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Pass Laws During Apartheid

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South African pass laws were a major component of  apartheid  that focused on separating South African citizens according to their race. This was done to promote the supposed superiority of White people and to establish the minority White regime.

Legislative laws were passed to accomplish this, including the Land Act of 1913, the Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, and the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950—all of which were created to separate the races.

Designed to Control Movement

Under apartheid, pass laws were designed to control the movement of Black Africans , and they are considered one of the most grievous methods that the South African government used to support apartheid.

The resulting legislation (specifically Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act No. 67 of 1952 ) introduced in South Africa required Black Africans to carry identity documents in the form of a "reference book" when outside a set of reserves (later known as homelands or bantustans.)

Pass laws evolved from regulations that the Dutch and British enacted during the 18th-century and 19th-century enslavement economy of the Cape Colony. In the 19th century, new pass laws were enacted to ensure a steady supply of cheap African labor for the diamond and gold mines.

In 1952, the government passed an even more stringent law that required all African men age 16 and over to carry a "reference book" (replacing the previous passbook) which held their personal and employment information. (Attempts to force women to carry passbooks in 1910, and again during the 1950s, caused strong protests.)

Passbook Contents

The passbook was similar to a passport in that it contained details about the individual, including a photograph, fingerprint, address, the name of his employer, how long the person had been employed, and other identifying information. Employers often entered an evaluation of the pass holder's behavior.

As defined by law, an employer could only be a White person. The pass also documented when permission was requested to be in a certain region and for what purpose, and whether that request was denied or granted.

Urban areas were considered "White," so a non-White person needed a passbook to be inside a city.

Under the law, any governmental employee could remove these entries, essentially removing permission to stay in the area. If a passbook didn't have a valid entry, officials could arrest its owner and put him in prison.

Colloquially, passes were known as the dompas , which literally meant the "dumb pass." These passes became the most hated and despicable symbols of apartheid.

Violating Pass Laws

Africans often violated the pass laws to find work and support their families and thus lived under constant threat of fines, harassment, and arrests.

Protests against the suffocating laws drove the anti-apartheid struggle—including the Defiance Campaign in the early '50s and the huge women's protest in Pretoria in 1956.

In 1960, Africans burned their passes at the police station in Sharpeville and 69 protesters were killed. During the '70s and '80s, many Africans who violated pass laws lost their citizenship and were deported to impoverished rural "homelands." By the time the pass laws were repealed in 1986, 17 million people had been arrested.

• Grand Apartheid in South Africa
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• A Brief History of South African Apartheid
• The End of South African Apartheid
• Apartheid Era Signs - Racial Segregation in South Africa
• South African Apartheid-Era Identity Numbers
• Understanding South Africa's Apartheid Era
• Group Areas Act No. 41 of 1950
• The Origins of Apartheid in South Africa
• The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act
• South Africa's Apartheid Era Population Registration Act
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Pass laws and the disorganisation and reorganisation of the African population in South Africa

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Apartheid South Africa 1940s to 1960s Essay for Grade 11

On this page, we guide grade 11 student on how to write “Apartheid South Africa 1940s to 1960s Essay”.

Apartheid in South Africa was a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination that existed from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. This period in South African history is marked by the enforcement of legal policies and practices aimed at separating the races and maintaining white dominance in all aspects of life. The years between the 1940s and the 1960s were critical in laying the foundations and entrenching the policies that would define this era. This essay will explore the implementation of apartheid laws , resistance movements , and international reactions to apartheid from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Implementation of Apartheid Laws

The formal introduction of apartheid can be traced back to the National Party’s victory in the 1948 elections . The party, which represented the Afrikaner nationalist interest, institutionalised apartheid as a means of securing white dominance. Key legislation enacted during this period included:

• The Population Registration Act (1950): This act classified all South Africans into racial groups – ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘coloured’, and ‘Indian’. This classification was a prerequisite for the implementation of other apartheid laws.
• The Group Areas Act (1950): This law geographically segregated South Africans by race , determining where different racial groups could live, work, and own property.
• The Suppression of Communism Act (1950): Though ostensibly aimed at combating communism , this act was frequently used to silence critics of apartheid, including non-communists.

Resistance Movements

Resistance against apartheid came from various quarters, including political parties, trade unions, and individual activists. The most prominent of these movements included:

• The African National Congress (ANC): Initially adopting a policy of peaceful protest, the ANC organised strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience campaigns. Following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the ANC shifted to a strategy of armed struggle .
• The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC): A breakaway from the ANC, the PAC also played a significant role in organising protests against apartheid, notably the anti-Pass Laws protest that led to the Sharpeville Massacre.
• Sharpeville Massacre (1960): A turning point in the resistance against apartheid, where a peaceful protest against pass laws in Sharpeville turned deadly, with police opening fire on demonstrators, resulting in 69 deaths.

