The Roots of Segregation, Apartheid’s Menacing Predecessor

Curry, Dawne Y.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-85404-1_2

Dawne Y. Curry⁴

Part of the book series: African Histories and Modernities ((AHAM))

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Abstract

‘The Roots of Segregation, Apartheid’s Menacing Predecessor’ discusses the origins and the evolution of the policy of segregation in South Africa. This chapter opens with the observations of South Africans (African, White, and Asian) and African Americans regarding separate residential enclaves, race-designated institutions, and the intimacy of the policy within modes of travel, hospitals, elevators, and other areas where race mattered and where the government amplified difference. The chapter lays out the policy of segregation, how it evolved and mutated under James Barry Munnik Hertzog and other leaders who were intent on supporting the unity of the two White nations, the British and the Afrikaners that they championed.

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Notes

1.
Ruth Isabel Seabury, Daughter of Africa, 129.
2.
Mina Tembeka Soga, Patterns of Segregation, South African Institute of Race Relations, Head Office Memoranda (1948) File 1, Historical Papers, Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Aa12.15.7, 12/48.
3.
Dr. Oscar Wollheim, South African Institute of Race Relations, Head Office Memoranda (1948) File 1, Historical Papers, Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Aa12.15.7, 12/48.
4.
William George Ballinger, https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/william-george-ballinger, date accessed 13 May 2021.
5.
Robert R. Edgar, An African American in South Africa, 159–160, and this photo shows differentiation in technology. The right side shows a mechanized way to ascend the stairs while the left side shows the converse. https://theconversation.com/book-review-selling-apartheid-south-africas-global-propaganda-war-49380, date accessed 18 May 2021.
6.
Jennifer Robinson, Johannesburg’s 1936 Empire Exhibition: Interaction, Segregation and Modernity in a South African City, Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, 3 (September 2003): 761.
7.
Ibid., 761–762.
8.
Robert R. Edgar, An African American in South Africa, 175, and Jennifer Robinson, Johannesburg’s 1936 Empire Exhibition: Interaction, Segregation and Modernity in a South African City, Journal of Southern African Studies, 29, 3 (September 2003): 759–789.
9.
Robert R. Edgar, An African American in South Africa, 180.
10.
Maggie Resha, Mangoana O Tsoara Thipa Ka Bohaleng, My Life in the Struggle (Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers, 1991), 30.
11.
Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy: The Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa (New York: Free Press, 1986), 62.
12.
See Fran Lisa Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
13.
“5,000 Squatters Erect Shelters in Alexandra: Health Committee Condemns Action of Council,” Rand Daily Mail, January 8, 1947, 25, and Dawne Y. Curry, ‘Their World Was a Ghetto’: Space, power, and identity in Alexandra, South Africa’s squatters’ movement, 1946–1947 in Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe W. Trotter (eds.) The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2018), 278–279. Of Baduza’s lieutenants, most information exists on Rammitloa, who after being a petty hawker, trade unionist, and squatter leader turned to writing short stories and poems under the pseudonym Modikwe Dikobe. Alexandra’s backdrop of protest—a consumer boycott in 1917, and a series of bus strikes in the 1940s—made the township highly attractive as a literary subject. Alexandra had other things going for it. The township maintained its own local authority, the Health Committee; ran a sewage disposal system; operated a skeleton staff clinic; and offered a bus line. Compared to Alexandra proper, the squatter encampment was a slum of epic proportions. But that did not stop Baduza from making Alexandra a significant spoke in the wheel of land dispossession and excessive poverty.
14.
Dawne Y. Curry, ‘Their World Was a Ghetto’: Space, power, and identity in Alexandra, South Africa’s squatters’ movement, 1946–1947 in Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe W. Trotter (eds.) The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2018), 278–279. See also Alfred W. Stadler, Birds in the Cornfield: Squatter Movements in Johannesburg, 1944–1947, Journal of Southern African Studies, 6, 1 (1979): 360–372.
15.
Ibid., 279–282, and Philip Bonner and Noor Nieftagodien, Alexandra: A History (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press (2008), 90–96.
16.
Dawne Y. Curry, ‘Their World Was a Ghetto’, 290.
17.
Ibid., 279–280.
18.
Maynard Swanson, “The Asiatic Menace”: Creating Segregation in Durban, 1870–1900, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 16, 3 (1983): 403.
19.
Dawne Y. Curry, ‘Their World Was a Ghetto’, 279–280. See Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
20.
Dawne Y. Curry, ‘Their World Was a Ghetto’, 280.
21.
Ufrieda Ho, Paper Sons and Daughters: Growing Up Chinese in South Africa (Athens: Ohio University, 2011), 104–105.
22.
