In the history of South Africa, the Apartheid era (1948–1994) was the period of white-minority rule established with the promulgation of the Apartheid system of racial segregation in 1948. The Apartheid era began with the election of the National Party (NP) in the 1948 South African general election whose governments established white minority rule of a majority black African country. In the 1990s, formal negotiations to end apartheid and the white-minority government of the National Party culminated in the 1994 South African general election, wherein all South Africans of every race were free to vote for their government.

1948 general election

The 1948 general elections were a turning point in the history of South Africa. The United Party (UP) and their leader, Jan Smuts, despite receiving 11.48% more of the popular vote than the Herenigde Nasionale Party (HNP), (49.18% UP to 37.70% HNP), were defeated by the HNP, led by the cleric D. F. Malan, of the Dutch Reformed church.

South Africa had allowed social custom and law to govern the consideration of multiracial affairs and of the allocation, in racial terms, of access to economic, social, and political status. Nevertheless, by 1948 it remained apparent that there were gaps in the social structure, whether legislated or otherwise, concerning the rights and opportunities of non-whites. The rapid economic development of World War II attracted black migrant workers in large numbers to chief industrial centres, where they compensated for the wartime shortage of white labour. However, this escalated rate of black urbanisation went unrecognised by the South African government, which failed to accommodate the influx with parallel expansion in housing or social services. Overcrowding, increasing crime rates, and disillusionment resulted; urban blacks came to support a new generation of leaders influenced by the principles of self-determination and popular freedoms enshrined in such statements as the Atlantic Charter. Black political organisations and leaders such as Alfred Xuma, James Mpanza, the African National Congress, and the Council of Non-European Trade Unions began demanding political rights, land reform, and the right to unionise.

Whites reacted negatively to the changes, allowing the Herenigde Nasionale Party (or simply the National Party) to convince a large segment of the voting bloc that the impotence of the United Party in curtailing the evolving position of non-whites indicated that the organisation had fallen under the influence of Western liberals. Many Afrikaners resented what they perceived as disempowerment by an underpaid black workforce and the superior economic power and prosperity of white English speakers. Smuts, as a strong advocate of the United Nations, lost domestic support when South Africa was criticised for its colour bar and the continued mandate of South West Africa by other UN member states.

Given the established racial segregation of the society and the limited access to the right-to-vote for coloured people, those who voted were almost exclusively white, only accounting for 20% of the population of South Africa. Few coloured people and few Asians were allowed to vote, and black Africans had no right to vote since the late 1930s., A few Africans qualified to vote for white MPs, in a separate election. The electoral campaigns of the UP and the HNP required political coalitions with the minor political parties; the UP aligned with the leftist Labour Party and the Afrikaner Party aligned with the HNP to promote the white-supremacy rights of Afrikaners.

The HNP capitalised on the fears of many White South Africans who felt threatened by black political aspirations, pledging to enforce strict racial segregation and white domination in all areas of life. This policy was initially expounded from a theory drafted by Hendrik Verwoerd and was presented to the National Party by the Sauer Commission. It called for a systematic effort to organise the relations, rights, and privileges of the races as officially defined through a series of parliamentary acts and administrative decrees extended across the state. Segregation had thus far been pursued only in matters such as separate schools, and local society rather than law. The commission's goal was to completely remove blacks from areas designated for whites, including cities, with the exception of temporary migrant labour. Blacks would then be encouraged to create their own political units on land reserved for them. The party called this system "apartheid" (meaning "apartness" or "separation") and promised safety and security from supposed black-on-white crime. Apartheid was to be the basic ideological and practical foundation of Afrikaner politics for the next quarter of a century.

The National Party's election platform stressed that apartheid would preserve a market for white employment in which non-whites could not compete. On the issues of black urbanisation, the regulation of non-white labour, "influx control", social security, farm tariffs and non-white taxation, the United Party's policy remained contradictory and confused. Its traditional bases of support not only took mutually exclusive positions, but found themselves increasingly at odds with each other. Smuts' reluctance to consider South African foreign policy against the mounting tensions of the Cold War also stirred up discontent, while the nationalists promised to purge the state and public service of communist sympathisers.

The first to desert the United Party were Afrikaner farmers, who wished to see a change in influx control due to problems with squatters, as well as higher prices for their maize and other produce in the face of the mineowners' demand for cheap food policies. Typically identified with the affluent and capitalist, the party failed to appeal to its working class constituents.

