research about population registration act

South Africa's Apartheid Era Population Registration Act

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South Africa's Population Registration Act No. 30 (commenced on July 7) was passed in 1950 and defined in clear terms who belonged to a particular race. Race was defined by physical appearance and the act required people to be identified and registered from birth as belonging to one of four distinct racial groups: White, Coloured, Bantu (Black African), and Other. It was one of the "pillars" of Apartheid. When the law was implemented, citizens were issued identity documents and race was reflected by the individual's Identity Number.

The Act was typified by humiliating tests which determined race through perceived linguistic and/or physical characteristics. The wording of the Act was imprecise, but it was applied with great enthusiasm:

A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white — and not generally accepted as Coloured — or who is generally accepted as White — and is not obviously Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu...

A Bantu is a person who is, or is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa...

A Coloured is a person who is not a White person or a Bantu ...

Racial Test

The following elements were used for determining the Coloureds from the Whites:

• Facial features
• Characteristics of the person's hair on their head
• Characteristics of the person's other hair
• Home language and the knowledge of Afrikaans
• The area where the person lives
• The person's friends
• Eating and drinking habits
• Socioeconomic status

The Pencil Test

If the authorities doubted the color of someone's skin, they would use a "pencil in hair test." A pencil was pushed in the hair, and if it remained in place without dropping, the hair was designated as frizzy hair and the person would then be classified as colored. If the pencil dropped out of the hair, the person would be deemed white.

Incorrect Determination

Many decisions were wrong, and families wound up being split and/or evicted for living in the wrong area. Hundreds of colored families were reclassified as white and in a handful of instances, Afrikaners were designated as colored. In addition, some Afrikaner parents abandoned children with frizzy hair or children with dark skin who were considered outcasts.

Other Apartheid Laws

The Population Registration Act No. 30 worked in conjunction with other laws passed under the apartheid system. Under the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 , it was illegal for a white person to marry someone of another race. The Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 made it a crime for a white person to have sex with someone from another race.

Repeal of The Population Registration Act

The South African Parliament repealed the act on June 17, 1991. However, the racial categories set forth by the act are still ingrained in the culture of South Africa. They also still underlie some of the official policies designed to remedy past economic inequalities.

"War Measures Continuation. Population Registration." South African History Online, June 22, 1950.

• Apartheid Era Signs - Racial Segregation in South Africa
• Racial Classification Under Apartheid
• South African Apartheid-Era Identity Numbers
• What Was Apartheid in South Africa?
• The End of South African Apartheid
• Group Areas Act No. 41 of 1950
• A Brief History of South African Apartheid
• Pre-Apartheid Era Laws: Natives (or Black) Land Act No. 27 of 1913
• Grand Apartheid in South Africa
• The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act
• What Is a Literacy Test?
• Quotes From PW Botha, Prime Minister of South Africa
• Apartheid Quotes About Bantu Education
• Pass Laws During Apartheid
• Biography of Nontsikelelo Albertina Sisulu, South African Activist
• South Africa's Extension of University Education Act of 1959

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On-line version  ISSN 2309-9585 Print version  ISSN 0259-0190

Kronos vol.40 n.1 cape town nov. 2014.

The Book of Life: The South African population register and the invention of racial descent, 1950-1980

Keith Breckenridge

WISER, University of the Witwatersrand

This article examines the project of racial classification under Apartheid through the operations of the population register. It follows, in particular, a shift in the determination of race from the criterion of'community acceptance' in the early 1950s to a purely administrative and bureaucratic matter of descent derived from the paperwork in the late 1960s. The study shows that the project Eben Dönges called the 'Book of Life' was at the heart of the planning and practice of the Apartheid state, but that it took two contrasting forms. The first, associated with the green identity cards issued during the 1950s and early 1960s, derived identities and races for six million people, with surprising success, on the basis of the returns to the 1951 census. The second, associated with the inconvenient 50-page Book of Life that was issued after 1970, was a pure case of unrestrained panopticism and a simple failure, failing even to re-register the original population captured by the green identity cards.

A population register is actually a book containing the life-story of every individual whose name is recorded on that register. It contains the most important acts relating to such a person. In some cases the life-story of the individual is very short. In the case of a stillborn baby it contains only one entry and one page. In other cases a long life-history has to be recorded in that book. All those important facts regarding the life of every individual will be combined in this book and recorded under the name of a specific person, who can never change his identity. It is only when the last page in that book of life is written by an entry recording the death of such a person, that the book is closed and taken out of the gallery of the living and placed in the gallery of the dead. Eben Dönges, minister of the Interior, Introduction to the Second Reading of the Population Registration Bill, 8 March 1950 1

Centralised population registration was the bureaucratic cornerstone of the Apartheid state, the lynch-pin of the Group Areas Act, and of the Dompas (Reference Book). 2

As Muriel Horrell put it in her 1971 assessment of the legal foundations of the state: 'Basic to the rest of the Apartheid legislation was the classification of the population into racial categories.' 3 It was population registration that created the distinctive four-part racial order in South Africa - placing individuals into one of the basic categories of Coloured, Indian, White or Black, creating a social order that shows many signs of persisting long into the era of non-racial democracy. Population registration, as Deborah Posel has shown, became a powerful administrative loom in the fashioning of the enduring South African obsession with racial reasoning. 4 Much of this is now very well known. 5 But the work of racial classification was more intrinsically bureaucratic - in the sense of being about the highly normalised regimes of paperwork that form the focus of this special issue - than the published accounts to date have suggested. In this article I examine the documentary tools used to do the administrative work of creating and populating these racial categories: the 1951 Census, the Identity Card issued between 1955 and 1970, and the Book of Life that replaced it. In exploring this regime of paperwork my goal is, in part, to add to the already substantial scholarship that suggests that South Africa, in comparison with other societies, has been profoundly shaped over the course of the twentieth century by coercive regimes of racialised documentary registration. 6 I want, also, to show (as South Africans begin yet another round of applications for a new identity card) that each generation of official documentation can erase the political purpose of its immediate predecessor. And finally, I want to highlight the paradoxical contradiction between the state's often unchecked enthusiasm for centralised surveillance and its very limited capacities to manage the administrative labour requirements and the compliance of its subjects - something which, if it is not a structural feature of the modern South African state, is certainly a peculiar and unconscious bureaucratic habit. 7 And one which we should finally abandon.

The proposal for a central register of racial identification long-predated Apartheid, but like many of the other plans for social engineering in the first half of the century, it lay unrealised in the face of administrative indecision and parsimony. 8 That changed in 1948. The Population Registration Act of 1950, which preceded both Group Areas and the Bewysburo (Bureau of Proof), required every South African to secure an Identity Card - a laminated certificate that contained a photograph submitted by the applicant, recorded an address, a simple identity number and a racial classification. The 'most important aspect of the identity card', as Eben Dönges - the minister of the Interior, and moving spirit behind the project - put it, was 'the identity number'. 9 It served as a numerical index linking all the other registration events. The first (of four) national identity numbers that South Africans have adopted over the last century, this one consisted of the last two digits of the person's year of birth followed by the census district number, and then the birth registration number within that district. Initially, race was indicated discreetly by the final digit - a letter - of the identity number, but from the mid-1960s race was stamped on the cards in bright red ink. Other than the photograph, this information was initially all confirmed - in an extremely labour-intensive manner - against the returns on the forms of the 1951 census. The primary - indeed ultimately the only purpose of the first round of population registration -was the racial classification of the individuals identified. All South Africans, whatever their race, were issued with one of these laminated cards: Africans had them glued into the covers of their Reference Books; Whites, Indians and Coloureds were issued with wallet-sized cards that were roughly half the size. The cards were decorated along their borders with distinctive, and significant, iconography. Those for whites, Indians and Coloureds had the legend 'SA Burger - SA Citizen' (and no mention of the population register) while those for blacks had 'Bevolkingsregister - Naturelle : Population Register - Natives'.

On the distinction between Citizen and Native much turned under Apartheid, yet, to begin with, the actual procedures of classification were, as Jan Smuts objected at the time, astonishingly ad hoc, 'left to quite ordinary and untrained persons, who are not trained for this job to say who is a White Person, who a Coloured person, and who a Native' - life-altering decisions that were, at once, arbitrary and contradictory. 10 The reason for this casual disinterest in the volumes of sociobiology that determined the meanings of race by the 1950s was very clear, and explicit at the time: many white families were descended from black ancestors. This meant that assessments of racial descent were politically unacceptable. Once the surface assessment of the census agents had been recorded, 'objections founded on ancestry will not even be referred to the judicial Board', Dönges explained to parliament: 'Such objections will immediately go to the wastepaper basket where they belong.' 11 A generation later, by the middle of the 1960s, the population register had restored the place of ancestry in the determination of race. The processes of race classification had become intrinsically bureaucratic and archival, determined by the existing recorded responses on the census form, birth registrations and the documents that individuals used to apply for identity documents. In this sense racial classification under Apartheid was determined by a new kind of descent, one that was bureaucratically formed, and fundamentally incurious about biology or history prior to 1951.

From the outset an ambitious project of biopolitical surveillance lay behind the Nationalist Party interest in Dönges' Book of Life: 'All those important facts regarding the life of every individual will be combined in this book and recorded under the name of a specific person, who can never change his identity.' For the population register to work as a 'living book' it should be 'kept up to date', recording the 'address of the individual concerned' and all further changes of address. Also present at the beginning of the project was a naive faith in the labour-saving and surveillance powers of automation technologies. The Book of Life, Dönges explained, would mean that 'I merely take the [individual punch] cards, put them through the machine which can deal with thousands per hour, and I present [the minister of Defence] with a list containing not only the registration numbers of [conscripts] but also their names, mechanically typed, not by typists, but by the machine itself.' Yet there were also clear limits to this biopolitical curiosity between 1950 and 1970. The first was racist: although Dönges believed that the state should be investigating the lives of Africans in a similar way, he carefully excluded them from the requirements and expectations of the Book of Life. The second was administrative: the project of race classification so overwhelmed the resources of the Bureau of the Census that Dönges' 'living book' - maintained by the continuous recording of addresses - was not begun. Instead the project of race classification in the first generation of Apartheid hinged on the identity document itself and the static records of the population register. The green Identity Card (Persoonskaart) was the totem and instrument of the original Population Registration Act, 12 working as a certificate that the individual had submitted to race classification and proof of the state's approbation.

Among white people, there was some opposition to the cards - the Springbok Legion protested that the law robbed the 'individual of that anonymity which is his security against victimisation' and pointed out that similar cards in Europe were closely linked to rationing or social welfare, neither of which were present in South Africa. 13 Jan Smuts, in the last weeks of his life, also fought the Bill determinedly. He predicted that the project had little, in fact, to do with the registration of white people (who were otherwise already abundantly registered) or with Africans (who were practically ignored by the Act); its real purpose was 'to deal with the Coloured situation' and to provide a basis for eliminating the Coloured franchise. 14 And he warned that Dönges' living book would fail - South Africans of all races, unlike Europeans, would not comply with the requirement for continuous registration, creating, like the pass laws he had written, reasons for widespread 'flouting of the law and ... evasion.' Smuts and his United Party colleagues also warned of the growing danger of international isolation at the United Nations that would follow from the coercive registration of Indians in particular. They saw the implications of antagonising the 'non-European nations of the world whose total population exceeds half the total population of the world' at the United Nations. 15 But the main product of Smuts's bitter denunciation of the Population Registration Bill was condensed, at the time and for decades afterwards, in two claims: that the Nationalists were trying to 'classify the unclassifiable' and 'trying to do what is impossible to do.' 16 It was the refutation of Smuts's claims that South Africans would not comply and that race classification was impossible that motivated Nationalist hubris during the 1960s.

For there was startlingly little in the way of meaningful opposition or noncompliance to the first round of population registration. The universally available census data were key to this success. The selection of civil servants as the first recipients of the cards, and the use of certified professional photographers as agents of the application process including the distribution of racially specific forms, also worked very efficiently, at least for those confident of their status as whites. The police records on the distribution of the Persoonskaart in the early 1950s suggest that they were much more animated by the dangers of slenter-fotograwe (crooked photographers) than with any problems of dissent or resistance. 17 For whites, the answers they gave to the enumerators in the 1951 census were captured on punched cards, retained by the Census Bureau and used to confirm the racial status that they claimed when they submitted application forms for ID cards after 1953. 18 For Coloureds and Indians the process was much more contested: data on the census forms were usually incomplete or officially suspect, which meant that the application for the identity card was itself the key moment of race classification. Following a tradition that dated back a century, the Apartheid state utterly mistrusted the biographical information provided by Indians, forcing them to apply in person for their identity cards, using a state photographer. 19 At these interviews, Census officials were careful to insist that the applicants (most of whom were descended from indentured labourers who had arrived a century earlier) provide an original nationality. 20 The registration of Coloured people was even more contested, with only a trickle of voluntary applications for identity cards. From 1956 municipalities, mostly in the Transvaal, began to coerce Coloured people to present themselves for racial classification. Applicants for the identity cards were compelled by the forms themselves to accept one of the four basic racial categories - sometimes, it is clear from the records of later reclassification appeals, without an understanding of the implications. 21 The late 1950s marked the high moment of the humiliating bureaucratic ordeal of racial classification, with over 100,000 'border-line' individuals and their families being forced on to terrifying life trajectories at the discretion of the Bureau of Census officials. 22 By the end of the 1950s regional offices in each of the provinces had been established to issue identity cards and undertake 'the classification of persons of doubtful race'. 23

In comparison with the many other registration projects of twentieth-century South African history, what is most striking about the identity card system was its success and efficiency. The first cards were issued in significant numbers from 1955, and - despite some opposition and some administrative delays after the announce-ment 24 - by early 1958 the minister of the Interior reported to parliament that the register contained the names of 95 per cent of Coloured, Indian and White people. Much of the work of persuading people to apply for the cards was done by making them requirements of other social benefits - of, for example, teacher training (1956), government pensions (1959) and nursing registration (1958). 25 But it is also clear that the ideological enthusiasm and determination of the officials in the Bureau of the Census for race classification (of which more below) was another important motivation. By February 1963 the state was confident enough to impose the deadline requiring its white citizens to show their identity cards to the police. 26 Yet more significant than this practical success is the fact that by the end of the 1960s the combined processes of population registration - the 1951 census and the applications for identity cards - had completed Smuts's impossible task of allocating all South Africans to one of the four arbitrary Verwoerdian racial categories. It was at this point of success that the officials in the state began to lobby for the much more elaborate, panoptic, Book of Life, one which reanimated Dönges' original plans but which very quickly proved to be an administrative disaster. The main result of this second phase of population registration was that it seems to have clouded official and popular memory of the work of race classification that was done by the issuing of the identity cards.

By 1967, a generation after the passing of the initial Act, almost all adults had been captured in one of the population registers - maintained either by the Native Affairs Department or the Census Bureau. For the three million successful whites this meant that the temporary enumerators of the 1951 census had not disputed their self-selected race on the census forms. And, after 1955, officials had not queried their race on the basis of the photographs submitted along with their identity card applications. For many of the one million people who were registered as Coloured, racial classification involved a much more humiliating and frightening official examination, where the legal criteria of racial acceptance and appearance were decided by officials of the Department of the Interior. And for the 10 million Africans registered by the combined efforts of the mobile teams from the Bewysburo and the coercive requirements of influx control, the process was often degrading and sometimes terrifying. 27

It is important to notice that the very successful Population Register that was developed during the 1950s was built on the cheap. Most of the work was undertaken in five military huts that had been attached to the main offices of the bureau in Pretoria. They suffered from severe shortages of staff, very high rates of staff turnover, and broken and worn out tabulating machines. By the end of the decade most of these problems had been addressed, with new buildings, additional staff and new tabulating machines. 28 But, in that year, the population register was transferred out of the poorly resourced Census Bureau and directly into the Department of the Interior, where population registration was adopted as the department's main business. From there, close to the centre of state power, the project of racial registration proceeded with increasing complexity and confusion. 29

For whites and Coloureds, the officials built up most of the population register by carefully extracting racial selections from the responses to the original 1951 census on to punched cards. This use of the Census data was illegal, a violation of the prohibition in the Census Act on the use of response data in 'any legal proceedings' and an obvious breach of the promise on the forms that 'no Government Department or any private person' would have access to the responses. But the census data used in compiling the population register were quickly obscured by the applications for identity cards that required a similar act of self-classification; before 1967, where the race claimed on the identity card conflicted with either the respondent or the enumerators' assessment from the census, officials were licensed to apply the practical appearance and acceptance tests. In that year the law was amended to make racial classification a matter of bureaucratically determined descent, and some of this was completely invisible to the individuals being classified. 30 The population register grew steadily from the early 1950s, expanding by about 100,000 individuals annually from birth registration events gathered - mostly from hospitals - for whites, Coloureds and Indians, silently allocating all individuals to a racial group. 'Every person is classified at birth,' the minister explained, 'but they only become aware of their classification when they apply for an identity card after their 16th birthday.' 31 By the end of the 1960s the population register had done the impossible job, as the government constantly boasted, of allocating all South Africans to one of the four basic racial categories.

