch East India Company on their long voyages between Amsterdam and the Far East.
Since apartheid had not yet been invented, they intermingled freely with the primitive Hottentots and Bushmen who were the only native inhabitants of the Cape. "The Colored race started nine months after Jan van Riebeeck landed," says Colored Educator Dr. Richard van der Ross.
Plentiful Land. Cape Town soon became famous as "the tavern of the seas." Under a warm sun, crops flourished, cattle fattened and the population of the tiny station multiplied. Dutch settlers began flocking in, to be granted plots of rich farm land by the Dutch East India Company. Land was plentiful, and rather than survey it all, the company often granted a newcomer as much as he could ride around on horse back in a given number of hours.
The settlers' life was hard, isolated, but rewarding. In the remote areas, they often had to make the clothes they wore, the candles they burned and even the bullets they used to drive off marauding bands of Bushmen. They built their own sturdy homes, used the Bible —the only book they had—to teach their children how to read. When they saw their neighbors, it was usually when they rode to worship at the nearest church, often a two-day journey from their farm. There was no shortage of labor, however. Hottentots and imported East Indian slaves were easy to come by and inexpensive to maintain. Gradually, the Boer farmer became lord of his whole horizon and far beyond.
The Boers' glorious freedom ended in 1814, when the Dutch ceded the Cape Colony to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. The British brought in property laws, courts, and worst of all, government. Shocked at the treatment of the natives, London ordered all slaves freed, proclaimed Coloreds, Hottentots, and even Bushmen equal to the