How apartheid affected people's lives

This question requires a long answer.

gh walls and secure gates on the property so if there was a late-night raid, we could get the partner and child into an area of the house and hide evidence of their living there, before allowing the inspectors in. I was threatened with arrest several times. When my “maid” decided she wanted to raise her kids herself, at home, she left and I got my mother to live with us so I didn’t have to put another woman through this abuse. It wasn’t as strict in the early years (1948 - 1960s), but then when the ANC was banned and Mandela was imprisoned, the racism of the ruling party was terrible.

The education system was broken into different systems for the four different race groups: whites were restricted only by censorship and sexism. There were banned books, like Mein Kamph for instance, Marx’s works about Communism and so on, and at one time, even Black Beauty was banned until the idiot who did that learnt it was about a horse. Having any banned material could land you in prison. So owning copies of Playboy for instance, was an offence. Sexism included that girls had to take classes in home management and cooking, boys weren’t allowed to learn typing, and girls weren’t allowed to learn woodwork. Also girls weren’t encouraged to go to university. They made it hard to get into university with a system that required you to have good marks in Afrikaans and “academic” subjects, like for instance insisting on Latin for law or medicine. Otherwise it was easy relatively, for white people.

“Coloured” people while allowed more academic education still fell under the “Bantu” Education department so they weren’t encouraged to academics, but were educated enough to be able to work in farming and unskilled jobs, but were allowed

Then there were the hostels at the mines. To keep miners housed, they built blocks of rooms with little sanitation for men to live in , on the mines’ properties. The miners weren’t allowed to have their families live in the rooms with them, or bring friends from outside to visit them. This led to children growing up without fathers being present, because they were at “home” sometimes hundreds of miles away from where their fathers lived and worked all year. Once a year, in December the country shut down, so that people could travel to their homes in the country for a visit, and to take clothes, food, etc to their families because there wasn’t shopping readily available at “home” except for small informal businesses, run by people who weren’t trained in running business. This led to shebeens where home-brewed alcohol was sold, again against the law because black people weren’t allowed to have alcohol, although “coloured” (mixed race) people working on wine farms were paid in wine leading to rampant alcoholism.

It was messed up. Almost 50 years of draconian laws all justified by Old Testament based religion, and fear of people who were different, and simple belief in racist supremacy.

I suggest reading Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom” and also here’s a list of books recommended List of books and articles about Apartheid.

I grew up and lived to almost retirement under Apartheid. A day I will never forget 27 April 1994, my eldest’s 21st birthday, and the day we voted for our freedom. The images of people standing for hours in the hot sun are burnt into my brain. We broke down apartheid on a day when not a single crime was reported, and all of us stood in lines talking to strangers with pride, in our ability to overcome this, but also knowing we’d get the world’s most progressive constitution that would guarantee our freedom from hate and division.