Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Changing Context of South Africa
SouthAfricahasauniquehistoryofracedrelations,producedthroughperiodsofcolon-
ization, racial segregation, and democratization. Between 1948 and 1994, the system of
racial discrimination known as “apartheid” was established. The word comes from the
Dutch word “apartness” or “separateness,” by which the country was framed both polit-
ically and materially (Butler 2009). Yet even before this time, the country was far from
integrated. There had been continuous skirmishing for power, since the first European
migrants arrived in the mid-seventeenth century. In the period from the 1870s onwards,
three groups of people emerged as particularly significant in the battles over resources
and power: the African farmers known as the Xhosa and Zulu, the Dutch immigrants,
known as Afrikaners or Boers, and the British imperialists. The Boers, the descendants
of the early Dutch colonists from the Cape, had supplied the Dutch East India Com-
pany and had later spread north and east into African land. They had grasped seemingly
“empty”stretchesoflandresultingfromthedivisionsbetweendifferentAfricanpeoples
(Butler 2009). Meanwhile the British, who had acquired the Dutch East India Company
in 1802, took control of the Cape Colony and started to take possession of the coastal
regions. They did this by force and without the consent of its indigenous peoples.
The two white communities were divided. The period after 1870 was marked by
a particularly dramatic disintegration of their relationships. Diamonds, and then gold,
were discovered in the Transvaal region, which is now known as Johannesburg, “City
of Gold.” This fueled the British desire to gain control of the whole of South Africa,
culminating in the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. After the “defeat” of the Afrikaners, the
country was unified as a British colony through the 1910 Act of Union and became a
leading place of settlement for British migrants. As a British Dominion, it shared the ra-
cial and governmental features of the British Empire; namely that whiteness and a Brit-
ish nationality delivered substantial social mobility, power, and privilege. Indeed, it was
the racialized political machinery developed at this time which laid the economic, polit-
ical, and institutional foundations of the later apartheid system (Butler 2009).
After 1910, emerging systems of racial segregation deepened the need for migrant
labor in the British owned mines and farms. A flexible migrant labor system required
mobility, and to this end the Natives Land Act 1913 squeezed African access to land
by allocating 87 percent of land to Whites and prohibiting land purchase and non-labor-
based tenure by Africans. Although there were some successful pockets of resistance,
with some successfully buying land and establishing “black spots” in “white” South
Africa(Sparks1997),thisAct,combinedwithacomplexsetofpasslawswhichpreven-
ted blacks from moving around the countryside to sell their labor, meant that many had
little choice but to migrate toward cities. However, at this time, the 1923 Urban Areas
Act entrenched spatial segregation practices as well as acting to control the “influxes”
