TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 2

Subsection 5

The effects of apartheid legislation

41 Overall, what the National Party did in its first ten to twelve years of power amounted, in Leo Kuper’s words⁹, to “a white counter-revolution” to forestall the perceived (although, as will be noted later, misinterpreted and exaggerated) growing threat to white supremacy from both local forces and the rising tide of African nationalist sentiment on the continent. This concern was often presented in the popular media as the ‘Mau-Mau factor’, reflecting a real fear of what African independence represented for the white minority.

42 It was also a social engineering project of awesome dimensions through which, from about the mid-1950s and for the next thirty or so years, the inherited rural and urban social fabric of South Africa was torn asunder and recreated in the image of a series of racist utopias. In the process, as indicated earlier, millions of black people and a handful of mainly poor whites were shunted around like pawns on a chessboard. Forced to relocate to places that often existed only on the drawing boards of the architects of apartheid, entire communities were simply wiped out. These included urban suburbs and rural villages, traditional communities and homelands, schools, churches and above all people. Sometimes the demolition was total, as in Sophiatown; sometimes an isolated temple, mosque or church was left intact, as in District Six, South End and Cato Manor; sometimes simply the name remained, as in Diagonal Street.

43 Thus, it needs constantly to be borne in mind that, while the state and other operatives were committing the murders and abductions and other violations documented in this report, a much larger pattern of human rights violations was unfolding. These may not have been ‘gross’ as defined by the Act, but they were, nonetheless, an assault on the rights and dignity of millions of South Africans and they were, in large part, the product of the core legislation, and subsequent amendments, outlined above.

44 This point is eloquently developed in the Mandate chapter. For the vast majority of South Africans, human rights abuse was:

for nearly half a century ... the warp and weft of their experience ... defining their privilege and their disadvantage, their poverty and their wealth, their public and private lives and their very identity ... the system itself was evil, inhumane and degrading ... amongst its many crimes, perhaps its greatest was the power to humiliate, to denigrate and to remove the self-confidence, self-esteem and dignity of its millions of victims.

45 Thus, while only some 21 300 persons filed gross human rights violations petitions with the Commission, apartheid was a grim daily reality for every black South African. For at least 3.5 million black South Africans it meant collective expulsions, forced migration, bulldozing, gutting or seizure of homes, the mandatory carrying of passes, forced removals into rural ghettos and increased poverty and desperation. Dumped in the ‘national states’ without jobs, communities experienced powerlessness, vulnerability, fear and injustice.

46 Many of the killings and acts of torture documented in this report occurred precisely because of resistance to the day-to-day experience of life under apartheid. The sixty-nine people killed at Sharpville were not armed Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) cadres or even human rights’ activists. They were just ordinary men and women protesting against the hated dompas. Countless, nameless people had their rights trampled trying to save their homes from apartheid’s bulldozers. Hundreds died doing no more than demanding a decent education or instruction in a language other than Afrikaans. One did not need to be a political activist to become a victim of apartheid; it was sufficient to be black, alive and seeking the basic necessities of life that whites took for granted and enjoyed by right.