1959: what does Apartheid mean?




Men were not born brothers; they have to discover each other, and this is what the Apartheid wants to prevent.
What is the Apartheid?
It depends on who answers. If you ask a member of the South African Government, he will say that it is the separate and parallel growing of the whites and the blacks. If you ask a simple white citizen, who supports that political union, he will say that it is the instrument to preserve the white South African. If you ask a black, well, he can give you one of the many answers that emerge from the
aspects of Apartheid which he had encountered that day, since for him it doesn’t deal with the ideological concept nor the policy, but of which all his life – study, work, love – is strictly confined. He could give you a list of the rules that prohibit him to aspire major aims achieved by any kind of civil person or to join pleasures of which others could take for granted, but it is possible that he can make it. In that moment his greatest worry could be how to save his smart son from the dull “Bantu education” that the government is introducing for the blacks in schools instead of the regular education. Otherwise, maybe when you meet him he has spent a night in jail because he was outside after the curfew and without a piece of paper with a signature of a white authorizing him to do it.
This is Apartheid for him. All of these things, big and small, and many more.
If you want to know how the Africans live - black men and women in South Africa –you will obtain a description of Apartheid with facts, because in a black man’s life, in his whole life, the rejection from a white has always the last word. With the word “rejection” Apartheid began, many times before it consolidated into laws and legislations, long before it became a racial exclusion and political theory of a government. The Afrikaner nationalists didn’t invented it, they simply developed it. It is the impulse of Cain on which they based, it was and it has always been inside a great number of white South Africans, both English and Afrikaans language speakers.
In South Africa the blacks have the more tiring jobs, because any white person doesn’t want to dig on the road or unload a truck. For any type of employment that a white person wants to do, there are fines and restrictions in order to exclude the black person. In the construction and in the industry, the Africans are the labourers and they are not permitted by law to become something else. They cannot be behind the counter of the shops and they cannot be employed together with white employers. Anywhere they work, they cannot use the toilets or the refectories of the whites. The real life of any kind of community – restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs and coffee shops – has no room for an African man or woman. They work in all these places but they cannot enter and sit. Art galleries, cinemas, theaters, golf courses and sport clubs and even the libraries, don’t permit access to blacks. At the post offices and  in other governmental offices, the blacks are served in segregated counters.
What does it mean to live this way, from the day you were born until the day you die, I cannot answer. No white can.