Apartheid

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6.2. Separate Necessities
Because of the comprehensive laws of segregation in South Africa under apartheid,
access to necessities, utilities, leisure facilities, access to the countryside and just about
everything else was differentiated according to race. As in all apartheid societies, access to
political decision-making was jealously guarded by the ethnic elite. Restricted access in
everyday life was applied especially harshly in South Africa after the introduction and
implementation of the infamous Reservation of Separate Amenities Act in 1953. The
discrimination goes back, however, to the forced removals of the 17 th century, to urban racial
segregation from the beginning of the 19 th century, to the establishment of townships, reserves
and homelands, and to previously segregated amenities, both before and after the introduction
of apartheid in the narrow sense. The physical conditions in the reserves, townships and
homelands were miserable from the start, mainly because of population density and the poor
quality of the soil for purposes of both agriculture and pastoralism, as well as the lack of
industrial infrastructure. People were forcibly herded together onto land that could not
possibly support them. Largely as a result of this, the Human Development Index (HDI)
ranking for the ‘liberated’ South Africa in 1996 was still only 100 th among the world’s
countries – 124 th for black citizens but 24 th for Whites. 471
The Separate Amenities Act enforced racially segregated beaches, parks, libraries, post
office entrances, churches, schools, sports clubs, swimming pools, etc., invariably leaving the
inferior options in each instance as the ones reserved for non-Whites. As we have noted,
segregation intensified more than ever from 1948 onwards, yet there was nothing essentially
new about this. Perhaps some public libraries and post offices had not been racially segregated
to that extent before, but the other amenities had.
The only interracial access that was facilitated under apartheid was due to the careful
location and design of townships by the authorities, which ensured easy white military,
paramilitary and police access. The townships were planned and built so that ‘security forces’
could rapidly and easily enter and crush any seeds of revolt. The roads and streets were built
wide to minimize the risk of ambush and facilitate access of armoured vehicles and other
bulky military personnel carriers, as well as bulldozers, etc. Even lamp posts were built
extremely tall and sturdy – not unlike the ones in Nazi concentration camps – so that a
streetlight could not be easily extinguished by a hiding subversive with a well-aimed rock or
bullet. The numbers of entrances and exits to the townships and homelands were kept at a
minimum, again in order to maximize the degree of control, especially in times of state
security emergencies. In all apartheid societies, the authorities are reluctant to be drawn into
urban guerrilla warfare. ‘A secondary effect of the [Separate Amenities] Act was to distance
the problems of the urban poor from white eyes…’ For most white South Africans, the
townships, located just outside their cities or suburbs, might just as well have been on the
other side of the planet. 472 This is another instance of negative hallucinations, the psychotic or
the elite’, according to Hölbl 2001: 198. It may also have led to some other advances. In 122 BCE an Egyptian
high priest married a woman who was probably Greek and who might even have been related to the royal family.
(Ibid.) It is hard to imagine, however, that these were much more than instances of token recognition for
Egyptians who had served the Greeks exceptionally well, similar to collaborating black kings and chiefs, or to
black policemen in South Africa. In any case, this all happened during the long rule of Ptolemy VII, whom many
Greeks and Jews in Egypt had opposed in favor of his sister, Cleopatra II. He has become known as the king who
treated Egyptians better than any other regent of his dynasty. Yet, he did not sever his ties to the other Greeks,
and he never even learned the Egyptian language. His favorable treatment of Egyptians appears to have been
restricted to the Egyptian upper classes, i.e. priests, officers and functionaries. See Huß 2001: 618f. He also
harshly punished those Egyptians who had joined the Sudanese rebel leader, Harsiesis, who had tried in vain to
conquer Egypt during the civil war between the followers of Ptolemy VII and those of his sister. Ibid: 622.
471 N.N.: Whites ‘Still Far Better Off Than Blacks in South Africa’: Latest ranking by UN, June 12, 1997
472 Lester 1996: 115f, quote 116; Durrsheim & Dixon: The Role of Place and Metaphor in Racial Exclusion:
South Africa’s Beaches as Sites of Shifting Racialization, 2001: 433-450