| Popis: |
The idea of legalized racial separation premised on white minority rule in the second half of the twentieth century in South Africa is identified in the global popular imagination with the apartheid regime. With the coming of apartheid in 1948, the Population Registration Act sought to label and divide African, Coloured, Indian, and White into neatly parceled categories. However, the idea of white racial supremacy has a much longer history in South Africa, dating to the arrival of Europeans in the seventeenth century. The coming of the Union of South Africa in 1910 gave legislative sanction to the entrenching of white minority rule. Against this background this chapter examines the making of the racial categories of Coloureds and Indians before apartheid. The narrative is one of both injunctions from above and impulses from below that drove the project of race making. This is a captivating story of the attempts of movements from below to confront this idea of racial separation and heroic attempts to build an identity that went beyond race, running the gamut from the non-racialism of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) to the orientation of the Congress Alliance led by the African National Congress (ANC), which sought to bring together the “four nations” in a united front against apartheid. This chapter concludes with reflections on the continued salience of apartheid racial categories in post-Apartheid South Africa. |
