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Unlock This CourseMalan's Nationalists had won power in 1948 by promising apartheid. Now they had to make it work. A system of total separation needs two things first. It must decide which race every single person belongs to, and it must keep the races from mixing, in families and in neighbourhoods. So between 1949 and 1950 Parliament passed a set of laws that did exactly that. Dr T.E. Dönges, the Minister of the Interior, steered the two biggest ones through Parliament.
Key terms:
This Act was the foundation of everything else. Every person was to be listed on a national register and classified by race. At first there were three main groups: White, Coloured and Native (the government's word for Africans). Indians were counted as a section of the Coloured group at first, and were later listed as a separate group. Each person was to carry an identity card that showed their race.
How did officials decide? Not by science. The Act said a white person was someone who looked white or was 'generally accepted' as white. So officials judged people by their appearance, their family, their friends, their home and even their job. In doubtful cases they used crude tests. The best known was the 'pencil test': an official pushed a pencil into a person's hair. If it stayed in, the hair was judged too curly for the person to be white. A special board heard appeals from people who disagreed with their label.
Once it was fixed, a person's race decided where they could live, which school they could attend, which jobs they could do, whom they could marry and whether they could vote. Every other apartheid law depended on this one, because none of them could be enforced until the state knew each person's race.
The lines between the groups were not clear, above all between White and Coloured. Members of the same family were sometimes put in different groups. A brother classed as White and a sister classed as Coloured then had to live in different areas and go to different schools. Many people found the questions and tests deeply humiliating.
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) was one of the very first apartheid laws. It banned marriage between a white person and a person of any other race. Such marriages were already rare. The law mattered because it showed what the Nationalists believed: that the white race must be kept 'pure'.
A year later the Immorality Act (1950) went further. An older law of 1927 had already banned sex outside marriage between whites and Africans. The new Act stretched the ban to cover whites and all other races. Together, the two laws are what the specification calls the prohibitions on mixed marriages.
The effects on people were harsh:
These laws also made race classification more urgent. A marriage officer could not refuse a couple unless he knew for certain which race each person was.
Remember, many African townspeople already had to live in locations. But some districts were still mixed, and Coloured and Indian families lived and traded in many town centres. The Group Areas Act set out to end this. It gave the government the power to mark out every town and city into areas, each for one race only. Only people of that race could live, own property or run a business there.
If your home was in an area given to another race, you had to move. This was forced removal. Whites were given the best areas: the town centres and the suburbs near them. Very few whites had to move. Coloured, Indian and African families were sent to new areas on the edges of towns, far from their work. Owners often had to sell their houses for much less than they were worth.
Indian shopkeepers were hit especially hard. Many had built up businesses in town centres over many years. When those centres were given to whites, they lost their shops and their customers. Close communities, with their own churches, mosques, schools and neighbours, were broken up and scattered.
The Act worked slowly. Each town had to be studied and mapped before its areas were announced, so most of the removals came from the mid-1950s onwards. But from 1950 families in mixed districts, such as District Six in Cape Town, lived with the fear that their homes could be taken.
Notice how the laws fitted together. Registration fixed each person's race. The marriage laws stopped the races joining as families. The Group Areas Act stopped them living as neighbours. The older segregation had been patchy. These laws were meant to leave no gaps.
Don't mix up the laws. The Population Registration Act labelled people. The Group Areas Act decided where each labelled group could live. Don't say the Group Areas Act moved everyone at once in 1950: it gave the government the power, and the removals followed over many years. And remember there were two bans on mixed relationships: one on marriage (1949) and one on sex outside marriage (1950).
Explain two effects of the Population Registration Act (1950) on the lives of people in South Africa. [8 marks]
One effect was that a person's race label now decided almost every part of their life. The Act put every South African on a national register as White, Coloured or Native, and each person was to carry an identity card showing their race. Because the state now knew everyone's official race, it could enforce its other laws. For example, the Group Areas Act (1950) could only send people to separate areas once each person had a label. So the Act led to people's homes, schools, jobs and marriages all being fixed by their classification.
A second effect was that families were divided and people were humiliated. Officials decided a person's race by appearance and by whether they were 'generally accepted' as white, using crude checks such as the 'pencil test' on a person's hair. Because the line between White and Coloured was unclear, members of the same family were sometimes placed in different groups. This meant that they then had to live in different areas and attend different schools, so the Act broke up families as well as labelling them.
What lifts this to the top level: there are two separate effects, each has precise facts (the national register, the identity card, the pencil test), and each paragraph shows how the Act led to the effect.
This question is about the Population Registration Act, so don't drift into describing forced removals or the marriage laws for their own sake. Mention another law only to show what registration made possible. And always give two effects: one effect alone, however well explained, cannot score more than 4 of the 8 marks. For more on this question type, see the Exam Skills lesson Paper 1 Question (b): Explain Two Effects.