TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 2

Subsection 3

■ THE LIMITED FOCUS OF THE MANDATE

19 As noted in the Mandate chapter later in this volume, the Commission’s governing Act limited its investigation to gross violations of human rights defined as the “killing, abduction, torture or severe ill-treatment” and the “attempt, conspiracy, incitement, instigation, command or procurement to commit” such acts. In essence, therefore, the Commission was restricted to examining only a fraction of the totality of human rights violations that emanated from the policy of apartheid - namely, those that resulted in physical or mental harm or death and were incurred in the course of the political conflicts of the mandate period.

20 The Commission’s focus was, therefore, a narrow or restricted one, representing what were perhaps some of the worst acts committed against the people of this country and region in the post-1960 period, but providing a picture that is by no means complete. For, simultaneous to the ‘gross’ abuses documented later in this report, millions of South Africans, and more particularly those who were not white, were subjected to racial and ethnic oppression and discrimination on a daily basis - in pursuit of a system which the Mandate chapter describes as “systemic, all-pervading and evil”.

21 Furthermore, in applying this system and in seeking to perpetuate it, the government of South Africa let loose upon the wider region a reign of terror and destruction. It was for this reason that Parliament mandated the Commission to include within its scope gross human rights violations that occurred outside South Africa.

22 Conceptually, the policy of apartheid was itself a human rights violation. The determination of an individual’s civil and political rights by a factor - skin colour - over which he or she has no control, constitutes an abuse of those rights. Of course, such discrimination existed before 1948 and had its roots far back in South Africa’s colonial past. Nevertheless, the apartheid state that was constructed after 1948 had dimensions that made it different from the discriminatory orders that preceded it.

23 Thus, although many of its laws built on or updated a de facto pattern of segregationist legislation (for example, an industrial colour bar and limited African property and voting rights), the apartheid system was of a qualitatively different type. No longer content to tolerate a de facto pattern of segregation in which ‘grey’ areas of social mixing remained - such as in urban residential patterns and inter-racial personal contacts and relationships, including marriage - from 1948, the new government set out to segregate every aspect of political, economic, cultural, sporting and social life, using established legal antecedents where they existed and creating them where they did not. Although making use of the forms of democracy (elections, proper legislative processes and so on), it constructed a totalitarian order that was far from democratic in substance.

24 Apartheid sought to maintain the status quo of white supremacy through the implementation of massive social change. It was thus an ideology, simultaneously of change and of non-change; or alternatively, perhaps, of reactionary change. To achieve its goals, Parliament:

a transformed the laissez-faire pattern of pre-1948 segregation into a systematic pattern of legalised racial discrimination, and

b constructed a huge internal security apparatus and armed it with awesome legal powers to crush opposition generated by the first process.

Legislation

25 With regard to the first process, the key legislative enactments were:

Population Registration Act 1950

26 This Act formed the very bedrock of the apartheid state in that it provided for the classification of every South African into one of four racial categories. To achieve this end, it came up with definitions of racial groupings which were truly bizarre:

A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white - and not generally accepted as Coloured - or who is generally accepted as White - and is not obviously Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu ... A Bantu is a person who is, or is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa ... a Coloured is a person who is not a white person or a Bantu.

27 Despite the crude and hopelessly imprecise wording of these definitions, the Act was imposed with vigour and determination.

28 President Nelson Mandela wrote:

Where was one was allowed to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of one’s hair or the size of one’s lips.⁶

29 The result, especially for the coloured people, was human devastation. As John Dugard put it in 1972:

No words can capture the misery and human suffering caused by this legislative scheme which sometimes results in divisions of families owing to the different racial classification of members of the same family ⁷ .