It was as the first cohort of 16-year-olds who had not been classified during the 1951 census began to apply for identity cards, that the state moved to embed a new form of racial descent into the operations of the population register. In the determination of race before 1967 the law had been carefully crafted to avoid racial genealogy (which had been used, for example in segregationist Natal, Nazi Germany and the US). 32 Instead, for the first decade the Act relied on pragmatic, and arbitrary, tests of communal acceptance and appearance. 33 To be more precise: during the 1950s the law specified that whiteness was determined by community acceptance; after 1962 it required both acceptance and the much more capricious test of physical appearance. Initially, as I have said, the leaders of the National Party were anxious not to make the test of whiteness a matter of descent because they were well aware, as H. J. 'Bronkie' Bronkhorst reminded them in parliament, that few 'amongst us can beat upon his breast and proclaim he is of pure white descent.' 34 But by 1967 a new logic of descent had been changed by the work of the population register. As the minister explained, those who were applying for identity cards after that date would have to answer a simple, chilling question: 'How were your parents classified?' 35

The idea of determining race by administrative descent - of relying exclusively on already-existing data on individuals', or their parents', race in the Bureau of Census records - came from a surprising source, one that reflects the unusual combination of authoritarianism and dependency that often influenced the Apartheid state's decision making. 36 During the first half of the 1960s the minister of Coloured Affairs was P. W. Botha, the future prime minister and state president. Before he adopted the mantle as champion of the South African military, Botha served as the first minister of Coloured Affairs and as the patron of the conservative faction of Coloured politics. 37 It was this group, acting through the Coloured Affairs Advisory Board, who began to lobby from 1964 for race classification to be based on the returns of the 1951 census. The board also lobbied for other stiffenings of the processes of classification, 38 but it was only this amendment - already a part of the practical work of the Bureau of the Census - that became law in 1967, and the exclusive basis of race classification. 39 Public and scholarly awareness of the adoption of a new kind of racial descent has largely disappeared in South Africa, because it coincided with another very elaborate expansion in the goals of the identity document issued to citizens.

High Apartheid took its pure form in the years between the assassination of Verwoerd in 1966 and the international oil and domestic labour crises in 1973. Foreign investment, most of it from the US, surged back into the country after fleeing in the wake of the Sharpeville crisis. With the wages of migrant labourers locked at historically low levels by the combined operations of the Dompas and massive subcontinental migration to the mines, the rates of return on investment in South Africa were amongst the highest in the world. The Nationalists crushed the United Party in the 1970 elections, winning 70 per cent of the parliamentary seats, and they were very aware of the fact that they no longer faced any significant opposition. 40 The long boom of the 1960s had lifted white prosperity dramatically in real terms and relative to black people. And Afrikaner capital, for the first time, had secured its place at the high table of the mining economy. 41

It was in this comparatively short window of self-confidence and affluence -which stands in contrast to the much longer periods of parsimony and hesitation before and chaotic reform afterwards - that the grandest technopolitical projects of the Apartheid state were born. 42 The most uncompromising and ambitious political and social engineering projects of the Apartheid period were initiated in the years between 1967 and 1973. It was in 1970, for example, that Prime Minister Vorster announced the project for the domestic enrichment of uranium, leading to weapons capacity. 43 The plans for the massive dams of the Orange River Development Project, which sought to rearrange the climate of the subcontinent, were first drafted by the great imperial dam builder William Willcocks in 1903, but they were only finally built in the early 1970s. 44 And, critically for this story, it was also in 1970 that the Department of the Interior relaunched the population register, powered this time by one of the new IBM computers, a determination to capture all forms of civil registration in a single purpose-built high-rise in Pretoria, and an ominous name -the Book of Life.

The use of this phrase - the Book of Life - dated from the first parliamentary debates over population registration in 1950. In explaining the purpose of the register to his colleagues, the minister of the Interior, T. E. Dönges, had said that 'a population register is actually a book containing the life-story of every individual whose name is recorded on that register.' And it was from that date that the Afrikaans phrase lewensboek began to enter the vocabulary of the bureaucracy. 45 But the Book of Life project that emerged after 1967 was in its most important respects a very different instrument from the population register and the Identity Card that preceded it.

In the first instance, the project was funded on an entirely different scale to the modestly resourced effort that had been run out of temporary offices by the Census Bureau. A 30-storey black monolith, called Civitas, was built in Pretoria at the extravagant cost at the time of R10 million, with a special IBM computer room in the basement. 46 And it was staffed lavishly: over 500 clerks and data processors worked in the central office, with 100 each in the Johannesburg and Cape Town offices, and 50 in Durban. These officials worked exclusively on the population register, with much smaller establishments devoted to the work of issuing passports and registering voters. 47

The South African project was modelled on the Israeli and Swedish population registers, which officials in the Department of the Interior saw as the most advanced globally. 48 The Swedish system, which dated from 1947, had used an identity number, a personal paper file and a raft of benefits to support very fine-grained, and largely self-reporting, surveillance of the reproductive, tax and employment histories of every resident. 49 But in one key respect the South African register was different: the architecture of the Swedish system was decentralised, using computer registers after 1967 based separately in each of the 300 municipalities. Two historical imperatives drove this decentralisation. The first was the enduring tradition of church-based civil registration in Europe, which made parishes and then municipalities the site of registration, welfare and taxation; 50 and the second was the compelling interest in preventing a repetition of the data-driven genocide of Nazi Germany. 51 Over generations the Swedish state specifically opted not to allow the development of a single, centralised database of civil identities.

Centralisation was the object of the South African project. 52 In addition to birth, voting and death certificates that had long been issued and held in Pretoria, the personal file for each individual in the population register at Civitas contained marriage certificates, gun and driver's licences that had previously been retained in local magistrates' and municipal offices. An overweening and naive surveillance goal was at the heart of the new system - the Vorster cabinet minutes from February 1968 specifically record that the object of the project was to 'provide the State with better control over its citizens and to give effect to better national security.' 53 Like the Swedish system and the Nazi Volkskartei, 54 the population register was supposed to be a continuously updated register of domicile for all whites, Coloureds and Indians - but the South African project was an instrument of policing. This unrealisable surveillance ambition, the effort to exercise control through the proliferation of linked registration functions, was the Book of Life's undoing.

The project also had roots (at least in the Department of the Interior) in the belief that the Apartheid state was sustained by its technological supremacy, that legitimacy was derived, in part, from the ability to deploy globally precocious forms of social engineering. 55 This technopolitical imperative was manifest from the first criticisms of the 'backward' static population register that had been built after 1951. And it certainly formed a major part of the public justification of the scheme, beginning with the new minister, Lourens Muller, declaring during the second reading of the Bill announcing the Book of Life that the South African state 'is keeping pace with developments in the world.' 56 Later in his speech the Minister invoked the justification that runs through the history of universal registration projects in the twentieth century: the project was an 'almost indispensable instrument' in a 'progressive country and modern state'. The mystique of the new IBM computers was at the heart of this desire to act progressively. 'We are living in an age of mechanization and automation,' as the minister put it, in 'the world of the computer.' The promise of massive efficiencies - exactly like those promised by the Census Bureau - that would follow from the integration of the separate drivers', firearms, marriage and birth registers provided a third public justification. 57

Behind the scenes the reasoning for the Book of Life was different but also conventional: an almost routine example of the administrative will to know combined with a powerful but secret national security imperative. The project began in 1966 with an investigation by the Public Service Commission which argued for the centralisation and automation of all forms of registration. Key to the original idea was the idea of a massive improvement in efficiency from a centralised and continuously updated register of addresses - the working adresburo that was specified in the original Population Registration Act but never implemented. This emphasis on efficiency altered the following year as the worked-out proposal reached the cabinet. At that level the main supporters of the project were those departments 'wat alga met lands-veiligheidgemoeidis [charged with National Security]' - the police, Defence and Civil Protection. By the time the instruction came from Vorster's office for the bureaucracy 'to move ahead speedily' with the project, its primary raison d'etre was for the 'uitoefening van beter beheer oor sy burgers asook vir die veiligheid van die Republiek [exercise of better control over its citizens as well as for the safety of the Republic]'. 58 It was only after this coercive justification was clearly established that the other departments (at an interdepartmental meeting in August 1968) began to add to the proposal for a compulsory adresburo the many different forms of compulsory registration that entailed the grand biopolitical project of the Book of Life: the recording of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, widowing, naturalisations, applications for passports, drivers' licences, firearms, immunisations, professions and education. 59

What is particularly interesting about the planning for the Book of Life is that it was opposed, with real foresight, by the officials who had undertaken the massive task of race classifiction over the previous decade. Director Botha, of the Census Bureau, had been in charge of the population register since 1951, and he was responsible for the successful registration, and racial classification, of six and a half million people. He warned that the Book of Life was a dangerous risk, and he reminded his superiors that the purpose of the register was the making and preservation of Apartheid. Identification was only a secondary objective where the main goal was the 'identification of a person's Race'. Where, he asked, was this new project to find a new body of source documents ('brondokumente') equivalent to the four million records that had been so successfully generated by the 1951 census? The extraction of racial categories from those documents had been 'werklik n ontsaglike taak [really an awesome task]' but the new law made no provision for generating a similar set of documents. A new round of applications would require the cooperation of every photographer in the country, which was 'politically dangerous' and left open the possibility that people would 'cross the line' unless all available documents were examined, something which was an enormous task. Unlike the other, younger officials, Botha warned that his experience of computers in administration had been 'bitter' and that they usually did not justify the enormous expense. Finally he warned his bosses - in language that echoed Smuts and was antithetical to the enthusiasm for West European bureaucracy that informed the public debate - that South Africans would not adopt the norms of the old forms of decentralised registration that worked so well in Europe. 60

The project was plagued by the intractable problems that Botha had warned about from the outset. To begin with, the construction of the intimidating new skyscraper was delayed. The new IBM computers were moved into Civitas in May 1971, most of the staff took possession of their offices a year later, but work continued on the building well into 1973. When the department began accepting applications for the new Books of Life in February 1972, they were quickly overwhelmed. Within weeks the department restricted applications to voters in specific districts and to 16-year-olds who had no other forms of ID. After the excitement of the first year the project never recovered its momentum; fully six years into it, nearly half of the target population of 7.5 million people had still not received their new books. In that year the processing of applications was so delayed - processing of a new application was taking over two years - that the books could not be used for the registration and authentication of voters. 61 As late 1983, over 100,000 registered (Coloured, Indian and White) voters had still not yet applied for Books of Life.

The new scheme also uncovered (and exacerbated) the regulatory problems around controlling driving in South Africa. The original plan was to strip local authorities of the ability to issue licences, primarily for the surveillance benefits that would accrue to the central government in Pretoria. But the results were catastrophic. Year after year during the 1970s, extensions were required for the compulsory replacement of local licences with the Book of Life. 62 Belatedly the state realised that all black drivers would also have to reapply for new licences. 63 From 1978 onwards the Department of the Interior was forced to continuously postpone the deadline for drivers to have their licences inserted by the delays in the processing of books. 64 And, in a pattern that, ever since, has threatened the regulatory fabric of daily life in South Africa, the slips of paper that were eventually stuck into the Book of Life were easy to forge, opening the floodgates to illegal drivers. 65

Yet, notwithstanding the bureaucratic delays and confusions associated with the project, what is most striking about the books themselves is how little they seem to have been used. Aside from the pages of Marriage and Drivers licensing, most of the Books of Life consist of 60 pristine blank pages. Occasionally an especially conscientious person may have filled in the date of a tetanus innoculation on the pages for Diverse Immunisations but, in general, the books were not used, at all. People tended to hold on to them (especially after the identity number was changed to remove the racial classification from the last two digits) because they provided the only official record of marriage registration. But otherwise their significance lay in the mute testimony of a failure to engage the state. And the contrast with the embellishment on an ordinary Dompas - with its monthly stamps for permission to seek work and medical inspections - is compelling.

The Book of Life also changed the architecture of registration for the much larger population of black people who had fallen under the Bewysburo. Paired with the new centralised population register, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 set up the process of stripping all black South Africans of their citizenship, allocating them to one of the emerging bantustans. 66 After the 1976 Soweto Uprising, the state began to use the rhetoric of independence to shift governmental responsibility onto these bantustans. Late in 1977, after representations from the chief ministers of the three pseudo-states of Lebowa, Ciskei and Bophutatswana, Vorster announced that all Africans would receive new identification documents 'similar to the Whites' Book of Life' and that entry to and travel in the white territories would be regulated by 'work permits'. 67 At the same time the Department of the Interior began to flesh out a special Kafkaesque nightmare of the bantustans, setting up separate population registers in the three that had been pushed into formal independence. 68 And then building a handful of immigration posts for the 'control of aliens' at arbitrary points on the thousands of kilometres of border linking the bantustans to the old white provinces. 69

By the end of the 1970s, P. W. Botha had overthrown the Vorster faction and begun to impose a new, more market- and military-oriented reform strategy on the state. A constitutional fantasy about the possibilities of decentralisation was one part of this reform project. In this plan, municipalities and a host of other formal and informal institutions would take on the onerous work of maintaining the population register that the Department of Interior had failed to manage. 70 Constitutional gymnastics formed one part of this new ideological brand of reform; Thatcherite contempt for the state was another. The contrast between the late 1960s view of the capacious and sinister state, one that would not shrink from ambitious projects of social engineering, and the widespread public and academic contempt for the bureaucracy in the late 1970s, is striking. Key to this view of the state as a bloated and incapable source of employment for millions of lazy officials, as the Sunday Times observed, was the publicity disaster of the Book of Life project, 'bogged down hopelessly to the degree that the citizenry have been begged to stop applying for their documents.' 71 In fact, of course, the Book of Life project showed off both aspects of power in South Africa: how limited goals and bureaucratic and ideological tenacity and the power of the census data could achieve the impossible, on one hand; and how bad planning and administrative and national security overreach, irrespective of resources, could produce disaster. This is a lesson that the state, here and elsewhere, seems determined to learn in every generation. 72

