TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 2

Subsection 4

1950 Group Areas Act

30 In terms of the Group Areas Act, the entire country was demarcated into zones for exclusive occupation by designated racial groups. Implemented from 1954, the result was mass population transfers involving the uprooting of (almost exclusively) black citizens from their homes of generations, and the wholesale destruction of communities like Sophiatown, District Six, Cato Manor and South End in Port Elizabeth. Again, in human terms, the consequence was immense suffering and huge losses of property and income.

The 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and 1950 Immorality Amendment Act

31 According to this legislation, all future interracial marriages were prohibited, as were all forms of sexual contact across colour lines. Like the Population Registration Act, the Immorality Act was energetically implemented for some two to three decades, resulting in untold suffering in the form of harassment, public humiliation and the destruction of marriages and family bonds. Suicide by those caught in the web of the provisions of this Act was not unknown.

1950 Suppression of Communism Act

32 This Act provided not only for the banning of the Communist Party, but also for the legislative means to crush or curb all forms of dissent - communist, radical, liberal, radically religious and just plain annoying. It did this through the inclusion of a definition of communism that was absurd in its breadth and vagueness.

1953 Separate Amenities Act

33 This Act designated all public amenities and facilities (parks, libraries, zoos, beaches, sports grounds, and so on) for the exclusive use of specified racial groups. The allocation was made on a wholly unequal basis with the result that most facilities and amenities were closed to black people.

1953 Bantu Education Act

34 The Bantu Education Act laid the basis for a separate and inferior education system for African pupils. Based on a racist notion that blacks needed only to be educated, in the words of Dr Verwoerd, “in accordance with their opportunities in life”, the Act transferred the control of African schools from the provinces to a central Bantu Education Department headed by Dr Verwoerd himself.

35 In addition, state subsidies to mission schools were first reduced and later stopped altogether. This meant that they were either forced into the state school system or had to close - which many (often the better) schools did. The result, in the short term, was the destruction of black mission education in South Africa that sector of African education that had produced some of the country’s finest minds and political leaders. It also stifled the development of a private African school sector by requiring that all non-state schools be registered with the then Native Affairs Department.

36 In the longer term, the consequence was exactly what had been intended: namely, the under-skilling of generations of African children and their graduation into an economy for which they were singularly under-equipped. The critical shortage of skills in the economy forty years later and the massive numbers of unemployed African people bear witness to the legacy of this legislation.

37 In the next decade - the 1960s - legislation brought coloured and Indian education under state control with similar, though not as severely deleterious, effects.

1959 Extension of University Education Act

38 This perversely named law, far from extending opportunities for tertiary education, actually had the opposite effect by denying black students the right to attend their university of choice. It imposed apartheid on the tertiary sector, making it illegal for the existing largely (in the case of the Afrikaans campuses exclusively) white universities to admit black students except with ministerial permission. It resulted in the creation of separate ethnic colleges for Indians, coloureds and Zulu, Sotho and Xhosa-speaking Africans.

39 This Act, which was first published in draft form in 1957, was significant in another sense. It signalled a shift in government thinking in relation to the challenge posed by the growing force of African nationalism of the time. Having laid out the framework for the racial compartmentalisation of, particularly, urban South Africa, the government’s provision for African tertiary education along ethnic lines flagged an intention to engage in a further bout of racial and social engineering. This theme will be discussed later in this chapter.

40 These eight pieces of legislation laid the foundation of the new apartheid order in South Africa. However, other important pieces of legislation passed in the first decade of apartheid rule stripped coloured male voters of their common-roll franchise rights, further limited the rights of African workers to strike and bargain collectively and, by extending pass laws to African women, further restricted the rights of Africans to move from the reserves to the cities and to sell their labour to the highest bidder.⁸