28/11/07

South Africa: A multicultural Society

The population census of 1996, the first to be held in South Africa after
the first universal suffrage elections of 1994, gave a total population of
40.58 million (the 1999 figure was estimated to be 43.43 million). The
1996 figures also showed a significant change in the balance between
blacks and whites since the 1970 census.

The first inhabitants of the area were the San (Bushman) people and
the Khoi-Khoin people. However, the majority of South Africa’s black
people are descended from Bantu-speakers who migrated into the area
many centuries ago. The white population (most of whom are know
known as Afrikaner) are descended from Dutch, German, French,
British and Belgian immigrants since 1652., The coloured people are
descended from mixed relations amoung the European settlers,
indigenous peoples and people from Madagascar, India, Indonesia, and
Malaysia. The Asian population arrived after 1860 and came mainly
from India.

A policy of segregation between black and white originated in the first

Dutch settlement, the Cape, in 1652. This practice became customary
and was established legally as apartheid by the first National Party
government in 1948 when some Afrikaners in the Party united to
protect their language, culture and heritage from a perceived threat by
the black majority and to assert their economic and political
independence from British colonial domination.

Statutory apartheid regulated the lives of all groups, but particularly of

blacks, coloureds and Indians. The Population Registration Act
categorised the nation into white, black, Indian, Malay and coloured
citizens. Further acts made mixed marriages illegal and prescribed
segregation in restaurants, transport, schools, places of entertainment
and political parties. The Group Areas Act stipulated where and with
whom people could live and the Black Authorities Act established black
homelands.

The outcome of all this legislation was the unequal division of rights
and resources. This included the disproportionate division of land, the
unequal distribution of funding for education and the general denial of
constitutional rights for the majority of South Africans.
Legalised racial discrimination was abolished in the early 1990s. After
long negotiations, the first all party elections, held in 1994, established
a multi-party Government of National Unity. The five-year interim
constitution ended the existence of the homelands and included a
section on human rights; addressing housing problems, equality in
education and health care, and the encouragement of private home
ownership, a Land Court is to address land claims from dispossessed
people.

However, the legacy of apartheid will take many years to eradicate.

Housing
The Group Areas Act (1950) ensured that white, coloured and Asian
communities lived in different parts of the city with the whites having
the best residential areas. Buffer zones at least 100m wide, often
along main roads of railway lines, were created to try to prevent
contact between the three groups. Blacks were treated differently.
Those who had lived in the city since birth, or had worked for the same
employer for 10 years, were moved to newly created townships on the
urban fringes. The remainder were forced away from the cities to live
on one of ten designated reserves or homelands, where the
environmental advantages were minimal (drought, poor soils and a
lack of raw materials). The homelands took up 13 per cent of South
Africa’s land, held 72% of its total population and produced 3 per cent
of the country’s wealth. Most blacks living on the homelands were
employed on one-year contracts, to prevent them gaining urban
residential rights.

Life in the townships was no less difficult. These were built far away
from white residential areas which meant that those blacks who found
jobs in the cities had long and expensive journeys to work. Many of
the original shanty towns have been bulldozed and replaced by rows of
identical, single storey houses. These have four rooms and a backyard
toilet, but only 20 per cent have electricity. Corrugated-iron roofs
make the buildings hot in summer and cold in winter. The settlements
lack infrastructure and services and, due to rapid population growth,
are surrounded by vast shanty settlements. Two of the better known
townships are Soweto in Johannesburg (an estimated 4 million
inhabitants) and Cross roads in Cape Town.

When the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1993, it

promised to build a million houses during its first term in office to
redress the socio-economic imbalances of apartheid. By the 1999
elections, it had built 700,000 houses. Although the ANC was proud of
its record, there were still thousands of blacks living either in poverty
stricken and squalid conditions of squatter camps which developed
during the apartheid era, or in new, but mainly one-room, low-cost
housing which, their owners claimed, was often poorly constructed and
far too small for the large African families (up to 10 people).

Employment
Under apartheid, blacks were severely restricted in mobility and type
of job. A man had to return to his homeland in order to apply for a job.
If successful he was given a contract to work in “white” South Africa
for 11 months, after which he had to return ot his homeland if he
wished to renew the contract. This system prevented blacks from
becoming permanent residents in the city.

Throughout the late 1990s, unemployment remained the core cause of

poverty and social division in South Africa. In 1998, unemployment
was 38 per cent among blacks (with another 11 per cent
underemployed), 21 per cent among coloureds, 11 per cent among
Indians and 4 per cent among whites. The average wage for whites
was twice that of Indians, three times that of coloureds and seven
times that of blacks.

Education
Under apartheid, schooling was free and compulsory for all whites and
Indians, but not for coloureds or blacks (the 1996 census showed that
one-quarter of blacks had not received any formal education.) Despite
attempts by the ANC to improve education, mainly by renovating
existing schools, building new classrooms, encouraging school
attendance and increasing access to higher education, the pupil-teach
ratio remained, in 1998, 20:1 for whites and 300:1 for blacks.
 1970
Other
Asians
Coloureds

Whites

Blacks

1996
Other
Asians
Coloureds

Whites

Blacks