Populist rhetoric allowed the National Party to sweep eight constituencies in the mining and industrial centres of the Witwatersrand and five more in Pretoria. Barring the predominantly English-speaking landowner electorate of the Natal, the United Party was defeated in almost every rural district. Its urban losses in the nation's most populous province, the Transvaal, proved equally devastating. As the voting system was disproportionately weighted in favour of rural constituencies and the Transvaal in particular, the 1948 election catapulted the Herenigde Nasionale Party from a small minority party to a commanding position with an eight-vote parliamentary lead. Daniel François Malan became the first nationalist prime minister, with the aim of implementing the apartheid philosophy and silencing liberal opposition.

When the National Party came to power in 1948, there were factional differences in the party about the implementation of systemic racial segregation. The "baasskap" (white domination or supremacist) faction, which was the dominant faction in the NP and state institutions, favoured systemic segregation, but also favoured the participation of black Africans in the economy, with black labour controlled to advance the economic gains of Afrikaners. A second faction were the "purists", who believed in "vertical segregation", in which blacks and whites would be entirely separated, with blacks living in native reserves with separate political and economic structures, which they believed would entail severe short-term pain, but would also lead to independence of white South Africa from black labour in the long term. A third faction, which included Hendrik Verwoerd, sympathised with the purists, but allowed for the use of black labour, while implementing the purist goal of vertical separation. Verwoerd would refer to this policy as a policy of "good neighbourliness" as a means of justifying such segregation.

The elections marked the start of 46 years of National Party (NP) rule in South Africa, leading to the formal introduction of apartheid and the gradual development of a herrenvolk democracy that persisted until the 1994 election.

Apartheid legislation

Although apartheid as a comprehensive legislative project truly began after the HNP came into power in 1948, many of these statutes were preceded by the laws of the previous British and Afrikaner administrations in South Africa's provinces. An early example is the Glen Grey Act, passed in 1894 in Cape Colony, which diminished the land rights of Africans in scheduled areas.

The state passed laws that paved the way for "grand apartheid", which was centred on separating races on a large scale by compelling people to live in separate places defined by race. This strategy was in part adopted from "left-over" British rule that separated different racial groups after they took control of the Boer republics in the Anglo-Boer war. This created black-only "townships" or "locations", where blacks were relocated to. As the HNP government's minister of native affairs from 1950, Hendrik Verwoerd had a significant role in crafting such laws, which led to him being regarded as the 'Architect of Apartheid'. In addition, many "petty apartheid" laws were passed, which segregated public facilities and social events.

The first two grand apartheid laws were the Population Registration Act, 1950, and the Group Areas Act, 1950, which divided urban areas into "group areas" in which ownership and residence was restricted to certain population groups. Under the Population Registration Act, racial classification was formalised and required every person over 18 to carry an identity card detailing their racial classification, enabling greater census and subsequent racial profiling. Official teams or boards were established to come to a conclusion on those people whose race was unclear. This caused difficulty, especially for the multiracial Coloured people, whose families were separated when members were assigned to different races.

Other policies Alongside apartheid, the National Party implemented a programme of social conservatism. Pornography,JCW Van Rooyen, Censorship in South Africa (Cape Town: Juta and Co., 1987), 5. gamblingBet and board in the new South Africa. (legalisation of gambling could lead to growth of casinos, lotteries)(Brief Article) The Economist (US) | 5 August 1995 and works from Marx, Lenin and other socialist thinkers were banned. Cinemas, shops selling alcohol and most other businesses were forbidden from opening on Sundays. Abortion, homosexuality and sex education were also restricted; abortion was legal only in cases of rape or if the mother's life was threatened.

Television was not introduced until 1976 because the government viewed English programming as a threat to the Afrikaans language. Television was run on apartheid linesTV1 broadcast in Afrikaans and English (geared to a White audience), TV2 in Zulu and Xhosa, TV3 in Sotho, Tswana and Pedi (both geared to a Black audience), and TV4 mostly showed programmes for an urban Black audience.

Early internal resistance

The initial decade of National Party rule was met with a concerted campaign of non-violent resistance and mass mobilization, largely orchestrated by the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies in the Congress Alliance, which included the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People's Congress, and the (white) Congress of Democrats.

A key turning point was the Defiance Campaign of 1952, in which over 8,000 volunteers deliberately violated apartheid laws, primarily pass laws and segregated facilities, leading to arrests. This campaign of non-violent civil disobedience massively increased ANC membership and signaled a new phase of mass protest.

In 1955, the Congress Alliance convened the Congress of the People in Kliptown, where delegates adopted the Freedom Charter. This document became the foundational vision for the liberation movement, calling for a non-racial and democratic state.