From Segregation to Apartheid – The Comparison of the apartheid system in South Africa and the Jim Crow laws in the US

Thomas Jefferson once said, “All men are created equal”. The play “Master Harold… and the boys” written by Athol Fugard, is contradictory to this claim as it is thematically related to the inequality of men, especially men born with the black color which in the eyes of the white, was inferior to them. Set inside a tearoom on a wet and windy Port Elizabeth (South Africa) afternoon in 1950, the central theme of the play is human rights. The South African system of apartheid (also called de facto apartheid) in which only white people enjoyed full political rights comes under heavy attack although apartheid is not directly mentioned or addressed throughout the play. Fugard indirectly criticizes the society of racial discrimination and injustice created by apartheid. Although the white character in the play is merely a teen, the language he uses towards his black “servants” reflects the disparity of power where black men are forced by law to be subservient to white children. Under the apartheid system in South Africa, it was absolutely normal and well accepted for a white child to physically or verbally assault a black person. Though the black suffer in silence, the whites found it natural to assert their supremacy and did not seem to feel any injustice or immorality they rendered on the blacks. This simply reveals the glaring inhumanity of the indecent system of apartheid, which is an Afrikaner word for segregation. On the other hand, in America, the Jim Crow laws that were enacted between 1876 and 1965 are similar to apartheid in a lot of aspects. Jim Crow’s “separate but equal” status for black Americans mandated racial segregation in all public facilities. In reality, both the apartheid and Jim Crow system were resulted from the fact that the whites consider themselves to be the superior race and the blacks should be treated as underdogs. (Jaynes, 470) The apartheid system was closely related to the Jim Crow laws in the US and they both reflected the kind of cruel racial segregation against blacks that took place in the 20^th century.

The word apartheid was coined in the 1930s and was used as a political slogan of the National Party in the early 1940s. Newspapers and the National Party politicians used it occasionally but the policy itself extended back to the beginning of white settlement in South Africa in 1652. (Robinson) After winning an election on 26^th May 1948, the National Part coalition quickly adopted apartheid as the official policy in South Africa. (Brown, 26) Apartheid separated blacks, most indigenous South African from whites and divided blacks into 10 tribal groups. (Brown, 26) To start off, the early target for the Nationalists was marriage and sex of mixed races. In 1949, parliament passed the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which outlawed marriages between Europeans and non-Europeans. The Immorality Amendment Act came next as it prohibited adultery and also extended a ban on sexual intercourse between whites and natives. (Meredith, 53) In 1950, the Group Areas Act forced physical separation between races by creating separate residential areas. These racial zones represented complete segregation. (Spindle) One of the most outrageous laws passed was the Natives Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act of 1952, which required black people to carry identification with them at all times for patrolling police officers to check on. (Meredith, 56) When asked about the inequality of the acts, a minister of the Nationalist said, “We believe that if we remove the point of contact that causes friction, then we will remove the possibility of that friction and we will able to prevent the conflagration which might one day break out.” (Meredith, 54) All these laws constituted for one thing. The segregation of blacks. By 1960, the word apartheid had become one of the dirtiest words in the world, to such an extent that the South African Prime Minister at the time tried to drop it. (Addison, 3) After the Second World War, the decline of Jim Crow in the US and the dismantling of European colonies, South Africa’s apartheid policy came under increased scrutiny. (Middleton, 89) In addition, inspired by example of the Civil Rights Movement in the US, Nelson Mandela finally led the Natives to abolish apartheid in 1990. (Brown, 26)

The Jim Crow laws were a system of racial segregation and oppression that originated in the 1830s by a white minstrel performer who created a blackface character of that name. (Brown, 416) The name was later given to the segregation system that began in the late 1890s. (Jaynes, 468) During the nineteenth century, politicians like Thomas Jefferson believed Native Americans could amalgamate into American life but that never happened.  In a famous lawsuit Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, the US Supreme Court declared that “separate but equal” was the legal backbone for segregation. (Brown, 578)  This led to the exclusion of Indian nations from inclusion in the American political by the U.S. constitution. In retrospect, separate was just another word for “total exclusion”. At the time, racial segregation violated the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, however, the federal government continued to sanction the laws and practices of Jim Crow. There were two forms of Jim Crow laws that existed in the South: de jure and de facto. De jure segregation was the separation of races as mandated specifically by law and de facto segregation meant the practice of laws not necessarily ordained by law. (Brown, 417) An example of de jure in Alabama was that all passenger stations operated by any motor transportation company had separate waiting rooms and separate ticket windows for white and colored races. (Murray) De facto segregation usually occurred in school enrollment and housing patterns. Some neighborhoods could be predominantly black although it was not by de jure laws. One of the most famous laws was the “Separate Car Law," which purported to aid passenger comfort by creating "equal but separate" cars for blacks and whites. (Brown, 420) Similar to the apartheid system, the Jim Crow laws reflected Southern whites growing uneasy about the younger generation of African Americans. It was until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Brown vs. Board Education that the “separate but equal” system was finally abolished.

So what were the similarities and differences of these two systems in two entirely different worlds? Apartheid represented a dark period in the history of South Africa, while Jim Crow segregated natives almost identically. (Jaynes, 469) The Blacks in South Africa were forced to make long commutes by bus to jobs in white areas while the blacks in the US could not enter a white home through the front door. The types of segregation involved were all similar. They were all related to the “inferiority” of blacks. For example, blacks had to give way to a white person on a sidewalk. Signs labeled for white and for colored dominated the South as Jim Crow regulated social contact in places like restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, schools, parks, libraries, hospitals and waiting rooms. (Brown, 418) Both lands passed laws that prohibited interracial marriages. This was clearly because having a mixed population was not ideal for preserving segregation. State legislatures during the Jim Crow period enacted anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited these marriages and also passed laws to make voter registration difficult if not impossible for natives and blacks. (Brown, 419) Ridiculous laws like prohibiting freehold property rights were passed, which thereafter affected a total of 3.5 million people. (Middleton, 88) However, the apartheid system had a unique law to place black African owned businesses in urban areas under restrictions that limited their capacity to expand which did not exist in America. Deliberate and repressive measures were taken to ensure that the availability of family housing was limited to make South Africans scramble for their lives instead of focusing on a rebel against the whites. (Middleton, 89) The similarities between these two systems were very obvious as they both circled around themes like intermarriages, education and public affairs. There were practically no differences.

Apartheid. The word alone sends a shiver down the spines of the African society. Apartheid literally means apartness or separateness. It aims to separate the white and non-white peoples of South Africa and divides the country into separate areas for occupation and ownership by whites. (Addison, 3) Apartheid has left major scars on South African society in the form of severe inequalities in education, housing, welfare and income. Just imagine how many children grew up in terror of oppression. It took South Africa about fifty years to overcome this, almost identical to what happened in the United States. Race has always been a national problem in the 1900s and it wasn’t easy to overcome for the segregated groups because of the repressive laws. The play “Master Harold… and the boys” clearly demonstrates the kind of discrimination that occurred. The fight for freedom and democracy had cost many innocent lives and harm to all black South Africans and natives. The Jim Crow “separate but equal” laws have had almost the exact same impact as apartheid did in South Africa. The kind of cruel segregation that took place cannot be ignored even though they are both are in the past now. Both apartheid and Jim Crow have been two of the most significant segregation systems in the 20^th century and both have left incurable scars on the history of the black people forever.