Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

THREE Climax and Retreat
than 70 percent of the total population, the right to reside
permanently outside of the rural “homelands” or “Bantustans”
that added up to about 13 percent of the total land
area of South Africa. Those permitted to reside in urban
and industrial areas were treated as resident aliens or guest
workers whose sole function was to serve the economic
interests of the whites. The fiction of the African as cultural
alien or purely ethnic Other was used to mask the essential
racism of the regime. In 1952 Prime Minister J. G. Strydom
gave an honest answer to the question of what apartheid
was all about: “Our policy,” he forthrightly announced, “is
that the Europeans must stand their ground and remain
Baas [master] in South Africa. If we reject the Herrenvolk
idea . . . if the franchise is to be extended to non-Europeans,
and if non-Europeans are developed on the same basis as
Europeans, how can the Europeans remain Baas? Our
view is that in every sphere the Europeans must retain the
right to rule the country and to keep it a white man’s country.”
59 But such frank defenses of white supremacy were
obfuscated by an ideological fog under Strydom’s successor,
Hendrik Verwoerd, who sought desperately to give a
compelling philosophical, moral, and theological rationale
for what Strydom had in effect conceded was simply group
selfishness.
In the late 1950s, in an unconvincing effort to identify
South Africa with the seemingly irresistible decolonization
movement, Verwoerd held out the prospect of “independence”
for the African homelands, and four of them eventually
accepted the offer of a nominal autonomy that the
outside world refused to recognize. The mature ideology
of apartheid, as formulated by Verwoerd and a group of
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