What Was Apartheid and Who Built It?

Apartheid—Afrikaans for “apartness”—classified people by imposed racial categories and used law, policing and forced removal to determine where they could live, work, study, travel, own land and vote. In South Africa, it converted long-standing colonial segregation into a coordinated national system after the National Party’s election victory on 26 May 1948.

White supremacy did not begin in 1948. Dutch East India Company settlement began at the Cape in 1652; British rule, settler conquest and African dispossession followed. The Union of South Africa, founded in 1910, consolidated white minority government. The Natives Land Act of 1913 initially restricted African landholding to about 7% of the country; the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 nominally increased the scheduled share to about 13%, although acquisition remained incomplete.

After 1948, National Party governments under D. F. Malan, J. G. Strijdom, Hendrik Verwoerd, B. J. Vorster, P. W. Botha and F. W. de Klerk administered apartheid until democratic elections on 27 April 1994. Verwoerd, minister of native affairs from 1950 to 1958 and prime minister from 1958 to 1966, systematized “separate development.”

“There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.” — Hendrik Verwoerd, 1953, Senate speech on Bantu education.

This history belongs within the archive’s accounts of South Africa and the longer construction of modern racism.

Parliament supplied the statutes; cabinet ministers designed policy; civil servants classified families and issued permits; police arrested resisters; courts enforced racial laws; local authorities demolished neighborhoods; and employers benefited from controlled, underpaid labor.

Law or institution	Year	Function
Natives Land Act	1913	Barred most African purchase or tenancy outside scheduled areas covering about 7% of land in 1913
Population Registration Act	1950	Required racial classification as White, Native—later Bantu or Black—Coloured, or, administratively, Asian/Indian
Group Areas Act	1950	Reserved residential and commercial districts by race and enabled mass removals
Suppression of Communism Act	1950	Defined “communism” broadly to ban organizations and silence opponents
Bantu Education Act	1953	Put Black schooling under central racial control and trained pupils for subordinate labor
Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act	1959	Advanced ethnic “homelands” intended to strip Black South Africans of national political claims
Terrorism Act	1967	Permitted indefinite detention without trial; it was repealed in 1990

The African National Congress, founded in 1912, and allied organizations resisted through petitions, strikes, civil disobedience and, after the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 and state prohibition in 1960, armed struggle. The Pan Africanist Congress, South African Communist Party, trade unions, Black Consciousness organizations, churches, students and community groups were also central.

British and US governments publicly criticized apartheid while often treating South Africa as a Cold War ally and trading partner. Foreign banks, oil suppliers and corporations helped sustain the economy; international sanctions, divestment and organizing later raised its costs.

Apartheid was not a single killing event with one accepted death toll. Its record includes killings by security forces, deaths in detention, executions, cross-border warfare, forced removals, imprisonment, impoverishment and preventable disease. These categories overlap, and official records undercount covert violence.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission received more than 21,000 victim statements after hearings began in 1996; about 2,000 people testified publicly. Its mandate covered gross human-rights violations committed from 1 March 1960 through 10 May 1994, not every injury caused by apartheid since 1948.

Event or measure	Documented figure	Source and scope
Forced removals under apartheid	About 3.5 million people, 1960–1983	Surplus People Project, reported in 1983; removals under state resettlement policies
Sharpeville massacre	69 killed and about 180 wounded, 21 March 1960	Official inquest figures; police fired on anti-pass protesters
Soweto uprising	176 official deaths; estimates up to about 700, beginning 16 June 1976	Government figure versus later historical estimates for the wider uprising
Deaths in police detention	73 deaths, 1963–1990	Human Rights Committee compilation cited by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Political violence during transition	About 14,000 deaths, 1990–1994	Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimate, including state, party and communal violence

No responsible total can translate apartheid’s full damage into a single death count: dispossession, malnutrition, family separation and deliberately unequal education were structural outcomes, not statistical footnotes.

Apologists dispute apartheid’s character by describing it as benign “separate development,” blaming every atrocity on individual officers, or emphasizing abuses committed by liberation movements. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission did examine violations by the African National Congress, Pan Africanist Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party. That does not equalize responsibility: the apartheid state commanded legislation, prisons, police, armed forces, intelligence agencies and public revenue.

Some disputes concern measurement rather than culpability. Soweto’s official toll was 176 after the uprising began in 1976, while later estimates extend as high as about 700 because violence spread and records were incomplete. The often-cited 3.5 million removals between 1960 and 1983 comes from the Surplus People Project; historians distinguish forced removals from labor migration and earlier dispossession. Such distinctions refine the record but do not negate the policy.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in 1973; it entered into force in 1976. The 1998 Rome Statute, effective from 2002, defines the crime of apartheid as specified inhumane acts committed within an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with intent to maintain it.

Apartheid’s defenders also detach it from racial ideology. Yet classification, pass controls and territorial partition were explicit state practices within the global history of modern racism. The scholarly consensus is not that apartheid was accidental discrimination, but that it was planned racial domination.

Apartheid legislation was dismantled in stages, political organizations were unbanned in 1990, and South Africa held its first national election with universal adult suffrage from 26 to 29 April 1994. Nelson Mandela became president on 10 May 1994. The 1996 Constitution prohibited racial discrimination and established equal citizenship.

Political apartheid ended; its geography and wealth distribution did not. The World Bank estimated South Africa’s consumption-expenditure Gini coefficient at 0.63 in 2014, among the world’s highest measured levels. Statistics South Africa reported unemployment of 32.9% under the official definition in the first quarter of 2024, with large racial disparities rooted in unequal land, education and labor markets.

The immediate conclusion is therefore twofold. Apartheid was built collectively by identifiable institutions and decision-makers, not by an abstract “past.” Its abolition removed white legal sovereignty, but restitution, land reform, educational equality and economic redistribution remained unfinished. Understanding that continuity is essential to any accurate account of South Africa.

• South African History Online: Apartheid legislation 1850s–1970s
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Apartheid
• United Nations: International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid
• World Bank: Overcoming Poverty and Inequality in South Africa
• Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Apartheid and the Group Areas Act