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By Root 799 0

there would forfeit their South African citizenship. The 1953 Bantu Authorities Act confirmed the impression that these were analogous to the reservations of Native Americans in the US when they accorded power to government-selected tribal chiefs. In the coming decades, vast numbers of people, including six hundred thousand Coloured, Indian and Chinese as well as forty thousand Whites and millions of Black Africans, were moved around in this bizarre experiment in racial engineering, with bulldozers erasing each anomalous ‘black spot’. A ban on the South African Communist Party was loosely framed to cover not only past Party members but also others deemed to have similar sympathies.

Laws also reserved the enjoyment of quotidian ‘amenities’ along racial lines. Non-whites needed special permits to run businesses or to practise professions within White areas. No Black was permitted to employ a White, and no White could be arrested by a Black African police officer. The transport system was segregated, with Blacks consigned to the third class on trains. Whites enjoyed significantly better educational and medical facilities than Blacks. Perhaps most perniciously, the limited avenues for intellectual and social advancement that Christian schools and colleges had provided were choked off by the restriction of Black education only to those skills - such as taking orders - that were deemed necessary by the Afrikaner economy. A Black man wishing to study astrophysics could go abroad, if the funding was there, but it would take an age to get a passport and his citizenship would be cancelled the moment he left. On a less exalted scale, there were no Black vets until 1980, simply because many cattle-dip inspectors were White and Whites could not take orders from Black vets. Black Africans were made to feel on edge in their own country by myriad petty restrictions that facilitated harassment. Car parks, drive-in cinemas, hotels, restaurants, theatres, beaches, public parks and swimming pools were all segregated, requiring a plethora of trilingual warning signs and zealous jobsworths. Black African mobility was further restricted by the issuance of passes which recorded a person’s employment history and without which he or she was liable to arrest.

Although in 1955 a broad front of opponents of apartheid promulgated a Freedom Charter at a historic meeting at Klipstown, the role of White Communists in its drafting led to the formation in 1959 of a separate Pan-African Congress, and hence an unfortunate radicalising rivalry among both groups of militants in their respective campaigns against the pass laws. The PAC was under the spell of the Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah and wanted a totally Africanised state to be called Azania. In March 1960 a PAC-organised demonstration converged on a police station at Sharpeville in the Afrikaners’ Transvaal heartland, with the intention of having themselves arrested for not carrying the necessary identity passes which the demonstrators had left at home. Apparently the fact that a stone hit the car of the local police chief was sufficient justification for his men to open fire, which resulted in sixty-nine unarmed Africans being shot in the back and a further 186 wounded. Press photographs caught the police reloading their weapons to fire another salvo which undermined the idea that they had responded impulsively to some imminent threat. Separate violent confrontations occurred in the townships around Cape Town. A state of emergency was declared in many areas. Shocking photographs of White policemen with snarling dogs bludgeoning Black Africans were relayed around the world.

Nelson Mandela recalled that ‘We in the ANC had to make rapid adjustments to this new situation, and we did so.’ By then Mandela was a defendant in the longest treason trial in history. In late March chief Luthuli led the way in symbolically burning his pass, a gesture followed by thousands of ANC supporters. In early April both the ANC and PAC were banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. It was at this time that the ANC