Assessing the World's Response to Apartheid: A Historical Account of International Law and Its Part in the South African Transformation

Abstract

Introduction: The apartheid frameworkDiscriminatory racial policy has long been at the heart of South African society.Few words have gained as much international notoriety as the word "apartheid."The policy of apartheid, linked with white-Afrikaner nationalism, can be described under the wide prescripts of institutionalized racial segregation.In 1948 DF Malan and his associate HF Verwoerd, the architects of apartheid, began to implement the Afrikaner ideology.This ideology was committed to preventing Whites, particularly, Afrikaans speaking Whites, from losing their cultural identity through interaction with Black people.It was contended that the Afrikaner ideology could best be achieved through a program of separate development, where different races would co-exist independently of one another.Afrikaner nationalists initially sought to justify this policy by arguing that separate development was in the best interests of Black people, because they would be better off and indeed happier if they governed themselves in their own areas, and maintained racial purity within their ethnic groups.Forced racial segregation occurred under a system of constitutionally organized population registration.Under the guise of population registration, apartheid became prescriptive and elevated to a principle of government.Racial classification was the key to this vast monument of separateness.South Africans were classified into various categories according to their race: White; Black; and Coloured.The latter to include not only those people who were historically the product of mixed race relationships, but also people of Indian, Pakistani or Malay origin. 1 *(B.A.), (LLB) Rhodes; (LLM) Witwatersrand. is an Advocate of the High Court of the Republic of South Africa and a Lecturer of International Law at the University of the Witwatersrand.I must thank Roewayda Abrahams for the many fruitful discussions that we had around this topic.1 The Population Registration Act 30 of 1950 made provision for the central population register in which all of these details were contained.Much of the apartheid legislation ignored the official categories and simply referred to "Whites" and "non-Whites."For the purposes of this paper the distinction between two groups has been maintained but I have changed the politically offensive term "non-White" to "Black."Black thus refers to any person not White--essentially Black Africans; Coloured people; and people of Indian, Pakistani, and Malay origin.Population