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Unlock This CourseBy 1955 the main apartheid laws had been passed. The later 1950s were the years when people felt them in full. Historians use the name petty apartheid for the many small rules that kept the races apart in everyday life. 'Petty' means small or minor. The rules were small one by one, but together they touched almost every hour of a black South African's day.
Petty apartheid is often set against 'grand apartheid', the large-scale plan to divide the land itself. You will meet that in the lesson Verwoerd, Vorster and the Bantu Self-Government Act.
Key terms:
Think about one day in a city such as Johannesburg in the late 1950s. An African worker left a township on the edge of the city before dawn and travelled in a crowded carriage marked for 'Non-Europeans'. In town there were separate entrances, separate counters, separate benches and separate lifts. Hospitals, ambulances and even cemeteries were divided by race. In the evening a curfew meant Africans had to be off the streets of the white town unless they had a permit.
Forced removals now began in earnest. Under a special law, the Natives Resettlement Act (1954), about 2,000 armed police began on 9 February 1955 to move families out of Sophiatown in Johannesburg to Meadowlands, in what became Soweto. Over the next few years about 65,000 people were moved. The houses were knocked down and a suburb for whites was built there, named Triomf, the Afrikaans for 'triumph'.
The Industrial Conciliation Act (1956) gave the Minister of Labour the power to reserve kinds of work for one race. In practice job reservation protected skilled jobs for white workers. Black workers were held in low-paid jobs however able they were.
A 1957 law included the 'church clause'. It let the Minister of Native Affairs stop Africans from attending services in a white area. Church leaders protested loudly, and the clause was seldom used, but it showed how far the rules now reached.
From 1956 the government also began to issue reference books to African women, so the daily fear of a police check spread to them too.
Why does this matter? The impact went deeper than inconvenience:
You have already seen what the Bantu Education Act (1953) said. From 1955 it was put into practice, and these were the changes families noticed.
From 1955 the state fixed the sum it paid towards African schools each year, however many pupils joined. Anything extra had to come from taxes paid by Africans themselves, and parents often had to help pay for buildings. More children went to school than before, but there was less to spend on each one.
To teach more children cheaply, the youngest classes ran double sessions, so each group had only about three hours of school a day. Across the country the number of pupils for each teacher rose from 46 in 1955 to 58 by 1967. Many teachers had little training.
The churches had to choose. The Roman Catholic Church kept most of its schools open without state money. The Anglican Church in Johannesburg closed its schools so that it would not have to teach the new lessons. Most other mission schools were handed over.
In April 1955 the ANC called a boycott of the new schools. Thousands of children stayed away, mainly near Johannesburg and in the Eastern Cape. Verwoerd warned that children who did not return would be shut out of school for good, and the boycott faded. Parents faced a hard choice between a poor education and none at all.
The consequence: most African children left after a few years of primary school, and few reached secondary school. A whole generation was prepared only for unskilled work, exactly as the government intended.
Before 1959 a small number of black students studied at the open universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand, sitting in the same lectures as white students. The University College of Fort Hare, in the Eastern Cape, taught African students from all over southern Africa. Nelson Mandela had studied there.
The Extension of University Education Act (1959) ended this:
Staff and students at Cape Town and the Witwatersrand marched in protest, but the Act went ahead. The new colleges were run by the government, which chose their staff and controlled what was taught. Dividing students by language group fitted the Nationalist idea that Africans were several separate 'nations', not one people. It also aimed to stop a shared, educated black leadership from growing.
Don't let the name fool you: the Extension of University Education Act did not extend opportunity. It cut black students off from the best universities. And don't treat petty apartheid as unimportant because 'petty' means small. For most people it was the part of apartheid they met every single day.
Extract A (a practice extract written for this lesson, in the style of a modern history textbook)
Petty apartheid was never petty to those who lived under it. From the first train of the morning to the curfew at night, a black South African was ordered about by painted signs: this bench, that door, the back of the queue. Nothing was too small to be ruled upon. Even the dead were sorted by colour in separate cemeteries. Each sign delivered the same daily insult, and there was no corner of the city where it could be escaped.
What impression does the author give about petty apartheid? You must use Extract A to explain your answer. [6 marks]
The author gives the impression that petty apartheid was humiliating and impossible to escape. This is shown by the author's language. Saying a person was 'ordered about by painted signs' makes black South Africans sound bossed around like children, and 'daily insult' shows the author sees the rules as deliberately hurtful and not just inconvenient. The phrases 'nothing was too small' and 'no corner of the city' suggest the rules reached everywhere. The author has also chosen what to stress. The extract follows a whole day, 'from the first train of the morning to the curfew at night', and picks the shocking example of separate cemeteries to show that segregation even followed people after death. It leaves out anything that might soften this picture, such as rules that were not always enforced. This selection makes petty apartheid seem constant and degrading.
What lifts this to the top level: it names one clear impression, proves it with short quotations, and explains how the author's word choices and choice of what to include and leave out create that impression.
Start with the opening sentence of the extract: 'never petty to those who lived under it' tells you the author is taking the side of the people affected. Then pick two or three loaded words, such as 'ordered about' and 'insult', and say what each suggests. Don't add your own facts about Sophiatown or the schools: only the extract earns marks here. For more on this question type, see the Exam Skills lesson Paper 1 Question (a): What Impression Does the Author Give?