The Year of Global Africa was announced last year in November, and this week (the week of September 24th, 2018) MSU libraries will be hosting speakers and have an open house of activist archives related to Apartheid

Michigan State University Libraries’ Africana collection is one of the largest in the United States. There will be an open house in the special collections area in the MSU Main Library on September 26 for the African American History and Culture materials and on September 28 there will be an open house for the African and Student Activism materials.

Forty years ago, Michigan State University announced that it would be divesting from companies doing business with Apartheid South Africa, making MSU one of the first universities in the U.S. to take a stance on condemning the conditions. This subsequently led to Michigan passing more sanctions on South Africa than any other state. As a part of Year of Global Africa: Campus Activism for Justice, from Michigan to Southern Africa, MSU Libraries is hosting a two-day conference on September 27 and 28 (information and registration here) to reflect on the role of campus activism in political action, to place MSU’s divestments in the larger social context of other movements that came before it, and will feature a number of speakers.

The blog post this week, to reflect the goals of the conference, will feature archives that contain materials about the lives and conditions of people living under Apartheid. For over 50 years, South Africans lived in government-sanctioned, white supremacist segregation for the benefit of the nation’s minority white population. The legacy of this authoritarian policy still haunts the citizens of South Africa, but many may not know what life during apartheid was really like.

History of Apartheid

In Afrikaans (the Dutch dialect spoken by white colonial settlers in South Africa), apartheid means “separateness”. The region of South Africa was colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British to engage in the slave trade and to mine the region’s natural resources (particularly diamonds and gold). In 1833, the UK abolished slavery, changing the status of enslaved South Africans to that of indentured servants. It is during this period into the early 20th century that we begin to see the legislation that we associate with Apartheid: restricting freedom of movement, depriving non-whites and native South Africans the right to vote, limiting the amount of land that could be owned, and even removing the rights of Black South Africans to have seats in parliament.

From the Joseph A. Labadie collection, housed at University of Michigan and accesible through SiRO

In effect, although slavery was abolished, the minority white population seized power and enacted legislation that intentionally kept the non-white and native South African population segregated from white communities, access to power, and to ensure white domination.

Apartheid laws can then be divided into two categories: grand apartheid and petty apartheid, with the former reflecting policies to compel people to live in geographically different areas based on race and the latter reflecting legislation like restricting the right to vote, placing non-whites into their own townships, and restricting access to land ownership. In 1950, the Grand Areas Act was passed and each race was segregated into its own area.

In Apartheid-era South Africa, there were four races: whites, Coloured (mixed race persons who adopted the Christian faith), Black, and Indian. Segregation, then, was not purely between Black and white but rather was enforced in separating these four groups. Separate universities, public transport, parks, beaches, restaurants, and even benches were segregated by race. Marriage and sexual acts between people of different races was a criminal offense, and there were even attempts to divide up the region into different “homelands” for each race.

The government thus enforced policies of resettlement, moving millions of people from their homes and forcing them into townships and shantytowns. The white supremacist government’s policies that segregated people by race in all areas of life left a profound impact on South Africa’s policies, government, and society that are still felt today, particularly since Apartheid only formally ended in the early 1990s.

Resources for Materials on Apartheid

SiRO has materials from the Apartheid era from both the John A. Labadie collection as well as from Adam Mathew Digital. In particular, “The three parts of the Adam Mathew Digital Apartheid South Africa cover the period between 1948 and 1980 and explore the inception and implementation of apartheid by Daniel Malan, the strengthening of policies by Hendrik Verwoerd and the eventual destabilization of the system under P. W. Botha. Documents, dispatches, reports, telegrams and handwritten embassy notes both from South Africa and from Britain, the United States and other powers provide first-hand analyses of South Africa’s relationship with the international community, her struggles with internal resistance, civil unrest and anti-apartheid organisations, and the implementation of policies to forcibly remove black Africans into independent ‘self-governing’ Bantustans.”

Other resources about Apartheid as well as Anti-Apartheid activism, at MSU and other places, include:

African Activist Archive

Overcoming Apartheid

Chicago Anti Apartheid Movement Collection

Art Against Apartheid Collection

Adam Mathew: Apartheid South Africa 1948-1980 (accessible through SiRO)

BBC Archives – Apartheid and South Africa

United Nations Center Against Apartheid, Notes and Documents

International Institute of Social History – Anti-Apartheid and Southern Africa

Apartheid: Global Perspectives 1946-1996

South Africa Under Apartheid, reports and research from a journalist, 1949-1995

MSU Libraries – Special Collections: Africana