Apartheid

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towns under the condition that they find work within two weeks. In 1948, this was reduced to
three days. A passbook system was implemented to effect this, and the passbook was stamped
to indicate the length of time one was permitted in an urban center. As opposed to Blacks,
Whites did not have to carry any passbooks, although they were nominally not allowed into
black areas either. 396 If the Blacks did not find work in the minimal time allowed them, they
would be sent ‘back’ to the reserves, just like the Egyptians under Greek and Roman rule, or
the Palestinians under Israeli rule.
In the years that followed, segregation, as previously mentioned, did not only include
spatial divisions but economic and political ones as well. It must be noted however, that
segregation was implemented differently at different locations. In Cape Town, for example,
one third of the population lived in racially mixed areas (in the 1930s), whereas Durban was
already strictly segregated according to race. An even more rigid and racist legal framework
for spatial segregation, particularly in urban areas, was thoroughly accomplished by the time
of the rise of apartheid in a narrow sense.
Whites not only deprived Blacks of the right to land, but also extracted South Africa’s
natural wealth for their own benefit, leaving the rest of the population physically and
economically marginalized. Most Whites, as Van den Heever’s writings demonstrate, believed
that this was their right, by virtue of occupation: ‘Boer and soil are bound together and the
Boer is South Africa.’ 397 With dispossession having been so successful for the Whites by the
late 1880s, it was easy for them to dominate industrialization and urbanization, as Blacks and
other non-Whites were weak from the outset.
Wealth and class depended primarily on race. By the beginning of the twentieth
century, the South African government resettled illegal black squatters. But, on the whole,
little attention was given to the squatter areas and little was done to improve them, even after
the war, when the economy was once again flourishing. This indicates that the South African
apartheid government in the narrow sense was not concerned with the poorer classes of
society, regardless of their color. But it especially neglected the non-white population in the
squatter areas. For instance, according to John Western, ‘...no single government has created
greater Colored resentment...and sense of injustice.’ 398
More than 79,000 claims for restitution of land taken since the 1913 Land Act was
imposed have been lodged with the new, post-apartheid government, which is forced to buy
the land back from the white owners at market prices. Needless to say, the process is a very
slow one. The ANC-led government of today is therefore facing increasing pressure to
facilitate for the previously severely oppressed black majority to acquire access to fertile
commercial land. 399
396 Lester 1996: 85
397 Quoted in Lester 1996: 38
398 Western: Outcast Cape Town, 1981: 310
399 Thomasson February 11, 1998; Seccombe June 2, 2000. Isa: S.Africa Says Needs $2 Bln for Black Land
Claims, 2004. 56,400 of the 79,000 land claims had already been settled at the cost of only one billion Rand.
However, the remaining were the largest and legally most difficult claims due to white investments into it.
Zimbabwe, which was conquered and seized by the Whites (the British) in a very similar way to South Africa
(see Chapter I.4), carried out a land restitution program between 2000 and 2002, which was unique in Africa.
The country’s judiciary attempted to block the move on legal grounds, western governments tried to block it with
economic and diplomatic pressure. The 804 white-owned farms first selected by the government made up around
10 percent of the prime farmland owned by the country’s one-percent white minority, a fact seldom reported in
western media. See, however, Chinaka: Zimbabwe Lists 804 Farms for Seizure, 2000; See also Seccombe: South
Africa Warns on Possible Zimbabwe-Style Landgrabs, 2000; Eisenstein: Namibia Says May Expropriate White
Farms, 2002. Later, Zimbabwe’s government identified a total of 3,041 white-owned farms for resettlement. The
combined area of those farms was around half of the country’s commercial agricultural land. See N.N.:
Zimbabwe’s Mugabe Says Land Resettlement to Continue, December 20, 2000; Esipisu November 11, 2002. On
the broader problem throughout the region, see Seccombe: Land Ownership Disputes Simmer in Southern
Africa, 2001. In Namibia, similarly, a post- and neo-colonial white minority which makes up a mere five per cent