1 Hansard, 8 March 1950, col 2498, 'Population Registration Bill, Second Reading'. 2 D. Posel, 'Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa', African Studies Review, 44, 2, 2001, 87-113;         [  Links  ] K. Breckenridge, 'Verwoerd's Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of Apartheid, History Workshop Journal, 59, 2005, 83-109.         [  Links  ] 3 M. Horrell, Legislation and Race Relations: A Summary of the Main South African Laws Which Affect Race Relationships (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1971), 9.         [  Links  ] 4 D. Posel, 'What's in a Name? Racial Categorisations under Apartheid and Their Afterlife', Transformation, 2001, 50-74;         [  Links  ] Posel, 'Race as Common Sense'; G. Mare, 'Race Counts in Contemporary South Africa: "An Illusion of Ordinariness,"' Transformation, 47, 2001, http://www.history.ukzn.ac.za/ojs/index.php/transformation/article/download/842/657 . 5 E. H. Brookes, Apartheid: A Documentary Study of Modern South Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 19-25;         [  Links  ] G. Bowker and S. L. Starr, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999), 195-225 on reclassification appeals in particular;         [  Links  ] W. G. James, 'T. E. Dönges and the Group Areas Act' (Johannesburg: African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, 1992),         [  Links  ] http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/8815 is useful on Dönges. 6 E. Kahn, 'The Pass Laws' in E. Hellman (ed.), Handbook of Race Relations in South Africa (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1949), 275-91;         [  Links  ] C. van Onselen, 'Crime and Total Institutions in the Making of Modern South Africa: The Life of "Nongoloza" Mathebula, 1867-1948', History Workshop Journal, 19, 1985, 62-81; P. Frankel, 'The Politics of Passes: Control and Change in South Africa, Journal of Modern African Studies, 17, 2, 1 June 1979, 199-217, doi:10.2307/160715; D. Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948-1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); D. Hindson, Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987); Bowker and Starr, Sorting Things Out, 195-225; U. Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 'Cat and Mouse Games: The State, Indians in the Cape and the Permit System, 1900s-1920s' in I. About, J. Brown and G. Lonergan (eds), Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers and Practices (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); K. Breckenridge, Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 7 Breckenridge, 'Verwoerd's Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of Apartheid'; K. Breckenridge, 'The Elusive Panopticon: The HANIS Project and the Politics of Standards in South Africa' in C. Bennett and D. Lyon (eds), Playing the ID Card: Surveillance, Security and Identity in Global Perspective (London: Routledge, 2008), 39-56. 8 Posel, 'Race as Common Sense', 98. 9 'Population Registration Bill, Second Reading', col 2517. 10 Ibid, cols 2526-7; Bowker and Starr, Sorting Things Out; Posel, 'Race as Common Sense'. 11 'Population Registration Bill, Second Reading', col 2521. 12 Government Gazette, Act No 30 of 1950 Population Registration Act', 7 July 1950. 13 National executive committee of the Springbok Legion, 'Statement on the Populations Registration Bill', Fighting Talk, March 1950. 14 'Population Registration Bill, Second Reading', col 2524. 15 Ibid, cols 2529, 2542; M. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Lawrence Stone Lectures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 178-89. 16 'Population Registration Bill, Second Reading', col 2534. 17 SAB (Sentrale Argief Bewaarplek, now the National Archives Repository) South African Police (SAP) 477, 2/44/50, Persoonskaarte, 1963. 18 Bureau of Census and Statistics, South Africa, Report of the Director, 1951 (Pretoria, 1951); Bureau of Census and Statistics, South Africa, Report of the Director, 1952 (Pretoria, 1952). 19 M. Swan, Gandhi: The South African Experience (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985);         [  Links  ] Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 'Cat and Mouse Games. 20 Bureau of Census and Statistics, South Africa, Report of the Director, 1957 (Pretoria, 1957). 21 SAB MBN 34, B13, Rasklassifikasie, 1971. 22 M. Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa: 1956-1957 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1957), 39.         [  Links  ] 23 Bureau of Census and Statistics, Report of the Director, 1957. 24 Horrell, Survey of Race Relations: 1956-1957, 39; Kompol, Pretoria to Alle Afdelingskommissarisse, RSA en SWA, 'Persoonskaarte - Proklamasie 268 van 26/10/1962', 1 February 1963. 25 Horrell, Survey of Race Relations: 1956-1957; M. Horrell, A Survey of Race Relations in South Africa: 1957-1958 (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1959). 26 URU, vol 4433, 1962, Toon van Persoonskaarte Ingevolge Artikel Veertien van die Bevolkingsregistrasiewet, 1950, Soos Gewysig. 27 Hansard, 17 March 1967, 'Population Registration Amendment Bill, Second Reading'; Horrell, Survey of Race Relations: 19561957, 64-6. 28 Bureau of Census and Statistics, Report of the Director, 1951; Bureau of Census and Statistics, Report of the Director, 1952; Bureau of Census and Statistics, Report of the Director, 1957. 29 Department of the Interior, South Africa, Annual Report for the Calendar Year 1972 (Pretoria, 1972). 30 'Population Registration Amendment Bill, Second Reading', 17 March 1967. 31 Ibid. 32 J. Caplan, 'Registering the Volksgemeinschaft: Civil Status in Nazi Germany 1933-1939' in M. Steber and B. Gotto (eds), A Nazi 'Volksgemeinschaft'. ? German Society in the Third Reich (London: German Historical Institute; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 116-29. 33 Posel, 'Race as Common Sense'; Bowker and Starr, Sorting Things Out. 34 'Population Registration Amendment Bill, Second Reading', 17 March 1967. 35 Government Gazette, Act No 29 of 1970 Population Registration Amendment Act of 1970', 21 August 1970. 36 S. Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth-Century Natal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 116-26.         [  Links  ] 37 D. Y. Saks, 'The Failure of the Coloured Persons' Representative Council and Its Constitutional Repercussions, 1956-1985' (Unpublished MA thesis, Rhodes University, 1992), 38-50, http://eprints.ru.ac.za/1024/ . 38 The board was lobbying the Ministry of the Interior for much stricter criteria and procedures for the reclassification of Africans as Coloureds. In 1965 they appealed (unsuccessfully) for the withdrawal of all Identity Cards issued to Coloured people, and a return to the original classifications of the 1951 census. 39 SAB MBN 38, B16/4, Wet op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 1967. 40 See the confidence of the Nationalist MPs in the debate during 'Population Registration Amendment Bill, Second Reading' (Hansard, 27 July 1970). 41 F. Wilson, 'Unresolved Issues in the South African Economy: Labour', South African Journal of Economics, 43, 4, 1975, 311-27,         [  Links  ] doi:10.1111/j.1813-6982.1975.tb00460.x; D. O'Meara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948-1994 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1996), 173-7. On Anglo-American's sale of General Mining to Sanlam, see ibid, 120-4; H. Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2003), 534-47.         [  Links  ] 42 P. N. Edwards and G. Hecht, 'History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa,' Journal of Southern African Studies, 36, 3, September 2010, 619-39.         [  Links  ] 43 S. Polakow-Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 73.         [  Links  ] 44 W. Willcocks, Mr Willcocks' Report on Irrigation in South Africa, British Parliamentary Papers (BPP) CD 1163, Further Correspondence Relating to Affairs in South Africa (In Continuation of [Cd 903] January 1902) (Daira Sania Co, Egypt, 1901); T. Emmett and G. Hagg, 'Politics of Water Management: The Case of the Orange River Development Project' in M. Khosa (ed.), Empowerment through Economic Transformation (Pretoria: HSRC, 2001), 299-328. 45 Hansard, 8 March 1950; see also Hansard, 15 March 1950. 46 S. Leeman, 'Sad Saga of the Book of Life,' Pretoria News, 14 July 1983, section 2; Department of the Interior, South Africa, Annual Report for the Calendar Year 1973 (Pretoria, 31 December 1973). 47 Department of the Interior, Annual Report for the Calendar Year 1972. 48 SAB MBN 38, B16/4, Adjunk-Sekretaris (Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie) to Sekretaris van Binnelandsesake and Minister, 'Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie', Wet op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 11 November 1968; SAB MBN 38, B16/4, Wet op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 1967. 49 Jack Clarke, interview by Keith Breckenridge and Paul Edwards, 20 April 2004. 50 S. Szreter, 'Registration of Identities in Early Modern English Parishes and Amongst the English Overseas' in K. Breckenridge and S. Szreter (eds), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, Proceedings of the British Academy 182 (London: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67-92; P-A. Rosental, 'Civil Status and Identification in Nineteenth-Century France: A Matter of State Control?' in Breckenridge and Szreter (eds). Registration and Recognition, 137-65. 51 F. H. Cate, Privacy in the Information Age (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 44; International Institute for Vital Registration and Statistics (IIVRS), The Impact of Computerization on Population Registration in Sweden, (Bethesda: IIVRS, December 1996). 52 SAB MBN 38, B16/4, Adjunk-Sekretaris (Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie) to Sekretaris van Binnelandsesake and Minister, 'Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie, Wet op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 11 November 1968; 'Clearing up the Book of Life Confusion,' Rand Daily Mail, 14 December 1977, http://www.samedia.uovs.ac.za/cgi-bin/getpdf?year=1977&refno=5157&topic=5 . 53 'die Staat mag benodig vir die uitoefening van beter beheer oor sy burgers asook vir die veiligheid van die Republiek, te bewerkstellig', SAB MBN 38, B16/4, Adjunk-Sekretaris (Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie) to Sekretaris van Binnelandsesake and Minister, 'Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie', Wet op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 1967, 11 November 1968. 54 G. Aly and K. H. Roth, The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 45-55. 55 See Edwards and Hecht, 'History and the Technopolitics of Identity' for a discussion of this. 56 See SAB MBN 38, B16/4, W. J. Nijgh (Juris Doctor Leyden en Paris) to Le Roux, Wet op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 30 January 1967. 57 'Population Registration Amendment Bill, Second Reading', 27 July 1970. 58 SAB MBN 38, B16/4, Adjunk-Sekretaris (Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie) to Sekretaris van Binnelandsesake and Minister, 'Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie', Wet op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 1967, 11 November 1968. 59 SAB MBN 41, B25, Die Sekretaris (Deur die Adjunk-Sekretaris DR, PV, en BI), 'Wetsonwerp op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 1967', 8 August 1968; SAB MBN, 1968 Kabinetsmemoranda, vol 41. 60 SAB MBN 38, B16/4, L. Botha, Direkteur van Statistiek to Adjunk-Sekretaris van Binnelandsesake, 'Bevolkingsregistrasie en -identifikasie, 21 October 1968, Wet op Bevolkingsregistrasie, 1967. 61 D. Levin, 'Book of Life: Bad Decisions Cost SA R35m', Sunday Times, 20 May 1979. 62 '3 Million Must Still Get Books of Life', Pretoria News, 18 April 1978. 63 'Licences Warning to Blacks', Eastern Province Herald, 25 January 1978, http://www.samedia.uovs.ac.za/cgi-bin/getpdf?year=1978&refno=166&topic=42 . 64 Pietermaritzburg Bureau, 'Drivers' Licences Must Be in Book of Life by 1982', Daily News, 13 June 1978. 65 'Rybewyse Is die Boek se Swak', Beeld, 4 July 1978. 66 Republic of South Africa, Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act, 1970; L. Gevers, 'Black Sash and Red Tape: The Plight of the African Aged in KwaZulu and Natal, 1979-1990' (Unpublished Honours thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2012), 41. 67 'Reisdokument Gaan Pasboek Vervang', Volksblad, 23 July 1977; J. Theron, 'Influx Change Expected Soon, Citizen, 3 November 1977; Editor, 'Bewysboekstelsel, Transvaler, 4 November 1977. 68 BAO, vol 12/94, Transkei, Binnelandse Sake, Bevolkingsregistrasie, 1968; KGT, vol 28, Kommissaris-Generaal, Xhosa Volkseenheid, Staatsdepartemente, Republiek van Suid-Afrika, Justisie Landdroskantore Byhou van Bevolkingsregister; BAO, vol 11/76, Venda, Bevolkingsregistrasie, Sensus en Statistiek, 1979; BAO, vol 11/98, Ciskei, Bevolkingsregistrasie, 1981. 69 Department of the Interior, South Africa, Annual Report for the Calendar Year 1977 (Pretoria: 1977). 70 'New Plan to Keep Tabs', Pretoria News, 17 April 1980. 71 I. Wilkins, 'A Nation of Clerks', Sunday Times, 16 July 1978. 72 I would like to offer exceptional thanks to Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie for her tenacity and kindness in assembling this special issue of Kronos. Watching from afar it has seemed a thing of wonder.

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Introduction: Early Apartheid: 1948-1970

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At a Glance

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Table of contents:

Triumph of the National Party

• Science, God and Race

Many Nations

The passbook system, the defiance campaign, the freedom charter, women protest, the sharpeville massacre, the rivonia trial, shut down at home, organizing overseas.

The roots of apartheid can be found in the history of colonialism in South Africa and the complicated relationship among the Europeans that took up residence, but the elaborate system of racial laws was not formalized into a political vision until the late 1940s. That system, called apartheid (“apartness”), remained in place until the early 1990s and set the country apart, eventually making South Africa a pariah state shunned by much of the world.

Having aggressively promoted an ideology of Afrikaner nationalism for a decade, the National Party won South Africa’s 1948 election by promising to clamp down on non-white groups. Once in office, the National Party promptly began to institute racial laws and regulations it called  apartheid  (a word that means “apartness” in Afrikaans). Led by Daniel Malan, a former pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church turned politician, the National Party described apartheid in a pamphlet produced for the election as “a concept historically derived from the experience of the established White population of the country, and in harmony with such Christian principles as justice and equity. It is a policy which sets itself the task of preserving and safeguarding the racial identity of the White population of the country; of likewise preserving and safeguarding the identity of the indigenous peoples as separate racial groups.” 1

• 1 D. W. Kruger, ed., South African Parties and Policies 1910–1960 (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960), available at Politicsweb, accessed July 29, 2015.

Apartheid Era Sign

The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (passed in 1953) led to signs such as the one shown above. The Act prohibited people of different races from using the same public amenities.

By 1948, segregation of the races had long been the norm. But as journalist Allister Sparks noted, apartheid, drawing on racist anthropology and racist theology, “substituted enforcement for convention. What happened automatically before was now codified in law and intensified when possible. . . . [Racism] became a matter of doctrine, of ideology, of theologized faith infused with a special fanaticism, a religious zeal.” 1

Religion was an important aspect of Afrikaner identity. Most Afrikaners were members of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, a strict and conservative Calvinist church that promoted the belief that the Afrikaners were a new “chosen people” to whom God had given South Africa. Journalist Terry Bell explained the role of religion in the outlook of those who supported the National Party: “Afrikaners [saw themselves] as players in the unfolding of the Book of Revelations, upholding the light of Christian civilization against an advancing wall of darkness. . . . It was God’s will that the ‘Afrikaner nation’ . . . linked by language and a narrow Calvinism, had been placed on the southern tip of the African continent.” 2  As a result, they saw themselves as a select group whose right to the land was greater than any other group’s.

The new National Party administration offered a stark view of ethnic categories. As laid out in the Population Registration Act of 1950, these categories were as follows: “white” (“a person who in appearance obviously is, or who is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person”), “native” (“a person who in fact is or is generally accepted as a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa”), and “coloured” (“a person who is not a white person or a native”). 3  “Indian” was soon added as a fourth group. The groups were not only portrayed as distinct and fundamentally different; drawing on principles of Social Darwinism, they were ranked hierarchically in terms of supposed intellectual capacity and other attributes. The white population stood at the pinnacle of the South African racial hierarchy, with the National Party ideology claiming that they should dominate the other groups because of their natural superiority. Their control of the state guaranteed whites superior access to education, healthcare, employment, and housing. “Natives,” or black South Africans, stood at the very bottom of this steep hierarchy—a necessity in the eyes of Afrikaners, who believed not only that their livelihoods depended on depriving black South Africans of land, voting rights, the right to marry freely, and, above all, the right to participate freely in the labor market but also that Africans were not as deserving as whites of these privileges. Indian and “coloured” groups were “ranked” above black South Africans, allowing them some employment and mobility privileges denied to black South Africans yet still making them subservient to the white South African population.

Science, God, and Race

The triumph of the National Party pushed to the forefront of South African racism the ideas fostered by church leaders and scholars in Afrikaner institutions. During the 1930s, scientific books and articles, some written by scholars at Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria, lent credence to the idea that white populations were of superior intelligence to nonwhite groups. The Dutch Reformed Church, whose congregations had been segregated since 1857, also preached that, following the Tower of Babel, God had ordained that different cultures be distinct and sovereign. The church’s ideas combined with the pseudoscience of race to give rise to a secular theology of Christian nationalism. If groups were to develop as God intended, they needed to live separately.

Because they conceived of blacks and whites as fundamentally different, Afrikaners concluded that contact between the groups fostered conflict. Each group would prosper most if left to develop on its own; to impose segregation was to protect and promote black culture, they argued. The 1947 National Party campaign pamphlet explained:

The party holds that a positive application of apartheid between the white and non-white racial groups and the application of the policy of separation also in the case of the non-White racial groups is the only sound basis on which the identity and the survival of each race can be assured and by means of which each race can be stimulated to develop in accordance with its own character, potentialities and calling. Hence inter marriage between the two groups will be prohibited. Within their own areas the non-white communities will be afforded full opportunity to develop, implying the establishment of their own institutions and social services, which will enable progressive non-Whites to take an active part in the development of their own peoples. The policy of our country should envisage total apartheid as the ultimate goal of a natural process of separate development. 4

The reading  Apartheid Policies  offers a more extended explanation of the ideas behind apartheid, as publicly articulated by the party.

A contradiction arose, however, because if black South African labor had been subtracted from the white South African economy, the latter would have immediately collapsed. While the theory of apartheid argued that the races should be kept separate, the economy of the South African state depended heavily on black South African labor. Therefore, the apartheid state had to permit black South African laborers to come and go between white and black territories.

After the National Party took power, it implemented a series of laws designed both to separate each of the country’s racial groups and to divide and weaken the black South African population and allow for the easy exploitation of its labor. The Population Registration Act created a national system of racial classification that gave every citizen a single identification number and racial label that determined exactly what privileges this person would be able to enjoy. Where one could live, whether one had to carry a passbook to travel, and what sort of education one could receive depended on one’s racial classification. While white South Africans enjoyed every conceivable right, black South Africans could not vote for South African officials, and coloured South Africans could only vote for white representatives—they could not run for office themselves. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 banned interracial marriage, while the Immorality Act of 1950 “prohibited sex between whites and non-whites.”

The Group Areas Act of 1950 was the Malan government’s first attempt to increase the separation between white and black urban residential areas. The law was both a continuation of earlier laws of segregation and a realization of an apartheid ideal that cultures should be allowed to develop separately. The law declared many historically black urban areas officially white. The Native Resettlement Act of 1954 authorized the government to force out longtime residents and knock down buildings to make room for white-owned homes and businesses. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed under the authority of this act. For example, on February 9, 1955, Prime Minister Malan sent in 2,000 police officers to remove the 60,000 residents of Sophiatown, a vibrant African neighborhood in central Johannesburg. Black South African residents were forcibly resettled in the Meadowlands neighborhood of Soweto, where they were expected to move into houses without electricity, water, or toilets. In Durban, Indian neighborhoods faced a similar fate. City centers became enclaves for the white South African population, while black, coloured, and Indian South Africans were relegated to townships at the periphery of the urban areas, which were often far removed from centers of employment and resources such as hospitals and recreation spaces. Generally, the townships were intended to contain the black South African population by restricting movement through urban planning while ensuring that black South Africans had permission to leave these areas in order to work.