International Reactions to Apartheid

The international community’s response to apartheid was initially muted, but as the realities of apartheid became more widely known, international condemnation grew. Significant aspects of the international reaction included:

• United Nations Condemnation: The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 1962 calling for sanctions against South Africa, urging member states to cease military and economic relations with the apartheid regime.
• Isolation in Sports: South Africa was banned from the Olympic Games and other international sporting events, highlighting the growing international isolation of the apartheid government.

Student Guide

When writing an essay on Apartheid in South Africa from the 1940s to the 1960s, focusing on clarity, depth, and evidence-based arguments is crucial. Here are some useful tips to enhance your essay writing:

• Start with a Strong Thesis Statement:
• Clearly state your essay’s main argument or analysis point at the end of your introduction. This sets the direction and tone of your essay. For example, “This essay argues that the apartheid laws enacted between the 1940s and 1960s not only institutionalised racial segregation but also laid the foundation for the resistance movements that eventually led to apartheid’s downfall.”
• Organise Your Essay Logically:
• Use subheadings to divide your essay into manageable sections, such as the implementation of apartheid laws, resistance movements, and international reactions. This helps readers follow your argument more easily.
• Use Evidence to Support Your Points:
• Incorporate specific examples and quotes from primary and secondary sources to back up your statements. For instance, reference the Population Registration Act when discussing racial classification or cite international condemnation from United Nations resolutions.
• Analyse, Don’t Just Describe:
• Go beyond simply describing events by analysing their impact and significance . For example, when discussing the Sharpeville Massacre, explore its effect on both the apartheid government’s policies and the tactics of resistance movements.
• Acknowledge Different Perspectives:
• While focusing on the factual history of apartheid, also acknowledge the various perspectives on apartheid policies and resistance efforts, including those of the government, opposition movements, and international bodies.
• Conclude Effectively:
• Summarise the main points of your essay and reiterate your thesis in the context of the information discussed. Offer a concluding thought that encourages further reflection, such as the legacy of apartheid in contemporary South Africa.
• Reference Accurately:
• Ensure all sources are accurately cited in your essay to avoid plagiarism and to lend credibility to your arguments. Follow the specific referencing style required by your teacher or educational institution.
• Proofread and Revise:
• Check your essay for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Also, ensure that your argument flows logically and that each section supports your thesis statement.
• Seek Feedback:
• Before final submission, consider getting feedback from teachers, peers, or tutors. Fresh eyes can offer valuable insights and identify areas for improvement.

By incorporating these tips, you can create a well-argued, informative, and engaging essay on Apartheid in South Africa that meets the expectations of a Grade 11 history assignment.

The period from the 1940s to the 1960s was pivotal in the establishment and consolidation of the apartheid system in South Africa. Through the enactment of draconian laws, the apartheid government institutionalised racial discrimination, which led to widespread resistance within the country and condemnation from the international community. This era laid the groundwork for the struggles and transformations that would eventually lead to the end of apartheid.

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‘Pass’ Laws, Aspect of Apartheid Blacks Hate Most, Bring Despair and Pent‐Up Fury

By John F. Burns; Special to The New York Times

• May 24, 1978

JOHANNESBURG, May 23—Solomon Mangale's day in court was brief.

In less than four minutes, much of it taken up with translation from his native Zulu into Afrikaans, the tall, rangy laborer was found to have been “illegally present in a prescribed area”—a black man without a pass in the white man's South Africa. He was fined the equivalent of $1725.

With no lawyer, Mr. Mangale hesitated In the dock for a few moments before being waved away impatiently by a young white official presiding over the cramped courtroom. He was returned to the cells for two hours while his wife, Norah Khopho, waited for the white clerical staff to return from lunch so she could pay the fine.

By the standards of Courtroom A, on the third floor of the Bantu Affairs Commissioner's building in Fordsburg, a grimy commercial area in central Johannesburg, Mr. Mangele was fortunate. Of more than 400,000 blacks arrested last year under the so‐called pass laws and related measures involving curfew‐breaking and trespassing in white areas, perhaps half were sentenced to jail.

This huge number of offenders, one in every 43 blacks in the country, swelled the average daily prison population to almost 100,000, proportionately the highest in the Western world.

