Nationalist Party Of South Africa example essay topic

The word Apartheid alone sends a shiver down the spines of the repressed African community. Apartheid symbolizes a mordant period in the history of South Africa, when the policy of segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-European groups in the Republic of South Africa. It represents a mordant period in the history of South Africa. An entire community has been gutted, and the innards laid out to view.

The Afrikaners are a South African people of Dutch or French Huguenot descent. In 1998, 2.7 million Afrikaners inhabited South Africa, consisting of about 56% of the white population. Their language is Afrikaans, a derivative of Dutch. The Nationalist party of South Africa was founded in 1914 by James Barry Munn ik Hertzog to protect and promote the interests of Afrikaners against what were considered the pro-British policies of the South African party, led by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. On May 26, 1948, the Nationalists reigned victorious. They won the parliamentary elections and gained control of the South African government, despite the fact that they constituted no more than 12% of the population.

The party, under new Premier Dr. Daniel F. Malan, began taking steps toward implementing apartheid, the political policy of racial separation. Over the next several decades, whites consolidated their power. The National Party used its control of the government to fulfill Afrikaners ethnic goals as well as white racial goals. In 1961, South Africa became a republic and completed its separation from Great Britain. Apartheid turned into a drastic, systematic program of social injuring based on four ideas. First, the population of South Africa comprised four racial groups -- white, colored, Indian, and African each with its own inherent culture.

Second, whites, as the civilized race, were entitled to have absolute control over the state. Third, white interests should prevail over black interests; the state was not obliged to provide equal facilities for the subordinate races. Finally, the white racial group formed a single nation, with Afrikaans, while Africans belonged to several (eventually ten) distinct nations or potential nations, a formula that made the white nation the largest in the country. Over the years, the government introduced a series of repressive laws. The implementation of the apartheid policy, later referred to as separate development, was made possible by the Population Registration Act of 1950. It is widely considered the cornerstone of the entire system.

It provided for the racial classification of every person. The law put all South Africans into three racial categories: Bantu (black African), white, or Colored (of mixed race). While the statutory definitions of so-called coloreds under apartheid have shifted over time, they have been persistently raven with contradictions. The state has variously sought to demarcate the category colored on the basis of descent, parentage, physical appearance, language preference, cultural criteria, and general acceptance by the community.

The Population Registration Act defined a colored as someone who in appearance is obviously not white or Indian, and who is not a member of an aboriginal race or African tribe. The petty-bourgeois obsession with racial purity' and eugenics, was given expression in yet another set of repressive laws. The Group Areas Act of 1950 assigned races to different residential and business sections in urban areas, and the Land Acts of 1954 and 1955 restricted nonwhite residence in specific areas. These laws further controlled the already limited right of black Africans to own land, entrenching the white minority's control of over 80% of South African land.

The laws are based on a fear of black insurgence and the desire to present the world with a picture of South Africa showing whites less heavily outnumbered by non-whites than they really are. As these Bantustan's are gradually excised from the body politic of South Africa, the numerical situation of the whites changes dramatically. Non-whites outnumber whites six to one. Of the blacks the two largest groups are the Zulus and the Xhosas, numbering around 4,000,000 each.

But this is a dream-a dream made possible in theory by the edicts of government.