• 1 Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2006), 190.
• 2 Terry Bell, Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth (London: Verso, 2003), 23.
• 3 Population Registration Act (1950) , Wikisource entry, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 4 D. W. Kruger, ed., South African Parties and Policies 1910–1960 (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960), available at Politicsweb, accessed July 29, 2015.

Bantustans in South Africa

With the passing of the Bantu Authorities Act in 1951, the apartheid set in motion the creation of ten bantustans in South Africa, illustrated in this map.

Apartheid laws treated black South Africans not as citizens of South Africa but rather as members of assigned ethnic communities. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) and the Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) created ten “homelands” for black South Africans, known as Bantustans, and established new authorities in the Bantustans. While the apartheid state portrayed the Bantustans as a system that offered black South Africans independence, giving the appearance of self-government, the leaders of the homelands were appointed by the apartheid state. Furthermore, black South Africans were assigned these ethnic identities and corresponding “homelands” even if they did not see this as a central aspect of their identity. Black South Africans were essentially stripped of their South African citizenship.

By making black South Africans citizens of Bantustans, the government deflected any possible criticisms of refusing them the right to vote in South Africa. But this arrangement also very deliberately created a system of migrant labor. Since the homeland areas, which were mostly rural and underdeveloped, offered inhabitants few employment opportunities, most had to search for work in cities and live temporarily in townships. Given the desperate situation in the homelands, the apartheid state was ensured of a regular source of cheap labor for white-owned businesses and homes.

Although they were said by apartheid authorities to bear a historical association with the different kingdoms, Bantustans were scattered around the fringes of the country without any consideration for the well-being of their residents. KwaZulu in Natal, for example, was divided into many pieces, separated by large areas designated as white. The apartheid government reserved urban areas, the most desirable farmland, and regions rich in natural resources for white South Africans, while it allocated the least arable land for the Bantustans. Although black South Africans constituted nearly 70% of the population, only 13% of South Africa’s territory was allocated to the Bantustans. The reading  A Wife’s Lament  offers a look at how the creation of the homelands affected black South African families.

Girl Walking to School, Mthatha

A child walks to school through the barren village of Qunu, South Africa, located just outside of the town of Mthatha.

Dividing the black South African population into Bantustans was in part intended to break the solidarity that had formed between groups of black South Africans in the face of white oppression. By cultivating a false sense of “tribal” belonging, the government sought to reduce the black South African population to many small, ineffective groups, channeling discontent from resistance to apartheid into internal bickering.

A decade after the rise of the National Party, many black South Africans found themselves effectively stateless. They could only enter white areas to work, and they needed documents authorizing them to do so.

By the middle of the twentieth century, vast numbers of black South Africans commuted daily from Bantustans and townships to the white areas where they worked. Various forms of internal passports had existed in South Africa since the early twentieth century, but the apartheid government expanded and formalized the pass system. Designed to satisfy both the need for black labor and the need to protect white advantages, “pass” laws required every black male over the age of 16 to carry a passbook, which contained a photograph, fingerprints, a racial classification, place of work, and the bearer’s police record.

Additionally, the passbook had to have a current signature from an employer and proof that the bearer had paid income taxes. The passbook bureaucracy was so convoluted that few people were able keep their records current, providing authorities with an excuse for detaining black South African men at will. Anyone living in a black township on the outskirts of a white city who did not possess appropriate papers was effectively treated as an illegal alien and subject to arrest. Those found in violation were sometimes imprisoned, often forced to pay fines, and sometimes sent back to their homelands. Eventually, black South African women were also required to carry passes, an act that had a tragic impact on the lives of tens of thousands of families who were not allowed to live together. Only a few of these women with formal salaried employment were able to secure the necessary passes and keep them current, thereby satisfying the authorities’ requirements to be legally living in the same house as their husbands. Most black South African women were forced to remain in the homelands, raising their children and eking out a living off the land while their husbands worked in the cities or on white-owned farms.

Most black South Africans were obliged to leave “white areas” by sunset. At the country’s many checkpoints and roadblocks, black South Africans were at the mercy of the police and could summarily be stopped, arrested, and deported to homelands. Thousands of black South Africans were forced to break the law on a daily basis as they searched for work or attempted to keep their families together.

Police carried out daily raids on black residences, bursting in at midnight, forcing residents to show their passes, and arresting those out who did not have them. Police brutality was rife; hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were arrested, thousands disappeared from their homes without a trace, and hundreds lost their lives to the guns and batons of law enforcement officials. The government recruited black South Africans to join the police force and serve as informants, torturers, and, in some cases, executioners, and for a variety of reasons (bribes, economic pressures, and scare tactics), some black South Africans helped the government enforce apartheid. The reading  Experiencing Apartheid  gives an account of how the draconian enforcement of apartheid laws could affect black South Africans.

As apartheid laws were implemented, South Africa’s black leaders looked for a way to protest the changes imposed by the minority white government. Denied the right to vote, they had to find other means of expressing opposition outside the formal political system. From 1950 to 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) organized mass actions, which included boycotts, civil disobedience, demonstrations, and strikes.

A group of resisters proudly pose after their release from prison in Durban during the Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws, 1952.

Launched in April 1952, on the 300th anniversary of the arrival of the first Dutch colonists, this Defiance Campaign became the largest campaign of civil disobedience in South Africa’s history up to that point. It was also the first multiracial mass-resistance campaign, and its unified leadership included representatives from the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, and the Coloured People’s Congress. Together with other groups, these organizations formed the Congress Alliance, which forged a multiracial front against the implementation of apartheid. 1 Following heavily attended demonstrations in a number of towns, defiance of the newly erected racial laws commenced on June 26, 1953. Ten thousand volunteers, organized by the leader of the ANC Youth League, 34-year-old Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, were instructed to enter forbidden areas without passes, use entrances designated “Europeans only,” and occupy “white only” counters and waiting rooms. 2  These violations were designed to flood the prison system, rendering law enforcement impossible.

• 1 For Nelson Mandela’s description of the first months of the campaign and the unity between the different groups, see “ We Defy—10,000 Volunteers Protest Against Unjust Laws ,” August 30, 1952, African National Congress website, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 2 Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story , 3rd ed. (Cape Town: The Reader’s Digest Association Limited, 1994), 385.

Nelson Mandela, 1937

A young Nelson Mandela poses for a photograph in Umtata shortly before moving to Fort Beaufort to attend Healdtown Comprehensive School.

A decade later, Mandela reflected on the goals and strategies behind the Defiance Campaign:

Even after 1949, the ANC remained determined to avoid violence. At this time, however, there was a change from the strictly constitutional means of protest which had been employed in the past. The change was embodied in a decision which was taken to protest against apartheid legislation by peaceful, but unlawful, demonstrations against certain laws. Pursuant to this policy the ANC launched the Defiance Campaign, in which I was placed in charge of volunteers. This campaign was based on the principles of passive resistance. More than 8,500 people defied apartheid laws and went to jail. Yet there was not a single instance of violence in the course of this campaign on the part of any defier. I and nineteen colleagues were convicted for the role which we played in organising the campaign, but our sentences were suspended mainly because the judge found that discipline and non-violence had been stressed throughout. 1

The government lashed out, arresting over 8,000 South Africans and handing out stiff penalties and long prison sentences to those who had broken apartheid laws. It adopted the Public Safety Act (1953), which allowed the president to suspend all existing laws, stripping away basic civil liberties. “The government saw the campaign,” Mandela later recalled, “as a threat to its security and its policy of apartheid. They regarded civil disobedience not as a form of protest but as a crime, and were perturbed by the growing partnership between Africans and Indians. Apartheid was designed to divide racial groups, and we showed that different groups could work together. The prospect of a united front between Africans and Indians, between moderates and radicals, greatly worried them.” 2

While the Defiance Campaign lost momentum after a few months, and it did not achieve many concessions from the government, it was a turning point for South Africa. For the liberation movement, it was the first mass campaign, swelling the membership ranks of the ANC from just 7,000 to 100,000 and helping to transform the group from an elite organization into a mass movement. 3

In early 1955, the ANC organized a listening campaign, in which they sent out 50,000 volunteers to talk with people across the country about their political hopes for South Africa. In June 1955, the ANC, along with several other anti-apartheid political organizations—the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions, and the Congress of Democrats—developed a set of political demands that drew on the results of these interviews. The “Freedom Charter,” as it became known, called for a nonracial South Africa, in which people of all races would have equal rights and would share in the country’s wealth.

The Freedom Charter became the political agenda for the ANC, shaping its actions over the next several decades. The charter called for rights for all South Africans, not just black South Africans, and this concept of nonracialism became an important principle behind the ANC’s approach to political change. The Freedom Charter served as the guiding document for the ANC in its struggle against apartheid and beyond, as its nonracialism ultimately became a basis for ANC policies after the fall of apartheid. The reading The  Freedom Charter  includes the text of this foundational document.

Although their role has often been overlooked in historical accounts of resistance to apartheid, black South African women played an important part in opposing the system of racial segregation. (White and “coloured” women were part of the resistance, but the vast majority were black South Africans.) In the early 1900s, black South African women successfully resisted proposed legislation that would require them to carry passbooks. After a setback in 1918, women organized again to end the practice altogether under the leadership of Charlotte Maxeke, a gifted singer, social worker, and activist—a hero of the early days of protest. She was called “the mother of African freedom in this country” by A. B. Xuma, who served as the president of the ANC in the 1940s. 4

• 1 Nelson Mandela, “ An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die ,” The Guardian , April 22, 2007, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 2 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 116.
• 3 For a full and vivid description of the campaign, see Monty Naicker, “The Defiance Campaign Recalled,” June 30, 1972, African National Congress website, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 4 Andile Mnyandu, “ Charlotte Maxeke ,” eThekwini Municipality website, accessed July 27, 2015.

Woman Showing Her Passbook

An unidentified black South African woman defiantly shows her passbook.

The multiracial Federation of South African Women was formed in the 1950s, representing hundreds of thousands of women. Together with the ANC Women’s League, the federation organized many local demonstrations against the pass laws, culminating in the March on Pretoria. On August 9, 1956, about 20,000 women peacefully gathered in front of the city’s Union Buildings. They stood in silence for 30 minutes and then, breaking the quiet, chanted a call to the prime minister: “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo!” (Now that you have touched the women, you have struck a rock!) Alerted to the protest ahead of time, the prime minister, J. G. Strijdom, had slipped out of town. Before they concluded their protest, activists left on the prime minister’s door a petition bearing the signatures of 100,000 women. Their chant became the slogan for future women’s protests. The reading  Women Rise Up against Apartheid and Change the Movement  features a firsthand account of the 1956 women’s march.

By the late 1950s, a growing number of activists questioned the tactics of the African National Congress. The young founders of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), formed in 1959, believed that only an all-black African organization, in league with anti-colonial Africans throughout the continent, could adopt the forceful posture necessary to overcome apartheid. The time had come, these firebrands believed, to reclaim the land stolen by whites. In his inaugural speech, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, head of the PAC, outlined their approach:

[W]e reject both apartheid and so-called multi-racialism as solutions of our socio-economic problems. . . . To us the term “multi-racialism” implies that there are such basic insuperable differences between the various national groups here that the best course is to keep them permanently distinctive in a kind of democratic apartheid. That to us is racialism multiplied, which probably is what the term connotes. We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, everybody who owes his only loyalty to Afrika and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African. 1

Questioning the effectiveness of nonviolence against apartheid, the PAC set up a military wing, Poqo, that was feared by the white establishment.

The PAC announced to authorities that it would lead a peaceful demonstration against pass laws in the township of Sharpeville on March 21, 1960. Some 5,000 protesters gathered in the town center and then marched toward the police station to turn themselves in for defying pass laws. 2  Around midday, the police panicked and opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding another 180. Most were shot in the back as they fled.

Black South African leaders called for a day of mourning and a “stay-at-home” strike on March 28, 1960. Hundreds of thousands of black South Africans did not show up for work that day, making it the first successful national strike in the nation’s history. Marches took place in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town; the largest included a group of 30,000 who marched from Langa to Cape Town, led by 23-year-old Philip Kgosana. Fearing that black protests might spread, the government acted decisively in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre. It declared a state of emergency and arrested more than 11,000 people, including the leaders of both the ANC and the PAC. On April 8, the government banned both organizations. This put an abrupt end to the protests and ushered in a period of harsh repression that lasted for more than a decade.

During the 1960s, the government intensified its policies against the anti-apartheid movement by severely restricting the ability of the movement’s leaders to speak in public and to mobilize the population. The government went on to scrap what few rights non-white workers had, including the rights to organize, bargain, and strike, and it also intensified efforts to shut down surviving black urban neighborhoods and move the black population to the townships and homelands.

Although officially banned, the ANC continued to function clandestinely. The young leadership of the ANC, having seen their hopes for change dashed so violently, began to discuss a new approach to resistance. Despite opposition from the old guard, in 1961 the young upstarts prevailed: while there would never be official ANC approval, the creation of an armed wing was tacitly accepted. Named Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation,” known as MK), the clandestine group had Nelson Mandela as its commander.

Such a group needed new skills and new partners. Mandela and the other militant ANC members formed an alliance with the South African Communist Party, a multiracial political organization with ties to the Soviet Union that had been banned in 1950 but remained active underground, working primarily to support the interests of workers. They based MK operations at a farm in Rivonia, not far from Johannesburg. Setting up a network of operatives committed to terror permitted MK, over a year and a half, to carry out approximately 200 attacks on government facilities. By January 1962, Mandela had traveled to Algeria, where he learned the basics of guerrilla warfare from members of that nation’s National Liberation Front. A fortnight after his return to South Africa, he was arrested on the charges of inciting workers to strike and leaving the country without a passport. A year later, Mandela’s MK comrades were arrested at their Rivonia training camp.

In 1963, three years after the terror of the Sharpeville massacre carried out by government forces, the Rivonia Trial began with the government seeking to accuse its opponents of fomenting violence. Ten defendants, including six black Africans, three white Jews, and the son of an Indian immigrant, were charged with sabotage and attempting to violently overthrow the government of South Africa.

During the trial, the defendants decided not to deny the charge of sabotage. They wanted the world to know what they had done and why. Their lawyers expressed misgivings about their decision, because it meant that they could be put to death for treason. But the revolutionaries felt that they had to take the risk, using the trial to make their positions known to every person in South Africa.

When he took the stand at the Pretoria Supreme Court, Mandela described his personal journey within the resistance movement, explaining the reasoning behind the adoption of a militant approach. (The reading  Mandela on Trial  includes the text of this testimony.) The prosecutor attempted to prove that the group, which he labeled communist, was plotting to overthrow the government of South Africa. He played on Afrikaner fears of Soviet revolutionary plots. The government had long presented itself as a true ally of the West, securing generous financial and military support—a position unusual among African states, many of which adopted socialism as a reaction against the colonial powers they had thrown off.

When the trial ended in June 1964, two men had been acquitted. Six of the remaining eight, including Mandela, were found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison.

In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre and the government crackdown that followed, the ANC leadership charged Oliver Tambo, the organization's deputy president, with the task of beginning to organize overseas. With protest nearly impossible within the country and so many top ANC leaders in prison, Tambo looked for new ways to fight against the apartheid regime. Making use of a home base in London, he lobbied international leaders to speak out against the brutality in his homeland. Almost immediately, Tambo and British anti-apartheid movement activists organized to have South Africa removed from the British Commonwealth, an intergovernmental organization made up of countries that were formerly part of the British Empire—a move that succeeded in 1961. At the same time, activists began to lobby against South Africa in the United Nations, winning a 1962 vote at the UN General Assembly for a trade ban on South Africa. A partial arms ban followed a year later. Further international pressure against South Africa’s discriminatory policies came from the International Olympic Committee, which first suspended South Africa from participating in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and then formally banned the country from the Olympics in 1970. The ANC, with Tambo’s leadership, eventually set up 27 overseas missions.

However, diplomacy was only one part of the strategy. In 1965, the countries of Tanzania and Zambia agreed to let the ANC’s unofficial armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), set up paramilitary training camps. Under the leadership of Abongz Mbede and Joe Slovo, a South African Jew whose family emigrated from Lithuania, the MK sought to bring what they called an “armed struggle” to South Africa. In the late 1960s, though, South Africa was surrounded by neighbors that were allies of the apartheid government, making it difficult for fighters to make it into the country. An official history of the ANC describes the situation:

The ANC consultative conference at Morogoro, Tanzania in 1969 looked for solutions to this problem. . . .The Morogoro Conference called for an all-round struggle. Both armed struggle and mass political struggle had to be used to defeat the enemy. But the armed struggle and the revival of mass struggle depended on building ANC underground structures within the country. A fourth aspect of the all-round struggle was the campaign for international support and assistance from the rest of the world. These four aspects were often called the four pillars of struggle. The non-racial character of the ANC was further consolidated by the opening up of the ANC membership to non-Africans. 3

• 1 “ Robert Sobukwe Inaugural Speech, April 1959 ,” African National Congress website, accessed June 2018.
• 2 David James Smith, Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 210.
• 3 “ A Brief History of the African National Congress ,” African National Congress website, accessed June 2018.