Nor was the jail term, averaging four months, the end of the story for many of those involved. In addition to imprisonment, more than 50,000 people were banished by the courts to the homelands, impoverished tribal areas reserved for blacks, generally in remote parts of the country, that spread like jigsaw pieces across the map of the nation.

Not surprisingly, South Africa's blacks resent the pass laws more than any other aspect of the policy of apartheid, or racial separation. And that resentment, more than any political abstraction, is what fuels black nationalism in this country at a time when the white Government is feeling pressure on its borders as never before.

The Government relies on the pass laws to enforce its separation policy, under which 4.4 million whites are assigned the richest 87 percent of the country while the 18.6 million blacks are granted rights in the homelands.

About 10 million blacks, including 1.5 million migrants who make their permanent homes in the tribal reservations, are allowed into the white areas to provide the labor needed for the farms, factories and mines that have made white South Africans wealthy. The rest of the nation's blacks are confined to the tribal reservations, where most are trapped in conditions no better, and sometimes worse, than their forebears before the era of white settlement.

Black feelings go beyond the inequities of land apportionment. Over the decades, and particularly in the 30 years since Afrikaner nationalists came to power, studies have shown the pass laws to be at the root of every malaise afflicting the black community—poverty, family breakup, alcoholism, crime, prostitution and idleness, among others.

The symbol of the system is a pocketsized document known as a reference book,. or pass. Every black older than 16 must have one and must carry it at all times. The book contains a condensed history of the carrier's life‐including his birthplace, legal places of residence and employment, tax payments and marital status. To be caught without it is an offense.

The details, along with the fingerprints of every adult black, are logged in a corn?? in Pretoria. the administrative capital. The introduction of the computer, linked by facsimile machines to every I major center of the country, has made it easier for the sprawling South African bureaucracy to police the system and punish those who violate it.

The laws behind the reference book, derived from statutes that have been in effect since the turn of the century, make it as difficult as possible for blacks to gain permanent residence outside the homelands, At present, about 5.7 million blacks have the coveted so‐called Section 10 rights, which offer protection against arrest and deportation from urban areas to the homelands. Almost three million others live in white rural areas, mostly on farms.

“The pass laws are Public Enemy No. 1,” said Ellen Kuzwayo, a black social worker who has tried as hard as anyone to combat the ills of, apartheid in Soweto, the sprawling black ghetto outside Johannesburg. “They have stripped us of our self‐respect and our self‐confidence. They have deprived us of our humanity.”

Among black activists the abolition of the pass laws is usually considered the first priority if the Government wishes to head off endemic violence between whites and blacks in the long term. Last year, an official law‐reform commission recommended that penalties be ended for violation of the pass laws if the laws were not scrapped altogether. But the Government has remained unbending, beyond agreeing to shift some of the administrative responsibility to black officials in the homelands.

Prime Minister John Vorster has defended the system as “not at all ideological but practical.” He argues that abolition of the “influx control” measures—I official parlance for the pass laws—would result in a mass migration ?? unemployable blacks to the cities, making “Calcuttan” of Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town and other major centers.

Sheena Duncan, the president of Black, Sash, a white women's group that assists blacks who have run afoul of the pass laws, dismisses this argument. “These, people live in the most fantastic squalor, in the homelands anyway,” she said. “If, they must live in extreme poverty, better, that they should do so near the cities., where at least minimal standards of medical care and welfare can be organized.”

To Mrs. Duncan, the real reason for the pass laws is white selfishness. “It is a policy based on human greed, and on a false ideology—an ideology which claims that one minority group has the right to appropriate for its own benefit most of the resources and most of the land which in justice and right belong to us all,” she said recently to a Government manpower commission.

Section 10 of the Urban Areas Act restricts the right of urban residence to blacks who were born in townships such as Soweto and have lived there all their lives. If born elsewhere, they must prove that they have been legally employed and housed in the area for 15 years, or 10 years if they have worked for a single employer.

Even if a man qualifies for residence, lugder Section 10, the privilege is not automatically extended to his wife and children. Generally, wives are allowed to live in white areas only if they qualify in their own right or if they have been tho.re for an arbitrarily fixed period—in Johannesburg since 1959. If children area born outside an urban area, they can be banished to the homelands when they !turn 16.

Nor is the right of urban residence permanent. It can be withdrawn for any offense carrying a minimum penalty of six months in jail or a fine equivalent to $115. It can also be canceled by the courts if they find an otherwise qualified man to be “idle and undesirable”—a phrase than can cover prolonged unemployment through no fault of his own.

