Endgame

This system of Apartheid deepened existing segregation policies in a more systematic and brutal form, to erect a white supremacist Christian National State.

Racial segregation policies in South Africa dated from the 19th Century when colonial rulers used a pattern of conquest, land dispossession, taxation and pass laws to force black people off the land and channel them into labour markets, especially to meet the needs of the diamond and gold mines. British colonial rulers introduced a system of pass laws in Cape Colony and Natal. Without a signed pass, entry to areas occupied by white people and coloureds was restricted.

The NP's power base was an Afrikaner underclass that had emerged in the towns. Suffering from post-Second World War economic difficulties, they found themselves uncompetitive in a labour market where white workers demanded higher wages than those paid to black workers. The NP mythologised a powerful image of martyrdom, bravery and defiance generated by the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902 and determined to maintain white domination in the face of rising mass resistance from the black majority led by the African National Congress; uplift poor Afrikaners; challenge the pre-eminence of English-speaking white people in public life, the professions and business; and abolish the remaining imperial ties to Europe. The state became an engine of patronage for Afrikaner employment. To oversee the apartheid legislation, the bureaucracy expanded, and, by 1977, there were more than half a million white state employees.

Many white South Africans supported apartheid because separation and partition were seen as a means of avoiding a one-person-one-vote democracy within a single unified South African state, which would render white people a politically-powerless minority.

The government justified its plans on the basis that South Africa was made up of different "nations", asserting that "(the) government's policy is, therefore, not a policy of discrimination on the grounds of race or colour, but a policy of differentiation on the ground of nationhood, of different nations, granting to each self-determination within the borders of their homelands - hence this policy of separate development".

Africans could be denied basic rights if the fiction could be maintained that they did not belong in "white South Africa", but to "tribal societies". This set of assumptions and policies informed the development of segregationist ideology and, from 1948, apartheid.

The state passed two laws which paved the way for "grand apartheid", which compelled people to live in separate places defined by race (black, white, coloured, and Indian), and segregated by means of forced removals. From 1950 all citizens' were categorised according to race and this was recorded in their identity passes. Official team or Boards were established to come to an ultimate conclusion on those people whose race was unclear. This caused much difficulty, especially for coloured people, separating their families as members were allocated different races.

Black people were stripped of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands or bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states.

The government segregated education, medical care, and other public services, and provided black people with services greatly inferior to those of white people and, to a lesser extent, to those of Indian and coloured people. The education system practised in 'black schools' was designed to prepare black people for lives as a labouring class. In the 1970s each black child's education within the Bantu Education system cost the state only a tenth of each white child's.

Apartheid placed great emphasis on "self-determination" and "cultural autonomy" for different ethnic groups, so in addition to pouring resources into developing Afrikaans educational material, school textbooks were developed and distributed in black languages like Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, and Pedi. As a result, one of the consequences of apartheid was a South African population literate in black-African languages (a rare thing in Africa where schooling is normally carried out in colonial languages like English and French).

Border industries and the Bantu Investment Corporation, were established to promote economic development and the provision of employment in the homelands (to draw black people away from "white" South Africa). In terms of this model, black people became (foreign) "guest labourers" who merely worked in South Africa as the holders of temporary work permits.

The National Party passed a string of legislation which became known as petty apartheid. Laws prohibited marriage between white people and people of other races and forbade "unlawful racial intercourse" and "any immoral or indecent act" between a white person and an African, Indian or coloured person. Alongside apartheid, the National Party government implemented a programme of social conservatism. Pornography, gambling and other such vices were banned. Black people were not allowed to buy hard liquor, only state-produced poor quality beer (although this was relaxed later). Cinemas, shops selling alcohol and most other businesses were forbidden from operating on Sundays. Sex education was restricted and abortion was legal only in cases of rape or if the mother's life was threatened.