Response Paper 2

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EDFS 309: Scholarly Personal Narrative Writing

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Response Paper

Introduction

South Africa is a country inhabited by people of many races and nationalities as well. There is a large population of people who are not African nationals and have come to South Africa to live here permanently. These people migrated to the African continent a long time ago, when the British came to inhibit the region and then settled here and mixed with the locals to live and earn here. These people include white males and females both.

Various methods have been adopted by the government of South Africa to normalize relationships between the country’s majorities of the population which is non-white as compared to the minorities who are whites. It has always been a top priority of the government to keep a stable environment of peace and harmony in the country where both the races would live together and work in coordination with each other towards the progress and prosperity of the nation but sometimes they fail to do so. Apartheid can be taken as a perfect example. It was a policy developed to separate the white individuals and make them feel superior to the non-white population of the country. It was also developed to address the concerns of political and economic discrimination again the non-whites.

Discussion

Most of the policies of Apartheid were developed in the decade of 1950s but the implementation process continued for a long time. The process has been going on since 1960 under the law of popular Registration Act 1950. This law divided the citizens of South Africa into four major categories; Bantu, Colored, White and Asians. The Bantu group consists of all black Africans, the colored group consisted of people from mixed races and white people were the immigrants from Great Britain. The last group to be formed was Asians, which consisted of Pakistanis, Indians, Bengalis, and Nepalese.

Racial segregation was heavily practiced in South Africa before 1948, but when National party gained the office in 1948, it extended the policies at a large scale and termed them as Apartheid. Apartheid consisted of a number of policies and regulations that barred the individuals belonging to different races form curbing the rights of the people of other races. One of the popular regulations among these is the Group Areas Act 1950. As the name suggests, this acts separated different groups and classified different races from each other. Under this act, the residential, business and operational areas of each race were defined and no individuals from other race.

Another act that was developed along with this regulation was the Lands Act. Lands Act was developed in 1954-55 and was very much similar to the Group Areas Act. It allotted separate lands to people belonging to different races and barred members of other races from buying, purchasing and owning lands in the area of the other race. This act was also very much similar to the land acts of 1913 and 1936 and ended up in allotting 80% of the lands in South Africa to the white population only.

In order to protect the rights of the black or the native Africans, the newly-elected South African government established the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 and Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959. The Bantu Homeland Citizenship Act of 1970 also helped a lot in this respect as it granted a status of legal citizenship to every black African living in South Africa, irrespective of their roots or country of origin.

Conclusion

In short, it can be concluded that Apartheid emerged as a curse for not only the non-whites living in the region of South Africa but also for the members of other nationalities and races. It oppressed them even more and deprived them of their basic rights.