Apartheid Laws Quotes

We should be lords over them…these are the politics of South Africa.

Now, of course, we know there has been an end to apartheid in South Africa, but what excited me was seeing it in the context of history.

I was born and raised in Zambia in 1969. At the time of my birth, blacks were not issued birth certificates, and that law only changed in 1973.

I didn't actually realise what apartheid meant. I'm probably a bit naive, but I thought it was more of a vague segregation, like on the beaches and buses.

Mbeki began to write a study of the workings of apartheid policy in the reserves - the areas set aside in law for African occupation - as early as 1959 and 1960.

My father’s contemporaries, the white ones…had made laws that he must carry a reference book. They also made a law that an Alsatian dog must have a certain ticket on his neck (a dog license) and he must also carry a ‘reference book’. That Alsatian dog was going to die without ever deciding a law that governs his life. So was my father…The discomfort of prison cells is better than the emptiness of walking in the streets as if you were free when you are a dog in the land of your birth.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

The ANC was the product of a much earlier South Africa, a gradualist and non-tribal multi-racial organisation, driven to violence by the intransigence of the Afrikaner Nationalist Government, obsessed with improbable ideas of revolution.

I was really lucky in that my mom and dad never got caught in the act, so to speak. So my mom was caught fraternizing with my dad. My mom was caught, you know, in the building that my father lived in. My mom was caught in a white neighborhood past curfew without the right permits. My mother was caught in transition. And that was key because had she been caught in the act, then, as the law says, she could've spent anywhere up to four years in prison.

This is the Immorality Act of 1927.To prohibit illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives and other acts in relation thereto. Be it enacted by the king's most excellent Majesty, the Senate and the House of Assembly of the Union of South Africa as follows.

Apartheid was in South Africa; now it has been transferred to Palestine.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

The history of apartheid-era South Africa is incredibly sad and at times infuriatingly incomprehensible.