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Comedian Jim Jefferies joked in one of his shows, “Are you a white South African telling me you’ve done nothing wrong?” One of the numerous ways white South Africans fucked over Black Africans was apartheid. When it ended a lot of whites said we don’t like it here anymore and left.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: March 17, 1992--
People have lived in South Africa for 170,000 years. The Dutch began colonizing the region in the middle of the 17thcentury. A century or so later the British said oh lovely place we need to steal that shit. They killed a bunch of Zulus and killed a bunch of Dutch, and by 1931 South Africa became its own country. Then the minority white people living there put rules in place so they could continue to run everything.
Apartheid officially began in 1948, but there was racial segregation both under the British and the Dutch. The Natives Land Act of 1913 allocated less than 10% of South Africa as “reserves” for Black people, and they weren’t allowed to own any land outside those reserves despite making up two-thirds of the population. Apartheid placed whites at the very top, even though they made up only 20% of the population. Next in the pecking order was the 3% Indian population, many of whom were descendants of indentured servants brought by earlier British colonists. Then was the 9% “Coloured” population; those who are multiracial. At the bottom was the majority Black population.
There was petty apartheid and grand apartheid. Petty referred to segregation both in public locations and in social situations. Grand told you where you could live, and where you could work. You couldn’t marry or even have sex across racial lines. TV host Trevor Noah is from South Africa and has a white father and Black mother. In 2016 he released an autobiography titled Born a Crime.
By 1950 you had to register based on which group you were in, which had an entire process based on what you looked like, who your ancestors were, your socioeconomic status, and your cultural practices. Then they told you where to live based on that. Between 1960 and 1983 almost four million Black Africans were told hey you can’t live here you’re the wrong color you gotta move to this other place. It was a not-so-subtle way of whites saying get the fuck out of my country by placing them in “tribal homelands,” then saying oh by the way we’re revoking your South African citizenship. Dicks.
Massive opposition to apartheid grew both domestically and internationally, and on March 17, 1992, there was a referendum; only whites were allowed to vote. Nearly 69% voted in favor of ending apartheid. The “No” voters were pissed, claiming election fraud. At the time the white population, which had already been declining for years, was 13.2%. After the referendum the “white flight” of people who cannot abide equality accelerated so that in 2021 whites only made up 7.8%.
Apartheid has had lasting negative social and economic effects on the majority of South Africans.
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