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, “ Introduction: Early Apartheid: 1948-1970 ,” last updated August 3, 2018. 

This reading contains text not authored by Facing History & Ourselves. See footnotes for source information.

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Article contents

• Albert Luthuli
• Robert Vinson Robert Vinson University of Virginia
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1103
• Published online: 15 September 2022

Albert Luthuli, president of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid organization, became the first African-born recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1961. During Luthuli’s presidency (1952–1967), the ANC became a mass organization, articulating a broad, inclusive African nationalism and leading the Congress Alliance, a multiracial, multi-ideological anti-apartheid coalition that shared Luthuli’s vision of a democratic, equitable South Africa. The Prize recognized Luthuli’s Gandhian strategy to end South African apartheid, state-sanctioned laws and policies designed particularly to ensure White supremacist racial domination over the African majority, who were approximately 75 percent of the country’s population. The Nobel also reflected Luthuli’s success in portraying apartheid as a crime against humanity that violated the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and to contextualize South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle as central to expanding global human-rights campaigns. The Nobel Peace Prize cemented Luthuli’s enduring image as an uncompromising advocate of nonviolence who—during intense debates in 1960 and 1961 within the anti-apartheid movement about the relative efficacy of violent and nonviolent tactics against an increasingly violent apartheid state—remained implacably opposed to Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), which eventually became the ANC’s armed wing. But recently available archival documents, along with autobiographical accounts and oral interviews reveal that Luthuli accepted and authorized MK while insisting that the ANC maintain its official nonviolent position. In retrospect, the Nobel Prize was the apogee of Luthuli’s global renown, as increasingly restrictive state bans limited his ability to participate in political activity. Despite Luthuli’s tragic and still-controversial 1967 death, the ANC survived lethal state repression to become in 1994 the first democratically elected governing party in South African history. But Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize winner eventually became overshadowed by younger ANC leaders Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. This article aims to recover Luthuli from relative historical obscurity and highlight his key leadership of the ANC as it transformed into a mass anti-apartheid movement and his revolutionary belief that apartheid South Africa could become one of the world’s first truly multiracial democracies.

• African National Congress
• Nobel Peace Prize
• nonviolence
• human rights
• global anti-apartheid movement
• global color line

The Formative Years

Albert John Mvumbi Luthuli was born about 1898 in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. His South African–born parents were John, an evangelist, teacher, interpreter, and goods transporter, and Nozililo Mtonya, who as a young girl had lived in the royal court of the Zulu king ( inkosi ) Cetshwayo. Albert was the youngest of their three children. Tragically, John died, possibly during a malaria outbreak when Albert was only six months old. Nozililo, Albert, and his older brother Alfred (another brother, Mpangwa, died at birth) returned to South Africa in 1908 , eventually settling in Groutville, Natal. Named after Aldin Grout, a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABM), a Congregationalist enterprise that had begun its work in southern Africa in 1834 , this small community derived from the ABM’s Umvoti mission station. Albert’s grandparents, Ntaba ka Mdunjuni and Titisi Mthethwa, were among the Africans who resisted incorporation into the expansive Zulu state founded by Shaka ka Senzengakhona. They became Grout’s first Christian converts. In 1860 , the Umvoti mission community, known as the abasemakholweni (converted Christians), elected Ntaba as their chief, and thereafter Ntaba’s brother, son Martin, and grandson Albert, so that four of their first seven chiefs were Luthulis. 1

The 1910 Union of South Africa, a self-governing dominion within the British empire, consolidated White rule—immediately rooted in 19th-century land conquests by Dutch-descended Whites known as Afrikaners—particularly by the British, who subdued most Africans, including the large Xhosa and Zulu states, by the 1890s. The 1867 discovery of diamonds in Kimberley, soon controlled by the British Cape Colony, and in 1886 , gold in the Transvaal, an Afrikaner-controlled state, led to the institution of the migrant labor system, which exploited Africans. By 1900 , South Africa had become the world’s leading producer of these minerals. Segregationist laws denied virtually all Africans, about 70 percent of the population at this time, the right to vote; condemned them, by “color-bar” laws, to the lowest-paying jobs; and provided them little judicial recourse to counter their systematic subordination. These laws included the Natives Land Act of 1913 and the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 , which limited African landownership to less than 13 percent of South African territory. By restricting their abilities to own sufficient land for housing and to support the cattle holding and agricultural cultivation necessary to maintain economic independence, the laws forced them into labor tenancy and sharecropping on White farms, and into labor migration to urban areas. There, they became subject to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 , which segregated them in squalid townships, declared them temporary workers instead of permanent urban residents, and restricted their movements with pass laws. 2

In Groutville, the young Albert lived with his uncle Martin Luthuli, who was Groutville’s elected chief, secretary to the Zulu inkosi Dinuzulu and the translator and interpreter for the Zulu royal house. Martin was also a cofounder of both the Natal Native Congress in 1901 and the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, later renamed the African National Congress) in 1912 , groups that agitated for greater African political rights and land ownership. Serving until 1921 , Martin provided Albert with a model for the Groutville chieftainship and dual, complementary engagement with both “traditionalist” Zulu aristocratic affairs and broader pan-ethnic African nationalist politics. A central feature of his education, Albert also learned Zulu history and cultural traditions and performed the typical duties of a Zulu child: herding cattle, weeding crops, fetching water, and building nighttime fires to keep the household warm. 3

He attended the ABM mission school, Groutville Primary, and then the Ohlange Institute, the school established by his admired mentor, the American-educated John Dube, the first SANNC president-general and founding editor of the isiZulu-English–language newspaper Ilanga lase Natal (“Sun of Natal”). After Ohlange, Luthuli attended Edendale, embarking on a two-year teacher-training course that resulted in a teaching certificate in 1917 . After Edendale, he became the nineteen-year-old principal (and sole staff member) of a small school in the Natal midlands, before earning his higher teacher’s certificate at Adams College in 1921 . Luthuli, along with Z. K. Matthews, became one of the first African teachers at Adams College, heading the Teachers College to train future African teachers. He also taught Zulu history, music, and literature, cofounding the Zulu Cultural and Language Society to steep younger generations in Zulu history and culture and to promote isiZulu as a medium for primary education. A man of many talents, Luthuli was also a lay minister who led the Adams branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and gave well-received sermons, was a passionate lover of music who helped found Adams College’s school of music in 1935 and led choirs renowned throughout Natal and was also a skilled soccer player and coach who organized soccer leagues. 4

In 1927 , Luthuli married Nokukhanya ka Maphita ka Bhengu Ndlokolo, who had studied, then taught, at Adams. Nokukhanya, who would be known respectfully as “Ma Bhengu,” was the granddaughter of Ndlokolo Bhengu, a chief of the Ngcolosi people. Her father, Maphita Bhengu, was an early ABM convert who applied successfully to be exempt from the restrictive segregationist measures of the Natal Native Code, a status that also included his children, including Nokukhanya. But in marrying Albert, who was not exempted, Nokukhanya made considerable sacrifices. She lost both her exempted status and her teaching career because of restrictions against married women teachers. Patriarchal laws and customs classified women as legal minors and social children, but in fact Nokukhana was the family bedrock. She learned the successful farming methods of Nozililo, her mother-in-law, and cultivated the family’s small vegetable and sugar-cane fields, selling enough produce to become the family’s primary breadwinner throughout her marriage to Albert. Nokukhanya and Albert enjoyed an equitable family life that included four daughters and three sons, born between 1929 and 1945 . Albert was not a stereotypical authoritarian and distant patriarch but a loving, attentive, and devoted father. Their eldest daughter, Albertina, recalled, “Ubaba never imposed his status as family head upon us. Everybody had an equal opportunity to talk, and no one was considered too young to have his views respected.” 5

The People’s Chief

In 1936 , Luthuli reluctantly left Adams, after the Groutville community elected him as their chief. While willing to serve his people, Albert and Nokukhanya knew that government chiefs were in a difficult, contradictory position. They were government employees, paid to administer and enforce unjust and unpopular state policies to their people, whose interests they supposedly represented. Some unscrupulous chiefs abused their state-backed power to enrich themselves and their allies by claiming land, charging dubious fees, and accepting bribes to settle disputes. Luthuli, though the chieftainship paid far less than his former teacher’s salary, rejected such extortionist measures even as his children complained occasionally about their increasingly spartan lifestyle. Steeped in a multigenerational family tradition of chieftainship, Luthuli modeled his leadership on democratic Zulu traditional governance, with chiefs legally bound to honor traditional customs and to be responsive to their peoples’ needs and desires. He also practiced ubuntu , a broader African concept that recognized the humanity and interdependence of all people. Thus, he governed with an inclusive democratic spirit, personal warmth, integrity, empathy, and judicious wisdom. He also included women, regarded as legal and social minors, in democratic consultations and facilitated their economic advancement by disregarding government prohibitions on their beer brewing and selling and their operation of shebeens (unlicensed bars). Luthuli was, as one community member remembered, a “man of the people [who] had a very strong influence over the community. He was a people’s chief.” 6

Concerned for his people, Chief Luthuli criticized the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts, which were explicitly designed to further eviscerate African landownership and increase African labor migration to urban areas, separating families, accelerating African social disintegration and dislocation, and deepening poverty in the increasingly overcrowded reserves. Luthuli later noted the disparity of Whites claiming to need 375 acres per person to live comfortably while African families had only 6 acres, leading to soil exhaustion, lack of adequate grazing ground for cattle, and little heritable land for grown African children to economically sustain themselves and their families. He protested to unmoved state officials about the government’s “land rehabilitation” schemes that forced Africans to sell “surplus” cattle at reduced rates to White farmers who had comparatively plentiful land to absorb additional cattle and accrue more wealth: “Your solution is to take our cattle away today because you took our land yesterday.” Luthuli reminded government officials that for Africans, cattle were cherished possessions and a meaningful source of wealth; forcing them to sell cattle represented a deep economic and psychic violence against his people. 7

Luthuli’s chieftainship uniquely positioned him to observe the fallacy of state logic and the deepening poverty of the once-prosperous Groutville community and the tangible negative effects of African disfranchisement, onerous taxation without representation, land scarcity, and economic insecurity. Mobilizing his community, Luthuli revived the Groutville Bantu Cane Growers’ Association, a group of about two hundred small-scale cane growers (including himself) that successfully lobbied the millers to advance monies that would allow African farmers to meet upfront production costs. He also chaired the Natal and Zululand Bantu Cane Growers’ Association, bringing nearly all African sugar-cane producers into one union. During his 1948 American tour, he secured a tractor that helped boost agricultural production by local farmers, some of whom thus increased their margins enough to educate their children. The African intellectual Jordan Ngubane, who studied at Adams when Luthuli taught there and later became Luthuli’s personal secretary and political ally, credited Luthuli with promoting economic development, increasing agricultural efficiency, sending more youth to schools and universities, and inspiring an optimism that belied the increasing hardships caused by government land policies. In 1946 , Luthuli served as a councilor in the Native Representative Council (NRC), an advisory body to the government. There, he continued his longstanding complaints about inadequate African land, and he protested the state’s violent suppression of the 1946 African mineworkers’ strike. But government officials remained unresponsive, and an exasperated Luthuli dismissed the NRC as a “toy telephone.” 8

Grasping the Global Color Line

In 1938 Luthuli traveled to Madras, India, as part of an interracial Christian delegation to an international missionary conference. Despite the fact that South African segregation traveled outside the country’s borders—the White delegates traveled first class and the four African delegates second class—Luthuli toured Indian and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), met Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and African Christian leaders, and returned “with wider sympathies and horizons.” 9 Accepting the joint invitation and sponsorship of the American Board and the North American Missionary Conference, in June 1948 , Luthuli traveled to the United States for a seven-month lecture tour of churches, civic groups, youth groups, and universities that deeply informed his later anti-apartheid activism. 10 He left South Africa right after the May 1948 election victory of the pro-apartheid Nationalist Party and arrived in America during the 1948 presidential campaign, featuring the southern segregationist “Dixiecrat” revolt against the incumbent president Harry Truman’s mild civil-rights agenda. Displaying the strong racial affinities and solidarities developed between some Black South Africans and African Americans since 1890 , Luthuli extended his American tour to visit historically Black universities: Howard, Atlanta, Tuskegee, and Virginia State. He remarked, “I have such a great desire to visit my people in the South that I would have been awfully disappointed to return to Africa without doing so.” Luthuli lectured on African history and culture and the virtues of Gandhian nonviolence, met faculty and students from Africa and other parts of the Black world, and was hosted by Black lawyers, academics, and ministers. 11 Everywhere, his visits sparked an “awakening on campus relative to Africa and an eagerness on the part of students to know more about this great continent.” 12 Luthuli marveled at the impressive institutional and personal achievements of African Americans despite the formidable obstacles of Jim Crow racial subordination in the United States, which he also experienced personally. Howard University, the Mecca of Black education and the educational pillar of an upwardly mobile Black elite, was in Washington DC, the nation’s capital and a segregated Jim Crow city; Luthuli traveled on Jim Crow trains and encountered segregated public facilities throughout the South. 13 This southern tour profoundly affected Luthuli, who now saw “South African issues more sharply, and in a different and larger perspective.” 14 Luthuli would link South Africa’s freedom struggle to a global color line that included decolonization and labor movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and the US civil-rights movement. 15

From Government Chief to ANC President

Luthuli returned to South Africa in February 1949 , as the Nationalists began to pass apartheid laws to ensure ethnic Afrikaner advancement and White racial supremacy. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act ( 1949 ) and the Immorality Act ( 1950 ) outlawed marriage and sexual relations between Whites and other racial groups. The Suppression of Communism Act ( 1950 ) stifled political dissent by defining Communism to include all extra-parliamentary resistance to the apartheid state. The Population Registration Act ( 1950 ) divided South Africa’s inhabitants into four racial groups—Africans, Coloureds, Asiatics, and Whites—as the basis to create racially differentiated citizens and subjects, residential areas, employment, education, and political, economic, and social rights. The Group Areas Act ( 1950 ) extended government powers to create racially separate residential zones, including the forcible removal of people to create racially homogeneous areas.

In Luthuli’s view, the Nazi-inspired apartheid regime, and its White supporters had pirated the land, wealth, and government and these apartheid laws shackled the African majority in virtual enslavement. Africans were the “livestock which went with the estate, objects rather than subjects,” political footballs tossed about by the Nationalists and their White parliamentary rivals. 16 Apartheid South Africa also had powerful international allies. During the Cold War, the United States deepened its diplomatic, economic, political, and military ties with South Africa, a critical source of uranium and other strategic minerals for the nuclear arsenal at the heart of its arms race with the Soviet Union. The United States, along with Great Britain and France, used its veto power on the United Nations Security Council to block anti-apartheid resolutions from the UN General Assembly.

At the ANC’s December 1948 conference, ANC Youth Leaguers such as A. P. Mda, Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela, and Oliver Tambo argued that the new apartheid regime necessitated that the ANC move beyond strictly constitutional methods. The Youth Leaguers proposed a Program of Action that would consist of civil-disobedience tactics, including strikes and boycotts. Luthuli, who had joined the ANC in 1944 , would lead the Program of Action in Natal. After initial reservations about African-Indian collaboration after the January 1949 Cato Manor riots—when Africans, frustrated by the perceived arrogance and discrimination of Indians toward them, attacked Indian merchants—Luthuli participated in joint-action campaigns with the Indian congresses. This included a one-day strike on May 1, 1950 , in which the South African police killed dozens of unarmed, nonviolent protesters, and a multiracial one-day stay at home on June 26, 1950 , to protest the Group Areas Act and the Suppression of Communism Act.

On May 3, 1951 , Luthuli became the Natal ANC president, defeating the longtime president A. W. G. Champion, but he became a national political figure during the iconic 1952 Defiance Campaign, a multiracial mobilization led by the ANC. The campaign modeled itself on Gandhi’s nonviolent civil-disobedience strategy that helped win India’s independence from Great Britain. 17 Luthuli expanded Gandhi’s ideals of satyagraha, first developed exclusively for Indians in South Africa, to include all races, convincing Gandhi’s own son Manilal that Africans would lead a much broader movement of “active nonviolence” that could change individual lives, mobilize the masses, and end apartheid. Luthuli rallied thousands of people as Africans and Indians defied segregation practices in public facilities and Africans defied curfew laws in Durban. 18 Over nine thousand people of all races went to jail for defying apartheid laws, creating an impromptu interracial space that resounded with their freedom songs.

