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Since 1948 the Afrikaner government has pushed legislation through parliament classifying the population by race, banning marriage and I sex across the color line and imposing "pass" laws that rigidly control the movement of blacks. In all, some 300 pieces of separatist legislation form the edifice of apartheid today. Local prejudices simply reinforce the letter and spirit of the laws. A minority might endure such a system without protest, but South Africa's black majority did not. In 1960 came the bloody Sharpeville riot, in which 69 were killed as police fired on a black crowd demonstrating peaceably against the pass laws. It was a shock from which South Africans—black and white—never quite recovered.
Perhaps the most degrading aspect of the system is the web of social segregation laws and customs known as petty apartheid. In this respect—unlike many others—the segregation is similar to that which existed in the U.S. South until the '60s. Petty apartheid includes everything from segregated buses to beaches and lunch counters. The government has promised to reduce the irritations of petty apartheid, and has made some progress. WHITES ONLY signs have disappeared from elevators and park benches in most cities; restaurants and hotels that are granted "international" status can now admit local blacks.
The system is shot through with absurdities. Chinese are classified as a colored subgroup; the Japanese in South Africa, who are mostly foreign businessmen, are regarded as "honorary whites"—thereby illustrating the comment of Frantz Fanon, the black radical writer, that "you are rich because you are white, but you are also white because you are rich." A black beauty queen who won a holiday at a Cape hotel was refused accommodation because the hotel did not have international status. In a reshuffle of Durban's elaborately segregated beaches, Indians took over one formerly white beach but discovered they could not use the restaurant there; its designation had not been changed.
Further liberalization of the segregation laws is promised, although the concessions, as always, will come too late to satisfy rising black aspirations. Last month urban blacks were authorized to hold 42 more kinds of jobs than before—including those of auctioneer, druggist, chiropractor and boardinghouse keeper. Officially, pay scales for black and white workers are the same; in practice, blacks earn far less than whites who hold the same jobs. A fortnight ago the government announced its intention to modify slightly the hated pass laws; henceforth blacks will be allowed to carry "travel documents" rather than the present identity books.
The centerpiece of the apartheid system is the elaborate plan to establish nine "independent" black homelands within South Africa. Eventually, all South African blacks will be given citizenship in one of these homelands, even though about half of the black population live permanently in "white" South Africa. Of these, hundreds of thousands were born in the urban townships and have rarely if ever visited, or wanted to visit, their theoretical homelands. The urban black population in South Africa is estimated at 9 million.