from South African Quiz (Swan Press, Johannesburg; designed and compiled by the Department of Information, Pretoria; n.d. [approximately the late sixties]; pages 16-18)

Basic to South African politics and government is the policy of apartheid. It provides for, in particular, the political separate development of all the distinctive peoples that go to make up South Africa's multi-national population. It envisages, inter alia, a number of self- governing Bantu nations alongside and in co-operative association with, the White nation -- a South African commonwealth or community of nations.

The policy of separate development is based on these fundamental considerations:

The South African Situation

• Throughout their history of three centuries the peoples of South Africa have never been a single homogenous nation. The 3,500,000 people of European stock are a nation in their own right, with their own nationalism -- the first of all the African nationalisms.

  The 12 million Bantu people comprise several distinctive peoples, each with its own language, culture and customs. Among these are the Xhosa (3.5 million) and the Zulus (3 million).

Africa

• History has shown all nationalisms to be exclusive. One is not readily blended with the other and none will be placated by artificial formulas.
• Thus Black African peoples have so far all refused to be pseudo-European. Instead, they all insist on Africanisation -- a self-expression that is not watered down by any foreign (European) influence.
• Therefore the African and European personality have nowhere in Africa been accommodated in one political system without the one predominating to the exclusion of the other.

Therefore

• If all South Africa's diverse peoples were to share one political system, all the available evidence points to domination of one or more groups over all the others.

Instead

• South African policy insists that all the Republic's people are entitled to rule themselves. It insists that the White nation must continue to rule itself and must not be subjected to a newcolonialism.

Therefore

• Apartheid safeguards the long-established nationhood of the White people in that part of South Africa which has always been theirs and which they did not take from anyone.
• At the same time apartheid provides for the progress of all the separate Bantu peoples to full self-government.
• The focal point of this political development is the homelands of the Bantu peoples -- those parts of the country -- larger than England and Wales -- in which they originally settled and which are still theirs today.
• The basis of all political progress for the Bantu is what is familiar to them -- their own traditional systems of government.
• These are being developed to carry the full burden of Statehood.
• In order that their political autonomy may have substance, apartheid calls for the full social and economic progress of the Bantu peoples.
• Separate development does, in fact, mean that the Bantu peoples will as far as possible be self-sufficient in all spheres of national activity. They will provide their own doctors, teachers, civil servants and businessmen.

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© Copyright 1998 Patrick Beherec (or original author)
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