System of Segregation

The history of apartheid South Africa seems ever more similar to the southern United States under Jim Crow laws. From my most recent textbook reading I have gleaned that the South African Party (S.A.P.) was a government led by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. Their main objective was to entrench in law a comprehensive system of racial segregation. In order to accomplish this multiple laws were enacted each year through the next three decades. The first one was the Act of Union, also known as the South African Act. It restricted all voting rights to the minority white population with the exception of a very small number of “coloreds” and blacks who had previously met the narrow franchise qualification in Cape Province and Natal. Elsewhere, all non-Whites were excluded from the voters’ roll.

The next act put in place was the Mines and Works Act of 1911. It reserved all semi-skilled positions in the mining industry for whites. This meant that Blacks had no other option but to accept the poorly paid unskilled jobs in cities or rural farms. This was quite the opposite of a law common in today’s society known as Affirmative Action. Enacted in 1961 in the U.S. by President Kennedy the executive order mandated government employers, “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” For more on the order see the link below.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/affirmative_action

The Native Land Act of 1913 was a landmark piece of legislation. It prohibited Africans, who made up over two-thirds of the population, from owning or renting land anywhere outside certain parcels of territory that would be designated as native reserves. The Act further stipulated that Africans could reside outside reserves only on the condition that they were employed by Whites. This reminds me of what the United States did to Natives when they forced them to move onto reservations so those of European descent could do what they wanted with the land. It is interesting how across continents and countries, the same methods of oppression are used for the same greedy reasons.