Continuing my reading of the textbook, the history of apartheid South Africa continues to become grim. Following the establishment of British rule, new urban settlements were built on the far eastern frontier. The largest of these towns were East London and Grahamstown. Contact with the indigenous inhabitants, the Xhosa, was fairly frequent as Africans traveled to farms and cities in search of work.
The 1853 Constitution of the Cape Colony distinguished between “civilized” and “uncivilized” peoples. While it never blatantly states that they are segregating by skin color and ancestry, that is clearly their intention if you read between the lines. Furthermore, punitive (which I learned from the dictionary means “inflicting or intended as punishment”) laws, required the Xhosa to carry passes used to regulate their movement. Additionally, it could prevent them from leaving their jobs and seeking work elsewhere. In some ways, this reminds me of the current pandemic. In the most infected countries that are locking down the most, you must provide paperwork simply to commute to work and prove that you are an essential service member. However, in South Africa these passes weren’t used to ensure everyone’s health and well being, they were used to deepen the colonizers control over the native people.
Another way residential segregation was supported was through the imposition of curfews on Blacks to prevent them from entering White areas at night. This reminded me of a movie I recently watched, The Diary of Anne Frank. Anne was Jewish, living in Germany when Hitler rose to power. While she suffered the cruel fate of concentration camps, before she was forced into hiding she experienced having curfews imposed upon her because of her religion. It is curious that just a few years after WWII ended (1945), apartheid began in South Africa (1948). It seems the colonizers took a few ideas with them from the oppressors in Nazi Germany. There truly is nothing new under the sun.
20th Century History 