Malan crafted apartheid policy

In May 1948, the National Party led that time by Dr Daniel Malan won the general elections. That was a die-hard Boer-led political organisation whose avowed aim was to segregate once and for all the black people from the whites.
Malan and his chief ideologue, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd (pronounced Ferevoorid) crafted the diabolic apartheid policy. The word “apartheid” literally means “apartness”.

We must hasten to explain that racialistic policy had its roots in the very early days when the Dutch settlers led by Jan van Riebeeck set foot at the Cape in 1652. They lured or just captured black people  and housed them in highly fortified military compounds and employed them as slaves.
Centuries later Cecil Rhodes introduced the abominable Glen Grey Act (1894) which in 1913 was amended and was given a new name, the Natives Land Act. Apartheid was actually based on that law. It was also on the strength of that law, which created native reserves, that Bantustans were established in the Cape, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

Bantustans were also called Bantu Homelands, a reservoir of cheap labour for white industrialists and commercial entrepreneurs.
It is of much interest to the black  people of Zimbabwe that one of the unyielding promoters of the Natives Land Act was Jacobs Sauer, a man who was         widely regarded as a friend of the Africans.  Why? Just because he spoke the Zulu language fluently. One of the Bulawayo suburbs is named after him. It is called Sauerstown.

Dr Verwoerd, a former Plumtree High School student, became head of native affairs some years after Dr Malan’s death and ruthlessly implemented the National Party’s abhorrent apartheid policy.
The other development which was in effect a form of confrontation between black people and the whites in South Africa was the ANC’s decision to defy the Boer regime’s discriminatory laws, especially the law that forced every black adult to carry a pass, an identity document indicating where the bearer worked, his age, gender, place of abode and so on.

Members of the SAANC Youth League were breathing some militancy and urgency in the movement. These young people included the highly respected Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela and a tried and tested political strategist, Walter Sisulu, a highly articulate legal partner of Mandela, Oliver Reginald Tambo, another lawyer, Duma Nokwe and many others.
To widen the campaign against unjust laws, they sought and got the cooperation of the Indian Congress activists and those of other non-African racial communities. The move was meant to widen the ANC’s racial base, and to turn it into a genuinely non-racial movement.

The year was 1960 and Johannesburg was the scene. The decision did not go down well with a number of ANC provincial and other officials who said that the South African liberation struggle was racial and must be pursued as such, Africans taking their political destiny into their own hands without the involvement of people of other races.
Those people led by a Witwatersrand University lecturer, Robert Sobukwe, called themselves the Pan-Africanists. They espoused a form of Garveyism that contracted some aspects of the Freedom Charter adopted by the ANC leadership at Kliptown some five years earlier.

The Pan-Africanists wished to explain their position and philosophy at an ANC meeting in Johannesburg but were barred from attending it by the party’s activists.
Meanwhile, the ANC President was by that time a devout Seventh Day Adventist, Chief John Albert Luthuli, who had spent several years teaching at Solusi Mission in Zimbabwe.

Luthuli had taken over the ANC top leadership from Dr Moroka who had earlier replaced Dr Xuma whom the Youth League leaders had accused of passivity.
The Defiance Campaign was in motion and passes were the bone of contention. The Pan-Africanists resolved to break away and thus the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) was born.

The ANC decided to stage a massive anti-pass demonstration on 31 March 1960. On getting that information, the PAC’s strategists decided to hold their own 10 days earlier in order to capture the inevitable publicity that would be generated by the historic event.

The PAC chose the town of Sharpville for their massive show of defiance. The Boer regime responded by ruthlessly shooting the demonstrators. Sixty-nine of them were killed and more than 400 were injured, many of them seriously.

The world was stunned. A couple of  days later the Verwoerd administration banned both the ANC and the newly formed PAC.
The ANC went underground and Umkhonto Wesizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC military arm, was formed with Nelson Mandela as its supreme commander. Both organisations launched armed resistance from both within and from outside the country.
South Africa became a fully fledged democratic state in 1994, a gruelling 82 years after the launch of the ANC.