Besides Section 10 residents, the only blacks permitted to remain in urban areas for more than 72 hours are the approximately 1.5 million migrant laborers recruited at homeland labor bureaus and brought into white areas on one‐year contracts. These migrants, housed in spartan hostels while they work at factories, farms and mines, must leave their families behind.

Under the blueprint for apartheid drawn by Dr. Hendrik F. Verwoerd. Prime Minister from 1958 until he was assassinated in 1966, the pass laws were to have been used to slow down and eventually reverse the growth in the number of permanent black urban dwellers, The township populations were supposed to have begun filtering back to the homelands by this year, leaving only the migrant laborers in white areas.

In practice, the demand for black labor in a growing economy, particularly for skilled black workers of a kind that the migrant force cannot provide, has led to a steady increase in the number of Section 10 blacks. In recent years, the Government has abandoned the hope that they will eventually fade away and has pledged to turn the townships—mostly dusty ghettos with a minimum of recreational facilities other than beer halls—into normal, settled communities.

But the determination to limit population in the townships remains. Tens of thousands of civil servants, policemen, court officials and prison personnel are employed to root out “llegals” in th townships, punish them and return ther to the homelands. To keep straight with the system, blacks are required to complete dozens of forms and endure hour of waiting, often in offices far from where they live and work.

Among the most hated aspects of the system are police pass raids, often conducted in the hours before dawn. In white suburbs uniformed squads swoop into a neighborhood and seize blacks found domestic servants’ quarters without per mits. A similar system is used in the townships, except that “blackjacks;” blacks employed in the township force, conduct the raids in place of regular policemen. They are usually accompanied by Alsatian dogs.

Despite the elaborate enforcement apparatus, the system is grossly inefficient, at least in the townships around Johannesburg and Pretoria, the country's industrial heartland. Some estimates put the number of blacks illegally in white areas as high as two million, including perhaps 500,000 in Soweto.

To be “illegal” is to live constantly on the run from the authorities. Since it is impossible to register to seek work without an appropriately endorsed reference book, many move from one casual job to another, accepting minimum pay from employers who exploit their vulnerable positions. Many men have worked all their adult lives without earning more than one rand a day—$1.15.

Access to legal housing is also restricted to those with valid passes. Accordingly, tens of thousands of people in Soweto alone drift from house to house, ahead of police swoops, or seek shelter wherever they can—in chicken coons, doghouses. or in darkened alleys in the commercial and industrial sections of Johannesburg.

One man, Ephraim, has worked as a light security guard in the city for 27 years without a valid pass, An imposing figure with mutton‐chop sideburns, he says that he has been arrested a dozen times or more and returned by the authorities to Zululand each time. But like thousands of others, he related, he has gone back to Johannesburg as soon as his official escorts dropped him off in he homeland.

Asked if he was bitter about the experience. the 66‐year‐old watchman miled and replied, “Master, it is what must do,” going on to relate how he ad hecome accustomed to sleeping in different spot every day—sometimes in the basement of the building he uards. sometimes in a friend's room at a hostel, sometimes in one of the grassy parks in the city center.

With such unsettled existences becoming routine for vast numbers, social problems become endemic. The overriding social cost identified by the Viljoen commission, the blue — ribbon body that studied the pass system last year, has been a pervasive loss of respect for the law in the black community as a whole. “We have reached the point where a large percentage of the black population takes it for granted that they will go to prison at least once in their lives,” Mrs. Duncan said. “The result is that there is no longer any social stigma at‐. tached to acing to prison. Quite the opposite. Challenging the ‘white man's system,’ becomes something to boast about.”

Crime figures for Soweto suggest the dimensions of the problem. In 1975‐76, the township had 557 murders, 320 culpable homicides, 1,336 rapes and 8.239 grievous assaults in a population officially given as 904.000, an estimate social workers say is perhaps 50 percent too low.

With a large part of the police force busy enforcing the pass laws, only a fraction of those accused of violent crimes—137 of the murder suspects, for example’ —were brought to trial. Criminologists say that these figures make Soweto far more dangerous than high‐crime areas in the United States.

The frustrations of blacks unable to gain permanent residence in the town ships has also been cited as a factor in the riots that scourged Soweto and other black townships in the last two years. These clashes ended with the deaths of more than 700 blacks, mostly victims of police gunfire, and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage, including the destruction of government offices involved in administration of the pass laws.

“The pent‐up fury and hatred caused by the pass laws increases the number of people willing to involve themselves in rioting,” Mrs. Duncan said. “For the same reason, a substantial proportion of the whole black community gives tacit support to those involved in violent action.”