Marco Ramerini, English text revision by Dietrich Köster, The Dutch in South Africa, 1652–1795 and 1802–1806, https://www.colonialvoyage.com/dutch-south-africa/#:~:text=The%20Dutch%20settlement%20history%20in%20South%20Africa%20began,ships%20under%20the%20command%20of%20W.G.%20de%20Jong, date accessed 1 January 2021.
23.
“Timeline of Land Dispossession and Segregation in South Africa 1900–1947,” https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/timeline-land-dispossession-and-segregation-south-africa-1900-1947, date accessed 22 December 2020. The Glen Grey Act, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecil-Rhodes/Policies-as-prime-minister-of-Cape-Colony#ref137760, date accessed 11 November 2020.
24.
David Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Natal (1845–1910) (Cape Town: Oxford, 1971), 23–25.
25.
Timeline of Land Dispossession and Segregation in South Africa 1900–1947,” https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/timeline-land-dispossession-and-segregation-south-africa-1900-1947, date accessed 22 December 2020. The Glen Grey Act, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecil-Rhodes/Policies-as-prime-minister-of-Cape-Colony#ref137760, date accessed 11 November 2020.
26.
Ibid.
27.
Leepo Modise, The Natives Land Act of 1913 Engineered the Poverty of Black South Africans:
a Historico-ecclesiastical Perspective, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 39, 2 (2013): 359–378.
See Natives Land Act of 1913, http://psimg.jstor.org/fsi/img/pdf/i0/10.5555/al.sff.document.leg19130619.028.020.027_final.pdf, date accessed 8 April 2021, Natives Land Act of 1913, https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/natives-land-act-1913, 8 April 2021.
28.
South African History Online, “State Policies and Social Protest 1924–1939,” https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/state-policies-and-social-protest-1924-1939, date accessed 17 December 2017.
29.
South African History Online, Langa Township, https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/langa-township-cape-town, date accessed 9 April 2021.
30.
Ibid.
31.
Eslanda Robeson, African Journey (New York: The John Day, 1945), 37–38.
32.
Ibid.
33.
Rilda Marta(sic), Trip to the United States Full of Excitement, Bantu World, June 29, 1935, 12.
34.
Leonard Thompson, History of South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 157.
35.
Brandy S. Thomas, “Give the Women Their Due”: Black Female Missionaries and The South African-American Nexus, 1920s-1930s, B. A. Thesis, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 2011, 15. Thomas writes that The Christian Express later renamed the South African Outlook reprinted the speech in its newspaper.
36.
Robert R. Edgar, Josie Mpama/Palmer, 54.
37.
Philip Bonner, “African Urbanisation on the Rand Between the 1930s and 1960s: its Social Character and Political Consequences,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 1 (March 1995): 116–118.
38.
Ibid.
39.
Dawne Y. Curry, ‘Their World Was a Ghetto’, 277 and Olive Schreiner, “The People Overflow: The Story of the Johannesburg Shanty Towns,” pamphlet, 1947, 46.
40.
Rand Rebellion 1922, https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/rand-rebellion-1922, 3 June 2021.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Saul Dubow, The Passage of Hertzog’s Native Bills, Part One. In: Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 131. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20041-2 6, date accessed 11 January 2020.
43.
“African Women Must Be Organized We are Prepared to Move,” South African Worker, June 26, 1937, Robert R. Edgar, Get Up, Get Moving, 178.
44.
Timeline of the African National Congress, https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/african-national-congress-timeline-1930-1939#:~:text=A%20Non-European%20Convention%20is%20held%20in%20Kimberley%20to, and%20welfare%20societies%20from%20all%20over%20Southern%20Africa.
45.
Saul Dubow, The Passage of Hertzog’s Native Bills.
46.
Brian Percy Bunting, Moses Kotane, South African Revolutionary: A Political Biography (London: Inkululeko Publications, 1975), 67.
47.
World War II, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/South-Africa/World-War-II Second World War and its impact, 1939–1948 https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/second-world-war-and-its-impact-1939-1948, date accessed 16 March 2021.
48.
Brian Percy Bunting, Moses Kotane, 124.
49.
Preamble UN, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/preamble, date accessed 12 May 2021.
50.
Brian Percy Bunting, Moses Kotane, 124.
51.
Chapter 1: Purposes and Principles, https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/index.html, date accessed 15 January 2021.
52.
Brandy S. Thomas, “Give the Women Their Due,” 16.

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Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA
Dawne Y. Curry

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Curry, D.Y. (2022). The Roots of Segregation, Apartheid’s Menacing Predecessor. In: Social Justice at Apartheid’s Dawn. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85404-1_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85404-1_2
Published: 12 April 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-85403-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85404-1
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