By August 1952 , government officials, including the Secretary of Native Affairs, Dr. W. W. M Eiselen, felt strongly that Luthuli’s Defiance Campaign activity conflicted with his chiefly duties to administer and enforce government laws. Eiselen ordered Luthuli to resign from either the ANC or the chieftaincy and when, after two months of additional pressure, Luthuli refused to choose, the government stripped him of his chieftainship. Luthuli’s politics reflected his Christian beliefs:

I am in Congress precisely because I am a Christian. My Christian belief about human society must find expression here and now. . . . My own urge, because I am a Christian, is to get into the thick of the struggle with other Christians, taking my Christianity with me and praying that it may be used to influence for good the character of the resistance. 19

Luthuli’s personal sacrifice and principled integrity greatly impressed his ANC colleagues, who promptly elected him ANC president in December 1952 . Though the Defiance Campaign effectively ended by January 1953 without the elimination of apartheid laws, it prompted a dramatic increase in ANC membership from 25,000 in 1951 to 100,000 at the end of the campaign. The Defiance Campaign had also caught the attention of nascent international anti-apartheid, anticolonial, and human-rights activists, particularly in Africa, Europe, and the United States. In turn, Luthuli contextualized the Defiance Campaign as a manifestation of emerging international human-rights norms, and he celebrated the significant domestic and international support for the Defiance Campaign’s fight for the “fundamental human rights of freedom of speech, association and movement” that would forge a democratic and equitable post-apartheid South Africa. 20

The Defiance Campaign also helped launch the Congress Alliance, an ANC-led broad anti-apartheid front of independent multiracial, multi-ideological organizations that sought to end apartheid. Luthuli cast apartheid as a crime against humanity, and the Congress Alliance’s Freedom Charter, a landmark 1955 document that demanded freedom, justice, and material equity for all South Africans, was declared “a South African Declaration of Human Rights” and a “Magna Carta—a Bill of Human Rights” that was both a guiding star for anti-apartheid activism and the basis for a post-apartheid South African constitution. 21 For Luthuli, the Freedom Charter joined the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the American Declaration of Independence as a timeless document that could be adopted for all freedom-loving peoples. 22 Indeed, Luthuli and other Black South Africans framed their freedom struggles within international human-rights ideals, an under-recognized fact among human-rights scholars. 23 The UN Declaration of Human Rights, enacted in 1948 , was largely a reaction to the rise of fascism that led to World War II and Nazi atrocities during that war. The Freedom Charter’s preamble and thirty articles included declarations that every human should have “inherent dignity, equal and inalienable rights of all humans” as the “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” The Charter also stipulated freedom of speech, religion, assembly, and movement; equal education and pay; equal protection and rights under the law; and democratic governance; and it prohibited slavery, involuntary servitude, and arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile. 24

No wonder, then, that South Africa was one of eight countries to abstain when UN member countries voted overwhelmingly to adopt the UN Charter and that they interpreted the Freedom Charter as a subversive document. 25 On December 5, 1956 , police arrested and charged Luthuli and 155 anti-apartheid leaders with high treason. Luthuli spent nearly a year in prison, with Nokukhanya only allowed to visit him twice. High treason was a crime punishable by death, but Luthuli expressed more concern for his family’s welfare than for his own life. During the five-year Treason Trial ( 1956–1961 ), as it came to be known, the government’s imprisonment of anti-apartheid activists from all over South Africa, many of whom had not previously met, strengthened the movement. While in prison, Luthuli replicated the measured and inspirational statesmanship displayed during the Defiance Campaign, before Nelson Mandela’s more famous prison leadership on Robben Island after 1964 , Luthuli—with other Congress Alliance leaders Z. K. Matthews, Moses Kotane, and G. M. Naicker—maintained discipline among imprisoned Congress Alliance members and initiated political discussions, concerts, religious services, and cultural theater to foster political fellowship. When fellow Natal ANC leader M. B. Yengwa sang praises ( izibongo ) honoring Shaka, Luthuli rejoiced in the performance with Zulu and non-Zulu prisoners, declaring, “Ngu Shaka lowo!” (“That is Shaka!”) as the pan-ethnic and multiracial prisoners felt “bound together by love of our history.” 26

Imprisonment also facilitated Luthuli’s deeper trust with communist members, particularly Kotane, whom Luthuli always consulted before making major decisions as ANC president. Luthuli was definitely “not a Communist,” but

I have one enemy, the Nationalist government, and I will not fight on two fronts. I shall work with all who are prepared to stand with me in the struggle for the liberation of our country. We leave our differing political theories to one side until the day of liberation. 27

An intellectually curious and pragmatic man, Luthuli began to read the literature of Karl Marx and the South African Communist Party (SACP) to better understand communism and his communist allies, and he relied on communists for logistical support to break his bans and attend secret ANC and Congress Alliance meetings. 28 In turn, African communists like Kotane, J. B. Marks, David Bopape, and Sisulu, a Communist Party member since at least 1955 , expressed no concern that Luthuli was not a Communist and they remained stalwart supporters of Luthuli’s presidency. In the end, they were all African nationalists first. During the Treason Trial, the state’s weak case unraveled slowly, with Luthuli, Tambo, and fifty-nine others acquitted in December 1957 after the pretrial examination. Finally, in 1961 , the court acquitted the remaining Treason Trial defendants, declaring that the state had not proven its allegation. 29

Luthuli and Verwoerd: Irreconcilable Visions for South Africa’s Future

Luthuli contextualized the South African liberation struggle within larger African and Asian decolonization movements and continental Pan-Africanism, sparked by independence in Sudan ( 1956 ) and Ghana ( 1957 ). Indeed, Pan-Africanism swept across the African continent, with the Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah vowing that Ghana’s independence was worth little without complete continental emancipation from European colonialism. Nkrumah convened a series of Pan-African conferences—the first in Africa itself—including the 1958 All-African Peoples Conference (AAPC) that targeted 1963 as year of continental African liberation, inspiring the popular South African slogan, “Free by ’63!” 30 By the mid-1960s, most of Africa, excepting most of southern Africa, was independent. To inspire Black South Africans, Luthuli pointed to these “events taking place in Africa to show our complacent people here that the rest of Africa is astir.” Luthuli’s writings, including his personal communications with the future Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, also contextualized South Africa within other multiracial societies in East and Central Africa.

Luthuli also sought to cultivate transnational ties with the nascent global anti-apartheid movement. In 1958 , he supported a global boycott of all South African goods, in tandem with early anti-apartheid movements in several countries—including Ireland, Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, India, the United States, and Ghana. 31 Luthuli’s appeal, and the presence of exiled South Africans in such countries, increased coordination between global anti-apartheid activists and the South African domestic struggle. Building on these early connections, after 1960 , the exiled ANC would broaden the terrain for sanctions beyond economics to other sectors like sports, culture, and higher education. 32 Luthuli argued persuasively against claims that economic sanctions would do nothing except further impoverish Black South Africans:

The economic boycott of South Africa will entail undoubted hardship for Africans. We do not doubt that. But if it is a method which shortens the day of blood, the suffering to us will be a price we are willing to pay. In any case, we suffer already, our children are often undernourished, and on a small scale (so far) we die at the whim of a policeman.

He added later:

[A]lready in any case, they [the poor] are in difficulties; at some time this vicious circle must be cut; at some time some generation must suffer to do that . . . if you suggested that the African people should not suffer you in fact are saying that they should remain slaves. . . . So with this question of ‘It will hit the Africans hardest’, let us be hit, let some of us die, even if necessary die through bullets, if necessary die through starvation, if this will end this vicious circle. 33

In 1958 , the new prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd unveiled a system of “grand apartheid” as his audacious answer to the decolonization beginning to sweep across Africa north of the Zambezi River. Grand apartheid was distinct from earlier petty apartheid laws that defined and separated racial groups. The foundational legislation, the 1958 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, created ten ethnic-based “homelands” or Bantustans that would eventually become “independent.” The total land mass of all ten Bantustans comprised roughly 13 percent of the land that the state designated to Africans—now 75 percent of the population—in the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts. With no parliamentary oversight, the minister of Bantu Administration and Development ruled unilaterally over the Bantustans as his personal fiefdom. The minister even had authority over those Africans that worked and lived outside the Bantustans, in “White South Africa.” He also had the power to ban the ANC and deny entrance to the homelands. By locating African citizenship within ethnic-based homelands, grand-apartheid policies denied the ANC’s inclusive nationalism, refused African claims to South African political citizenship, and cast them as foreign migrant workers under perpetual threat of being “endorsed” to underdeveloped and often unfamiliar rural areas. Verwoerd sold grand apartheid as an instrument of peace that could end supposedly inevitable interracial conflict.

Must Bantu and European in future develop as intermixed communities, or as communities separated from one another, in so far as this is practically possible? If the reply is ‘intermingled communities,’ then the following must be understood. There will be competition and conflict everywhere. 34

Despite describing apartheid to foreign audiences as a “policy of good neighborliness,” Verwoerd, in his typically blunt and pugnacious style, explicitly rejected Luthuli’s call for multiracial partnership. “This is our country. If we had partnership with the black man, pretty soon he would feel that it is his country.” 35

Luthuli remained deeply unimpressed with Verwoerd’s dystopian vision that regarded multiracial contact as an inherently dangerous encounter with evil that could only be remedied by the utopian purity of his apartheid policies. He proclaimed that apartheid belonged to “the dark ages” and lamented that Verwoerd and the Nationalist Party were blind to

the wealth that lies in our very diversity, nor the underlying humanity and South Africanism that binds us all. . . . [T]heir profession . . . is the spreading of the spirit of Afrikaner exclusiveness . . . and when they try to don the mantle of statesmen, they succeed only in making themselves ridiculous, like pigmies strutting in giants’ robes. 36

When the government neglected to renew his banning orders, Luthuli seized the rare opportunity to embark on nationwide tours in 1958 and 1959 to promote his optimistic vision of a nonracial, democratic, peaceful, and equitable South Africa. He roused multiracial crowds in South African cities, becoming the only person in South Africa capable of attracting broad support from Africans, Indians, and Coloureds. For perhaps the first time in South African history, a significant number of Whites came to hear an African politician. Beyond members of the Congress of Democrats (COD) that were already in the Congress Alliance, Luthuli’s “gospel of democracy and freedom” entranced members of the Liberal Party and the Black Sash, anti-apartheid White women who wore a black sash on their dresses to symbolize their mourning of the Constitution, which the apartheid government increasingly disregarded. In one particularly memorable speech entitled “Freedom Is the Apex,” Luthuli invited listeners to climb with him to the top of a mountain. At the apex were the ideals of the Freedom Charter and the vision of a democratic, inclusive, and equitable South Africa that would be a global model for racial harmony and coexistence. Audiences responded to such speeches with roars of “Mayibuye Afrika!” (“Come back Africa!”) and “Somlandela Luthuli!” (“We will follow Luthuli wherever he goes!”).

But like Verwoerd, most Whites rejected Luthuli’s reconciliatory message. F. W. De Klerk, destined to be South Africa’s last apartheid leader, recalled that for him and his fellow White college students, Luthuli’s “message that all South Africans should have the right to one-man one-vote in an undivided South Africa was at the time utterly alien to us.” 37 In Johannesburg, Luthuli confronted “Nazi-like [White] thugs” shouting, “We will not allow a kaffir to address this meeting!” They subsequently stormed the platform, tackled the sixty-one-year old Luthuli, and left him with a bloodied face, a swollen jaw, and an “egg-sized bump on his forehead.” Unbowed, Luthuli promptly returned to the podium, called for calm and suggested gently that his attackers had not “matured spiritually yet.” Using the incident to emphasize the urgent need for South African racial reconciliation and to emphasize African demands for equality, he then delivered a stirring hour-long speech to an amazed audience that responded with a standing ovation. Such rapturous acclaim prompted parliamentarians to demand that the government “do something about this Luthuli . . . because his speeches were setting the minds of the people on fire.” 38

Effective May 30, 1959 , just before Luthuli’s address to thirty thousand people at an ANC anti-pass rally, the government issued a five-year ban, claiming ironically that Luthuli’s racial reconciliation tour was “promoting hostility between whites and non-whites.” The ban placed Luthuli under virtual house arrest in Groutville and forbade meetings, claiming the “objects of Communism would be furthered if ex-Chief Luthuli addressed any meetings in the Union.” Luthuli vowed to continue the fight for freedom, quoting Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—“government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth” and predicted that “in the end White South Africa will realize we must come together and discuss our problems.” 39

In the meantime, Luthuli had serious internal challenges from the “Africanist” ANC members that had long felt that White and Indian communists, multiracial alliances, and the Freedom Charter’s declaration—“the land belongs to all!”—diluted the strident African nationalism reflected in the 1949 Program of Action. In November 1958 , at the ANC Transvaal Provincial Conference, the Africanists, led by Josias Madzunya and Potlako Leballo, loudly rejected Luthuli’s view that the broad multiracial Congress Alliance was both the most effective means to end apartheid and a model for a democratic, equitable, and racially inclusive post-apartheid state. The Africanists failed in their attempts to win a decisive number of seats during elections to the ANC’s governing body, the National Executive Council (NEC), which promptly expelled Madzunya and Leballo from the ANC for behavior deemed insurrectionary. On November 8, 1958 , the Africanists seceded from the ANC; on April 6, 1959 , they established the rival Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), under the presidency of the widely respected intellectual Robert Sobukwe. Luthuli lamented the split, insisting that his inclusive African nationalism asserted both the primacy of Africans in the liberation struggle and provided space for anti-apartheid activists of all races to fight against the common apartheid enemy. But to many observers, the PAC, not the ANC, seemed to be more in tune with the Pan-African currents sweeping across the country, and many continental Africans expressed skepticism about the multiracial nature of the Congress Alliance, suspicions that Luthuli could never fully put to bed during his presidency. However, Luthuli had greater success in deepening the relationship between the ANC and Congress Alliance partner, the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), founded in March 1955 . Luthuli’s enthusiastic support for SACTU contributed to Natal becoming its most organized province in South Africa. Luthuli was the featured speaker at the 1959 SACTU annual conference, emphasizing the inseparability of political and economic struggle with his memorable metaphor that for anti-apartheid warriors, “the ANC is the shield and SACTU is the spear.”

The Nobel Peace Prize and International Nonviolence

In 1961 , Luthuli became the first African-born recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. 40 Albert was quick to tell the many journalists who came to Groutville to interview him that the Nobel would not have been possible without Nokukhanya, “with whom I share common ideals and values.” 41 Indeed, in addition to being the family’s breadwinner (the ANC presidency was an unpaid position), Nokukhanya was Albert’s true political partner, which she illustrated in a later interview: “He would sometimes read his speeches to me while I was working in the garden or in the house. I would argue certain points with him and he would alter the speech accordingly.” 42 Hailed as the “Mother of the Nation,” Ma Bhengu was also a leader in the ANC Women’s League and a delegate to ANC national conferences, particularly active in the protests against the extension of pass laws to women in the mid-to-late 1950s. Over the years, Albert had suffered from government bans and imprisonment, and also a debilitating stroke, that necessitated Nokukhanya to continue his political work, appearing at public gatherings in his stead and acting as a courier to keep communication lines open between her husband and other banned anti-apartheid members. 43

Despite suggestions that the ANC’s commitment to human-rights ideals “receded from the mid-1950s,” Luthuli continued to align his domestic anti-apartheid politics with UN-led human-rights efforts, calling on all South Africans to observe International Human Rights Day on December 10, 1959 . 44 Luthuli was also the first Nobel winner after the committee had explicitly added human rights as one criterion for winning the prize. The Nobel Committee’s award exemplified international recognition and support for the anti-apartheid struggle as a fundamental human-rights issue. The apartheid regime bristled, claiming that Luthuli’s Nobel was not “based on merit, but instead to further propaganda objectives.” The Luthuli’s, connecting the South African struggle to African continental decolonization, sought to attend Tanganyika’s independence ceremonies en route to Oslo, but the government spitefully denied them. 45 The Nobel Committee chairman Gunnar Jahn presented Luthuli with his Peace Prize on December 10, International Human Rights Day, praising Luthuli’s ANC for fighting “for the ideals expressed in the declaration of human rights embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.” 46 In his acceptance speech, Luthuli lamented that, in the golden age of Africa’s independence, White South Africa was in the dark ages, having missed “the wind of progressive change” of “entrenched fundamental human rights.” 47 For Luthuli, apartheid was the antithesis of “humanity’s highest aspirations of which the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights is a culmination. This is what we stand for. This is what we fight for.” 48 The Nobel propelled Luthuli to global celebrity and raised the profile of the ANC, but it proved to be the apex of Luthuli’s political life.

