Thirteen Formative Years |
 APARTHEID – Population and policies: Apartheid – the umbrella term for the policies pursued by the white National Party government that was first elected in 1948 and that remained in office until South Africa’s first all-race general election in 1994 – literally means “apartness” or “separateness”. The National Party government used the English words “separate development” to describe its policies. However, the glaring iniquities of apartheid can be summed up in this simple graph I used in lectures and talks: only 13 per cent of the land area of South Africa was reserved for Africans (who constituted 70 per cent of the country’s inhabitants), while 87 per cent was set aside for whites who accounted for a little more than one-eighth of the population. |