We must find new lands from which we
can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap
slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The
colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods
produced in our factories.
Cecil John Rhodes
The rise of
apartheid
in 1948 was a complex phenomenon. Some historians view it as a
20th-century development, closely linked to the peculiar evolution of
South African capitalism, with its strong reliance on cheap black labor
as advocated by Cecil Rhodes in the quote above. Other scholars believe
apartheid was a product of earlier racial prejudices and policies
imposed by Dutch and British settlers. Recent explanations point to a
combination of several factors ─ colonial conquest, land dispossession,
economic impoverishment, and exclusion from citizenship of Africans ─
that paved the way to apartheid. This unit explores the historical roots
of apartheid, from the colonial occupation of the Cape in 1652 through
the creation of the Union of South Africa and the segregation period
(1910-1948). The emphasis is on patterns of economic and political
transformation and how racism and
segregation increasingly restricted the lives of black South Africans.
Three main, interrelated forces influenced the nature of South African
society and economy: colonial conquest, the expansion of mining, and the
actions ─ also known as “agency” ─ of individuals. Colonial conquest by
the Netherlands and, after 1795, by Britain, stimulated limited if
uneven capitalist growth. The
Dutch East India Company established a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, which gradually expanded along a frontier at the expense of the
Khoikhoi,
Xhosa,
and other indigenous peoples, a process similar to the one that
unfolded in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. In South Africa,
destruction of Khoi societies produced an underclass of domestic and
farm workers, but their ability to earn a decent wage was severely
curtailed by the Dutch East India Company's use of slaves imported from
Angola, Mozambique, Madagascar, and South East Asia.
We
know little about the lives of ordinary people of these times, but
archival evidence reveals glimpses of slaves’ struggles against harsh
conditions imposed by their white oppressors.
Krotoa (known to the Dutch settlers as “Eva”) was a Khoi woman caught in the identity crisis of colonization: used by Dutch leader
Jan van Riebeeck
as an interpreter against her own people in the mid-1600s, she married a
European but was rejected by white society. Sarah Baartman was taken in
1810 from Cape Town to Europe and displayed in exhibitions like an
animal. Katie Jacobs, interviewed in 1910 as one of the last surviving
ex-slaves, told of her harsh life, of a master who even refused to
baptize her. Inhuman treatment sometimes led to resistance. For example,
the slave woman Dina escaped during the Boers’ (or
Afrikaners')
Great Trek of the 1830s. In another instance in 1825, after suffering
repeated floggings, Galant van der Caab, a slave on a farm northeast of
Cape Town, led a small-scale revolt of slaves. Eventually, Great Britain
pronounced the emancipation of slaves in the Cape Colony in 1833, but
slavery was replaced by draconian Master and Servant laws that preserved
a social hierarchy in which race closely corresponded to class.