The year 1960 was the “Year of Africa,” with seventeen newly independent countries announcing themselves on the global stage. Many South Africans hoped that they too would be “Free by ’63.” But the apartheid regime bucked global decolonization trends to instead intensify its reign of terror. On March 21, 1960 , during PAC-led anti-pass demonstrations, police in the town of Sharpeville killed sixty-nine African pass protesters and injured upward of one hundred eighty during peaceful demonstrations against pass laws, prompting global headlines and world outrage against apartheid viciousness. The regime doubled down, declaring a state of emergency, detaining over twenty-five thousand people, and outlawing the ANC, the PAC, and several other liberation groups and individuals. In response, newly independent African and Asian countries passed numerous anti-apartheid resolutions in the UN General Assembly, and anti-apartheid protesters around the world called for diplomatic isolation, economic sanctions, and trade boycotts; there was a massive withdrawal of capital, and South Africa was forced out of the British Commonwealth. But Verwoerd survived both the assassin’s bullet of a White farmer named David Pratt and international condemnation to call for a referendum whereby the all-White electorate declared South Africa to be a republic. For many Afrikaners who had long resented any form of British oversight, Verwoerd, the grand architect of apartheid, was their modern-day Moses who would safeguard their ethnic identity and security within a rapidly decolonizing African continent.

After Sharpeville and the government’s banning of the ANC, Luthuli and Nelson Mandela debated the appropriate use of nonviolence and violence in the anti-apartheid struggle. For Mandela and other ANC leaders, nonviolence was more a conditional tactic than an inviolable principle. Luthuli, who had been jailed and beaten during the state of emergency, was South Africa’s foremost exponent of Gandhian nonviolence, but he still understood that the increasing violence of the apartheid state prompted calls for some form of counterviolence. In mid- 1961 , during separate and joint meetings of the ANC and its Congress Alliance partners, Luthuli and Mandela agreed to a compromise position whereby the ANC retained its nonviolent policies but authorized and accepted the eventual formation of a separate though affiliated sabotage unit led by Mandela that eventually became known as Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). This unit had a qualified mandate not to engage in open warfare or target human lives but rather to confine itself to tightly controlled sabotage. Such actions would be against critical South African infrastructure, including government buildings that administered and enforced apartheid laws (like pass offices and police stations) and state infrastructure (like government installations, electricity transmission towers, communication, and transport links). Ideally, these attacks would disrupt the South African state machine, damage the country’s economy, raise national and international consciousness of apartheid’s evils, and bring the government to the negotiating table. Alas, it was not to be. The National Party responded to MK, launched on December 16, 1961 , with further state repression. In July 1962 , the South African parliament passed the General Laws Amendment Act, entrenching indefinite confinement without charge, and by 1964 the state had captured most MK leaders, sentencing several, including Mandela, to life imprisonment in June 1964 . 49

The state’s continued banning of the ANC, its virtual decimation of MK, and the widespread killing, jailing, and exiling of numerous anti-apartheid activists was a demoralizing political setback. The regime’s ban of Luthuli restricted him to his Groutville home, unable even to attend church with his family, and banned his image and words in South Africa. In this bleak milieu, Luthuli tried to recover political momentum. Communicating surreptitiously with exiled ANC leaders like Oliver Tambo and Robert Resha, Luthuli continued his calls for international nonviolence via weapons embargoes and trade boycotts particularly by Britain, South Africa’s largest trading partner. Ghana, India, and Malaysia were among the first countries to enact sanctions against South Africa. He also wrote missives to international anti-apartheid organizations like the American Council on Africa (ACOA) and the UN Special Committee on Apartheid to bolster their ongoing protests against South Africa. 50 Martin Luther King, Jr., amplified Luthuli’s international nonviolence and human-rights platform. Since 1957 , King had supported South Africans who sought “to achieve basic human rights for all as proclaimed in their Freedom Charter.” 51 King also raised money for the legal defense of Luthuli and his fellow accused during the Treason Trial, and in July 1962 , King and Luthuli issued the “Appeal for Action Against Apartheid,” a call to all governments, organizations, and individuals to support economic sanctions, trade boycotts, and diplomatic isolation of South Africa until it abided by the UN Declaration of Human Rights. En route to Oslo in 1964 for his own Nobel Peace Prize, King addressed a London audience with many South Africans present, lamenting the global color line: “Clearly there is much in Mississippi and Alabama to remind South Africans of their own country” and noted that the apartheid regime had responded to over fifty years of nonviolent struggle in South Africa with “the shootings of Sharpeville . . . years of punishment for Mandela” along with “hundreds wasting away in Robben Island.” 52 At his Nobel acceptance speech, King praised Luthuli, “pilot in the struggle for human rights . . . [who] met with the most brutal expression of man’s inhumanity to man” and continued his anti-apartheid activism until his 1968 death. 53

State Persecution and Luthuli’s Mysterious Death

In May 1964 , the Minister of Justice John Vorster renewed Luthuli’s bans for an additional five years, further isolating him from the ANC, which had been driven underground and was struggling to maintain a viable domestic presence. Luthuli still managed to transmit his message to the world through visitors such as the US senator Robert F. Kennedy, who, during his 1966 South African tour, made the pilgrimage to Groutville and later praised Luthuli as “one of the most impressive men that I have ever met.” 54 But police harassment intensified, with frequent house raids that made Luthuli “very touchy” and “depressed.” Nokukhanya recalled,

They used to come and fetch him from home. Sometimes without notice, they would take him away, talking to him about stopping what he was doing. They wanted him to resign from the ANC. That was the main thing. They would talk and talk to him and bring him back in the evening. 55

Luthuli, the Nobel Peace Prize winner hailed as the potential president of a democratic, nonracial South Africa, became a lonely, depressed, and increasingly ill man, victimized by a vicious regime that inflicted upon him a slow death by a thousand cuts. When the government stripped his chieftainship in 1952 , Luthuli anticipated correctly that his political path might lead to “ridicule, imprisonment . . . banishment and even death,” but he prayed to God that he would continue to have the courage to fight for “a true democracy and a true union . . . of all the communities in the land.” 56 While in Oslo, Luthuli had refused to go into exile, vowing to “win or die” in South Africa. 57

On July 21, 1967 , the chief died, having fought the good fight. A South African Railways freight train struck him while he walked across a bridge near his Groutville home, and he died at the hospital that afternoon before he could convey his version of this tragic event. Whether Luthuli’s death was a deliberate assassination or an unfortunate accident, given that the apartheid regime routinely murdered, tortured, and jailed its political opponents, it is not surprising that family members, close friends, colleagues, and subsequent generations have remained convinced of foul play. Certainly, whether Luthuli’s tragic encounter with the train was by accident or by design, he died imprisoned by apartheid. The ANC’s obituary praised Luthuli as “one of Africa’s greatest political figures of our times; the undisputed leader and respected spokesman for South Africa’s 14 million oppressed, exploited and humiliated inhabitants.” Luthuli’s admirers regarded him as a global icon of peace and reconciliation, like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Ironically, when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison in 1990 onto the world stage, he embodied Luthuli’s earlier status as a unique unifying figure with a stirring statesman’s vision of racial reconciliation in a democratic South Africa. In this way, he was “Luthuli after Luthuli.” If the winds of African decolonization had swept across apartheid South Africa, it is likely that Luthuli, not Mandela, would have become South Africa’s first democratically elected president. But Nokukhanya did live to see a post-apartheid South Africa before her death in 1994 . The story of Albert and Nokukhanya Luthuli is at once one of tragedy and despair, prophetic triumph, and a relevant model of leadership for today’s South Africa. Their integrity, gospel of service to the dispossessed, collaborative partnership and willingness to suffer and even die to realize a democratic and equitable South Africa are values deeply needed in today’s South Africa—and indeed the world.

Discussion of the Literature

Albert Luthuli’s 1961 autobiography, Let My People Go , remains an essential source of biographical information about Luthuli, his insights on the development and ideological basis of apartheid and his Christian-informed belief in the ultimate success of the anti-apartheid movement. Two early biographies, published in the immediate aftermath of Luthuli’s Nobel Peace Prize and at the height of his global renown, include Edward Callan, Albert John Luthuli and the South African Race Conflict ( 1962 ) and, from the close vantage point of a long-time anti-apartheid activist, Mary Benson’s Chief Albert Luthuli of South Africa ( 1963 ). Gerald Pillay’s Voices of Liberation ( 1993 ) provides a brief but useful biography of Luthuli before reprinting many of Luthuli’s most notable speeches. Scott Couper’s Bound by Faith ( 2010 ) asserts that Luthuli’s Christian faith “bound” him to repudiate counterviolence “before, during and after the decision to form MK,” despite the state’s brutality. Jabulani Mzaliya’s Celebrating Chief Albert Luthuli’s Life Through His Heritage Trail ( 2014 ) offers a holistic view of Luthuli’s political, familial, sporting, and musical lives. Jill Kelly’s recent and forthcoming writings on Nokukhanya build on the earlier biography, Nokukhanya: Mother of Light , by Peter Rule, Marilyn Aitken, and Jenny Van Dyck. Jon Soske’s African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa ( 2017 ) argues that Luthuli’s inclusive African nationalism was influenced by Indian independence and political and personal alliances with South African Indians. Utilizing the newly available Luthuli papers housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, as well as several other newly available archival sources, Robert Trent Vinson’s Albert Luthuli regards Luthuli as a Zulu man who contextualized South African politics within larger African continental and Black transnational politics. Utilizing these archival sources and a range of oral histories, this book also argues that Luthuli insisted that the ANC continue its official nonviolent policies but accepted and authorized a separate but affiliated sabotage unit that became MK.

Within the past twenty years, there have been vibrant, often contentious historiographical debates on various aspects of the “turn to armed struggle” in 1950s and 1960s South Africa. These debates include, but are not limited to, the respective roles of key figures like Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela in decisions about the efficacy of adding various forms of armed insurrection to the ANC’s longstanding policies of nonviolent protest, the relative influence of the Soviet Union and the South African Communist Party (SACP) in initiating armed struggle, recent revelations regarding Nelson Mandela’s SACP membership, and critiques of the governing ANC’s “patriotic” hagiographical claims that an ANC/MK–led “armed struggle” was a heroic and ultimately successful campaign that liberated Black South Africans from apartheid.

For path-breaking discussions on popular conceptions of Luthuli’s relationship to MK, see Jabulani Sithole and Sibongiseni Mkhize, “Truth or Lies? Selective Memories, Imagings and Representations of Chief Albert Luthuli in recent political discourses” ( History and Theory 39 [ 2000 ]). Ray Suttner contended that Luthuli supported the formation of MK as “just means” against a violent apartheid state that had closed off longstanding nonviolent options; Scott Couper countered that Luthuli was opposed to the formation of MK, and Stephen Ellis argued that the South African Communist Party, with the support of the Soviet Union, was the driving force in the inauguration of the armed struggle, including the formation of MK. 58 Thula Simpson’s Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle (Cape Town, 2016 ) and The ANC and the Liberation Struggle in South Africa: Essential Writings (New York: Routledge, 2017 ) offers several key articles that position Luthuli within larger debates on armed struggle. Simpson’s “Nelson Mandela and the Genesis of the ANC’s Armed Struggle: Notes on Method” ( Journal of Southern African Studies , Dec. 2017 ) points to methodological and conceptual flaws in the arguments of Couper and Ellis. For this pivotal early 1960s moment in South African history, Paul Landau has written a landmark book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022 ) and two important articles: “The ANC, MK, and ‘The Turn to Violence’ (1960–62)” and “Controlled by Communists? (Re) Assessing the ANC in its Exilic Decades.” 59

Acknowledgments

The author expresses gratitude to Ohio University Press for permission to reprint portions of my previous biography, Albert Luthuli (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018).

Primary Sources

Leading US-based primary sources include the Albert Luthuli papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, a less extensive collection of Luthuli papers as part of the Cooperative Africana Microfilm Project (CAMP) at Northwestern University. Other important US-based repositories with significant content on Luthuli include, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Harvard University, the Amistad Research Center, American Committee on Africa Collection, at Tulane University, the E.S. Reddy Papers at Yale University, and the John and Eleanor Reuling Papers, George Houser Papers and the Mary-Louise Hooper Papers, all at Michigan State University. South African-based archival sources include the Luthuli Museum in Groutville, South African National Archives Repository, the African National Congress Headquarters, Archival Division, the Killie Campbell Africana Library, University of Kwa-Zulu-Natal and the William Cullen Library, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, University of the Western Cape.

Further Reading

• Alegi, Peter . “Sport, Race, and Liberation: A Preliminary Study of Albert Luthuli’s Sporting Life.” In Sport and Liberation in South Africa , Edited by Cornelius Thomas , 66–82. Alice, TX: University of Fort Hare, 2006.
• Couper, Scott . Albert Luthuli: Bound by Faith . Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: UKZN Press, 2010.
• Gunner, Elizabeth . “The Politics of Language and Chief Albert Luthuli’s Funeral, 30 July 1967.” In One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today , Edited by Arianna Lissoni , Jon Soske , Natasha Erlank , Noor Nieftagodien , and Omar Badsha . Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 2012.
• Kelly, Jill . “Gender, Shame, and the ‘Efficacy of Congress Methods of Struggle’ in 1959 Natal Women’s Rural Revolts.” South African Historical Journal 71, no. 2 (2019): 1–21.
• Luthuli, Albert . Let My People Go . New York: McGraw Hill, 1962.
• Naidoo, Logan . In the Shadow of Chief Albert Luthuli: Reflections on Goolam Suleiman . KwaDukuza, South Africa: Luthuli Museum, 2010.
• Pillay, Gerald . Voices of Liberation: Albert Luthuli . Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press, 2012.
• Reddy, E. S. Luthuli: Speeches of Chief Albert John Luthuli . Durban, South Africa: Madiba Publishers, 1991.
• Rule, Peter , with Marilyn Aitken and Jenny Van Dyk . Nokukhanya: Mother of Light Johannsburg, South Africa: Grail Press, 1993.
• Simpson, Thula . “Nelson Mandela and the Genesis of the ANC’s Armed Struggle: Notes on Method.” Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 1 (2018): 133–148.
• Sithole Jabulani . “Chief Albert Luthuli and Bantustan Politics.” In Zulu Identities . Edited by Benedict Carton , John Laband , and Jabulani Sithole . Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: UKZN Press, 2009.
• Sithole, Jabulani , and Sibongiseni Mkhize , “Truth or Lies?: Selective Memories, Imaginings and Representations of Chief Albert Luthuli in Recent Political Discourses.” History and Theory 39, no. 4 (2000): 69–85.
• Soske, Jon . Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017.
• Suttner, Raymond . “The Road to Freedom is via the Cross’: ‘Just Means’ in Chief Albert Luthuli’s Life.” South African Historical Journal 62, no. 4 (2010): 696–715.
• Vinson, Robert Trent . Albert Luthuli . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018.
• Vinson, Robert Trent , and Benedict Carton . “Albert Luthuli’s Private Struggle: How an Icon of Peace Came to Accept Sabotage in South Africa.” Journal of African History 58, no. 1 (2018): 1–28.

1. Albert Luthuli, Let My People Go (New York: McGraw Hill, 1962), 19–22 .

2. Harvey Feinberg, Our Land, Our Life, Our Future: Black South African Challenges to Territorial Segregation, 1913–1948 (Pretoria, South Africa: UNISA Press, 2015).

3. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 17, 26.

4. Robert Trent Vinson, Albert Luthuli (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018), 20–21 ; and Peter Alegi, “Sport, Race, and Liberation: A Preliminary Study of Albert Luthuli’s Sporting Life,” in Sport and Liberation in South Africa: Reflections and Suggestions , ed. Cornelius Thomas (Alice, South Africa: University of Fort Hare Press, 2006), 66–82 .

5. Albertina Luthuli, “Ubaba: Recollections by Ntombazana,” in Luthuli: Speeches of Chief Albert Luthuli, 1898–1967 , ed. Enuga S. Reddy (Durban, South Africa: Madiba Press, 1991), 13, 38 .

6. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 56–57, 61–62; Logan Naidoo, In the Shadow of Chief Luthuli: Reflections of Goolam Suleiman (Groutville, South Africa: Luthuli Museum, 2010), 15 ; and Peter Rule, Marilyn Aitken, and Jenny Van Dyk, Nokukhanya: Mother of Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 92–93 .

7. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 120.

8. Vinson, Albert Luthuli, 28–31. The government formally dissolved the NRC in 1951.

9. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 81. Luthuli did not meet Mahatma Gandhi on this trip (personal communication with E. S. Reddy, September 15, 2015).

10. Wilson Minton to Albert Luthuli, October 27, 1960, in the Albert Luthuli Papers, Schomburg Center for Black Research and Culture, New York Public Library (NYPL), Box 4, Folder 73 (hereafter LPSC).

