EMSIE FERREIRA, Cape Town | Saturday
TEN years ago the foundation stones of apartheid fell when the laws that divided people into black and white and forced them to live apart were wiped from South Africa’s statute books.
The Population Registration Act of 1950, which required that everybody be classified at birth as belonging to one of four races — white, black, Indian or coloured — was repealed on June 28, 1991.
Two days later, on June 30, the hated Group Areas Act which had seen 3,5-million people driven from their homes in neighbourhoods like District Six and Sophiatown, followed suit.
The Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act also passed that day, revoking the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, which had squeezed three-quarters of the population onto less than 14 percent of the country’s land, leaving the rest for the ruling whites.
It happened so quietly that few South Africans can recall the dates when the laws ceased to exist.
“Gosh, I really can’t remember anything special happening or being said about it at the time,” an MP who was in parliament in 1991, said this week.
By then democratic elections were still three years away but the country had already been shaken by change.
Nelson Mandela was a free man and the government was in talks with the African National Congress and other liberation movements it had lifted a ban against in 1990, while those opposed to change were fomenting bloodshed in the black townships.
Political analyst Tom Lodge said “ignorance is so widespread” as the white regime had, by 1991, all but stopped enforcing the acts.
“The Group Areas Act had virtually stopped being enforced but the mid 1980s. In 1991 Hillbrow (in Johannesburg) had become predominantly black, though it was still technically a white area, as had much of the inner city.
“There was a tacit acceptance on the part of the authorities, the police were no longer harassing blacks.”
The same held true for the Population Registration Act.
The Human Rights Commission once wrote that the act “determined each individual’s destiny from cradle to grave” because race decided where you lived, what work you did, who you could marry, the quality of schooling and health care and eventually the pension the state gave you.
“But,” Lodge said, “the extent to which people ignored these (race) classifications, especially in the cities, by 1991 were so widespread that the law slipped off the books”.
F.W. de Klerk, the country’s last white president, was in a hurry to dismantle apartheid to demonstrate goodwill to the world and to liberation leaders with whom he now had to negotiate. But the process had begun under his predecessor P.W. Botha.
It was during Botha’s hardline rule that the petty apartheid laws which relegated blacks to separate beaches, hospitals, buses, parks, bank queues and train stations came undone, as well as the ban on marriage between people of different races and the so-called Pass Law.
For 70 years this law forced every black person to carry a “dompas” or identity document which restricted his or her movements to certain areas. During that time 17 million people were arrested for defying it.
“It is the end of the Pass Law in 1986 that I remember,” Sheena Duncan, the chairwoman of the Black Sash women’s resistance movement, told AFP.
“The race classification act divided families, it was a total violation of human dignity, it was horrible. The Group Areas Act was a scandal because it robbed people of their livelihood and their community,” she said.
“But the Pass Law affected every single African person in the country.”
At the Black Sash office in Cape Town, Nomahlubi Nabe remembers countless women coming for help, many having moved to the city with their children to join migrant worker husbands only to find themselves hiding from the law.
It was a relief when the legislation went away, she said, but 10 years later the disadvantaged keep coming for help as they battle the poverty and unemployment that apartheid left in its wake.
“Things change but every day there is a new problem. The biggest is poverty,” she says. – AFP