Professor Colin Bundy
Black, White and Gold: The Segregation Era, 1910-1948
Summary
Colin Bundy explores how the practice and policy of segregation in South Africa was substantially shaped by the large-scale gold mining industry and its labor policies. This is the first of three lectures outlining the history of twentieth century South Africa which was established in 1910.
Professor Colin Bundy
Historian Colin Bundy retired after a career as an academic and university administrator. He served as vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, principal of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford. As a scholar he was best known for his Rise and Fall of a South African Peasantry and was co-author (with William Beinart) of Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa. He has published widely on South African history and politics, and this lecture draws upon two of his books in the Jacana Pocket series: Short-changed? South Africa since apartheid, and Poverty in South Africa: Past and Present.
Well, yes and no. Apartheid quite clearly served economic interests and performed economic functions, but there were other issues as well. There were ideological issues, there was straight racism, and there was the political attempts to set up structures that entrenched and defended white supremacy and made trade-offs in one sort or another.
White churches, but particularly the Dutch Reformed Church, the official church of Afrikaners evolved quite detailed justifications for segregation. They accepted segregation and they sought to defend it. They sought to defend it in terms of fairness, and separate development. And it is important to notice that later during apartheid significant sectors of the churches, Christian churches did break with the ruling apartheid view. But in this period, in the segregation era, there was very, very little dissent from the Dutch Reformed Church.
Well, under the Union of South Africa, education for whites was free and compulsory. There was also an independent fee paying sector of white education. Black education in this period remained either vernacular schooling, that was primary schooling only. And the only schools in this period that took Africans through to the end of secondary education were mission schools. And they were replaced in the early 1950s, That’s the subject of my next talk, by something called Bantu Education.