11. Albert Luthuli, “Mahatma Gandi [ sic ] Memorial on the Occasion of the Centenary Celebrations of the Washington University,” U.S.A., LM, Folder 2005, 2, 1, Albert Luthuli Museum, Groutville, South Africa.

12. Gandy to President Dr. L. H. Foster, January 14, 1949, PSSC, Box 48, File 15; “Tribute to Luthuli,” New Journal and Guide , August 5, 1967.

13. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 82–84.

14. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 82–84; and Vinson, Albert Luthuli .

15. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 46–47.

16. Luthuli to Frederick Rowe, February 20, 1949, PSSC; and Luthuli, Let My People Go , 86–90.

17. Luthuli mentioned several times that Gandhi and his satyagraha campaigns against Britain had “inspired the ANC’s struggle against apartheid.” Gerald Pillay, Voices of Liberation: Albert Luthuli (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012), 31 .

18. David Welsh, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 110–112; “Minutes of the Meetings of the Working Committee of the African National Congress (Natal) Held on Saturday, Sept. 10, 1952, at Lakhani Chambers, Saville Street, Durban,” Albert Luthuli Papers, Cooperative Africana Microfilm Project (hereafter LPCAMP); Albert Luthuli, “We Go To Action,” August 30, 1952, LPCAMP.

19. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 147–148.

20. “Protest Meetings Against Swart Bills,” Indian Opinion , February 20, 1953; and “Annual Conference of N.I.C.,” Indian Opinion , February 27, 1953.

21. “Let Us Speak Together of Freedom,” Fighting Talk , vol. 10, no. 10, October 1954, in Box 6, Folder 115, LPSC; “Legal Struggle To Resist Apartheid and For Charter,” New Age , November 25, 1954, in “Documents concerning Chief Luthuli: Photocopies 1953–1962” folder, E. S. Reddy papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University (hereafter ESRPY); “Presidential Message to Natal ANC Annual Conference,” October 30, 1954, Box 3, Folder 11, LPSC; and Albert Luthuli and Masabalala B. Yengwa, “Joint Message to the Congress of the People of South Africa: Meeting in Kliptown”, Johannesburg, on June 25–26, 1955, in Box 3 Folder 54, LPSC.

22. Luthuli Presidential Address to Provincial Natal ANC annual meeting, July 26, 1956, Box 4, Folder 19, LPSC; Luthuli to Hooper, June 8, 1956, Box 4, Folder 1, LPSC; Luthuli Presidential Address, July 26, 1956, Box 3, Folder 87, LPSC; Raymond Suttner and Jeremy Cronin, 50 Years of the Freedom Charter (London: Zed Books, 2007), 115; and “Freedom Struggle Must Go On,” New Age , August 2, 1956.

23. Two examples are Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) and Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Saul Dubow notes that some factions of the ANC did not consistently engage in human-rights discourse but does not fully explore Luthuli’s human-rights language. Saul Dubow, South Africa’s Struggle for Human Rights (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012).

24. The text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be accessed on the United Nations website.

25. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 192–93.

26. Anthony Sampson, Mandela (London: Harper Collins, 2011), 103; and Albert Luthuli, foreword to Helen Joseph, If This Be Treason (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 1998).

27. Martin Meredith, Mandela: A Biography (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2011), 132; and Luli Callinicos, Oliver Tambo: Beyond the Engeli Mountains (Cape Town: David Philip, 2004), 188.

28. Raymond Suttner, The ANC Underground in South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2008), 47.

29. Meredith, Mandela, 145.

30. Drum , November 1959; and Arianna Lissoni, “Transformations in the ANC External Mission and Umkhonto we Sizwe, c. 1960–1969,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 2 (2009): 292.

31. Luthuli, Let My People Go , 219; Pillay, Voices of Liberation , 23. The ANC called for an international boycott against apartheid South Africa in December 1958 at the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra, Ghana. Luthuli renewed his call for sanctions at the 1959 ANC conference. Walter Sisulu wrote an important exposition on the utility of the boycott for the South African situation, noting its various historical uses in Ireland, Russia, and India, as well as in South Africa. Walter Sisulu, “Boycott As A Political Weapon,” Liberation , February 23, 1957.

32. Sifiso Ndlovu, “The ANC and the World,” in , The Road to Democracy , vol. 1 (1960–70) (South African Democracy Education Trust ([hereafter SADET]), 549–550.

33. Quoted in Pillay, Voices of Liberation , 24.

34. Hendrik Verwoerd, Verwoerd Speaks: Speeches, 1948–1966 , ed. A. N. Pelzer (Johannesburg: APB, 1966), 23–29.

35. Hendrik Verwoerd, quoted in Connie Field, “The Road to Resistance,” part 1, Have You Heard from Johannesburg: Seven Stories from the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement (Berkeley, CA: Clarity Films, 2010).

36. Liberation , July 1959.

37. Frederik W. De Klerk, The Last Trek: A New Beginning (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 31.

38. Rule, et al., Nokukhanya , 106.

39. Natal Daily News, May 29, 1959.

40. Kader Asmal, David Chidester, and Wilmot James, eds., South Africa’s Nobel Laureates: Peace, Literature, and Science (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2004), 63.

41. Mary Louise Hooper, “Profilee: Albert John Luthuli, c. 1961,” Memoirs S. A. folder, Mary-Louise Hooper Papers, Special Collections, Michigan State University.

42. Nokukhanya Luthuli quoted in Rule, et al., Nokukhanya: Mother of Light , 108.

43. Jill Kelly also illustrates Nokukhanya Luthuli’s lesser-known political activities. See Jill Kelly, “Gender, Shame, and the ‘Efficacy of Congress Methods of Struggle’ in 1959 Natal Women’s Rural Revolts,” South African Historical Journal 71, no. 2 (2019): 17 .

44. Dubow, South Africa’s Struggle for Human Rights , 13–14; “Top U.S. Diplomat in South Africa Sees Luthuli,” Sunday Times , September 20, 1959; Box 6, Folder 115, LPSC; and “Make December 10 A Worthy Anniversary,” New Age , December 3, 1959.

45. Natal Mercury, October 27, 1961; Minister of Interior Jan De Klerk, press statement, November 3, 1961.

46. Gunnar Jahn, “ Award Ceremony Speech ,” The Nobel Prize . .

47. Nobel Lecture delivered by Chief Albert Luthuli, Oslo University, December 11, 1961, typescript, Folder B4-7; Luthuli Papers, A3337, LP: WITS; and Jabulani Sithole, “Chief Albert Luthuli and Bantustan Politics,” in Zulu Identities: Being Zulu Past and Present , eds. Benedict Carton, John Laband, and Jabulani Sithole (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 331.

48. Nobel Lecture delivered by Chief Albert Luthuli, Oslo University, December 11, 1961, typescript, Folder B4-7; and Luthuli Papers, A3337, LP: WITS.

49. Kenneth Broun, Saving Nelson Mandela: The Rivonia Trial and the Fate of South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 102–15.

50. The UN Special Committee on Apartheid led by Enuga S. Reddy provided data and testimony to the General Assembly and Security Council, with the aim of fostering boycotts, arms embargoes, and wide condemnation of South Africa. For ACOA anti-apartheid and civil-rights activity during the Cold War, see Phyllis Martin, “A Moral Imperative: The Role of American Black Churches in International Anti-Apartheid Activism” (PhD diss., George Mason University, 2015), 104–193; Ryan Irwin, Gordian Knot: Apartheid and the Unmaking of the Liberal World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 78–79; Francis Nesbitt, Race Against Sanctions: African Americans Against Apartheid, 1946–1994 (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004); Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Brenda Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press,1996).

51. Lewis Baldwin, ed., In a Single Garment of Destiny: A Global Vision of Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 31.

52. Martin King, Jr., “Address on South African Independence,” December 7, 1964, London, quoted by Lewis Baldwin, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Coalition of Conscience,” in Freedom’s Distant Shores: American Protestants and Post-colonial Alliances , ed. R. Drew Smith (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 65. King linked the “struggle for freedom in the United States . . . [to what was] going on in South Africa”: Martin King, Jr., “Apartheid in South Africa,” July 12, 1963, 1–3, Archives of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta, Georgia.

53. “ Martin Luther King, Jr. Acceptance Speech ,” The Nobel Prize . For King’s ongoing anti-apartheid activism, see Baldwin, In a Single Garment of Destiny.

54. Vinson, Albert Luthuli , 130.

55. Rule, et al., Nokukhanya , 137, 142, cited in Vinson, Albert Luthuli , 131.

56. Albert Luthuli, public statement, “The Road to Freedom is Via the Cross,” November 11, 1952, reprinted in Albert Luthuli, Luthuli, Speeches of Chief Albert Luthuli, 1898–1967 , compiled by Enuga S. Reddy (Durban, South Africa: Madiba, 1991), 10–13.

57. H. G. M. Bass to G. E. B. Shannon, Commonwealth Relations Office, November 7, 1961, File Name, South Africa: ANC and PAC, Apartheid South Africa 1948–1966, Dominions Office (DO) 180/6.

58. See Ray Suttner, “The Road to Freedom Is Via the Cross: ‘Just Means’ in Chief Albert Luthuli’s Life,” South African Historical Journal 62, no. 4 (2010): 699–700 ; Scott Couper, “Emasculating Agency: An Unambiguous Assessment of Albert Luthuli’s Stance on Violence,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2012): 567, 569; Scott Couper, Albert Luthuli: Bound By Faith (Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press): 2010), 111–184 ; Scott Couper, “An Embarrassment to the Congresses? The Silencing of Chief Albert Luthuli and the Production of ANC history,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 2 (2009): 331–348; and Stephen Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile 1960-1990 (Oxford: 2013), 12, 25–26.

59. Paul Landau, “The ANC, MK, and ‘The Turn to Violence’ (1960–62),” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2012): 538–563; and Paul Landau, “Controlled by Communists? (Re) Assessing the ANC in its Exilic Decades,” South African Historical Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 223–224.

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 20, 2023 | Original: October 7, 2010

Apartheid, or “apartness” in the language of Afrikaans, was a system of legislation that upheld segregation against non-white citizens of South Africa. After the National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, its all-white government immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation. Under apartheid, nonwhite South Africans—a majority of the population—were forced to live in separate areas from whites and use separate public facilities. Contact between the two groups was limited. Despite strong and consistent opposition to apartheid within and outside of South Africa, its laws remained in effect for the better part of 50 years. In 1991, the government of President F.W. de Klerk began to repeal most of the legislation that provided the basis for apartheid.

Apartheid in South Africa

Racial segregation and white supremacy had become central aspects of South African policy long before apartheid began. The controversial 1913 Land Act , passed three years after South Africa gained its independence, marked the beginning of territorial segregation by forcing Black Africans to live in reserves and making it illegal for them to work as sharecroppers. Opponents of the Land Act formed the South African National Native Congress, which would become the African National Congress (ANC).

Did you know? ANC leader Nelson Mandela, released from prison in February 1990, worked closely with President F.W. de Klerk's government to draw up a new constitution for South Africa. After both sides made concessions, they reached agreement in 1993, and would share the Nobel Peace Prize that year for their efforts.

The Great Depression and World War II brought increasing economic woes to South Africa, and convinced the government to strengthen its policies of racial segregation. In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party won the general election under the slogan “apartheid” (literally “apartness”). Their goal was not only to separate South Africa’s white minority from its non-white majority, but also to separate non-whites from each other, and to divide Black South Africans along tribal lines in order to decrease their political power.

Apartheid Becomes Law

By 1950, the government had banned marriages between whites and people of other races, and prohibited sexual relations between Black and white South Africans. The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided the basic framework for apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race, including Bantu (Black Africans), Coloured (mixed race) and white.

A fourth category, Asian (meaning Indian and Pakistani) was later added. In some cases, the legislation split families; a parent could be classified as white, while their children were classified as colored.

A series of Land Acts set aside more than 80 percent of the country’s land for the white minority, and “pass laws” required non-whites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas.

In order to limit contact between the races, the government established separate public facilities for whites and non-whites, limited the activity of nonwhite labor unions and denied non-white participation in national government.

Apartheid and Separate Development

Hendrik Verwoerd , who became prime minister in 1958, refined apartheid policy further into a system he referred to as “separate development.” The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantu homelands known as Bantustans. Separating Black South Africans from each other enabled the government to claim there was no Black majority and reduced the possibility that Black people would unify into one nationalist organization.

Every Black South African was designated as a citizen as one of the Bantustans, a system that supposedly gave them full political rights, but effectively removed them from the nation’s political body.

In one of the most devastating aspects of apartheid, the government forcibly removed Black South Africans from rural areas designated as “white” to the homelands and sold their land at low prices to white farmers. From 1961 to 1994, more than 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes and deposited in the Bantustans, where they were plunged into poverty and hopelessness.

Opposition to Apartheid

Resistance to apartheid within South Africa took many forms over the years, from non-violent demonstrations, protests and strikes to political action and eventually to armed resistance.

Together with the South Indian National Congress, the ANC organized a mass meeting in 1952, during which attendees burned their pass books. A group calling itself the Congress of the People adopted a Freedom Charter in 1955 asserting that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black or white.” The government broke up the meeting and arrested 150 people, charging them with high treason.

Sharpeville Massacre

In 1960, at the Black township of Sharpeville, the police opened fire on a group of unarmed Black people associated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an offshoot of the ANC. The group had arrived at the police station without passes, inviting arrest as an act of resistance. At least 67 people were killed and more than 180 wounded.

The Sharpeville massacre convinced many anti-apartheid leaders that they could not achieve their objectives by peaceful means, and both the PAC and ANC established military wings, neither of which ever posed a serious military threat to the state.

Nelson Mandela

By 1961, most resistance leaders had been captured and sentenced to long prison terms or executed. Nelson Mandela , a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the military wing of the ANC, was incarcerated from 1963 to 1990; his imprisonment would draw international attention and help garner support for the anti-apartheid cause.

On June 10, 1980, his followers smuggled a letter from Mandela in prison and made it public: “UNITE! MOBILIZE! FIGHT ON! BETWEEN THE ANVIL OF UNITED MASS ACTION AND THE HAMMER OF THE ARMED STRUGGLE WE SHALL CRUSH APARTHEID!”

President F.W. de Klerk

In 1976, when thousands of Black children in Soweto, a Black township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the Afrikaans language requirement for Black African students, the police opened fire with tear gas and bullets.

The protests and government crackdowns that followed, combined with a national economic recession, drew more international attention to South Africa and shattered any remaining illusions that apartheid had brought peace or prosperity to the nation.

The United Nations General Assembly had denounced apartheid in 1973, and in 1976 the UN Security Council voted to impose a mandatory embargo on the sale of arms to South Africa. In 1985, the United Kingdom and United States imposed economic sanctions on the country.

Under pressure from the international community, the National Party government of Pieter Botha sought to institute some reforms, including abolition of the pass laws and the ban on interracial sex and marriage. The reforms fell short of any substantive change, however, and by 1989 Botha was pressured to step aside in favor of another conservative president, F.W. de Klerk, who had supported apartheid throughout his political career.

When Did Apartheid End?

Though a conservative, De Klerk underwent a conversion to a more pragmatic political philosophy, and his government subsequently repealed the Population Registration Act, as well as most of the other legislation that formed the legal basis for apartheid. De Klerk freed Nelson Mandela on February 11, 1990.

A new constitution, which enfranchised Black citizens and other racial groups, took effect in 1994, and elections that year led to a coalition government with a nonwhite majority, marking the official end of the apartheid system.

The End of Apartheid. Archive: U.S. Department of State . A History of Apartheid in South Africa. South African History Online . South Africa: Twenty-Five Years Since Apartheid. The Ohio State University: Stanton Foundation . 

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This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation , but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. It is the product of almost two decades of research and includes analyses, chronologies, historical documents, and interviews from the apartheid and post-apartheid eras.

This resource is hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation , but was compiled and authored by Padraig O’Malley. Return to theThis resource is hosted by the site.

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• Introduction

Passage, enforcement, and impact

Challenges, repeal, and legacy.

• What is apartheid?
• When did apartheid start?
• How did apartheid end?
• What is the apartheid era in South African history?

Group Areas Act

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• Table Of Contents

Group Areas Act , one of three acts, the first promulgated in 1950, in South Africa that provided for the division of the country into areas based on racial categories determined by the government. This occurred during the country’s apartheid era, when the white minority government implemented policies that sanctioned racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against the nonwhite majority. The act was used primarily to push nonwhites out of areas in which they had previously settled. After its enactment, the Group Areas Act was amended on a nearly yearly basis and was reenacted twice, with the passage of the Group Areas Acts of 1957 and 1966; the final version of the law was not repealed until 1991.

Racial segregation had long existed in South Africa, but the rise of the National Party —a political party dedicated to policies of white supremacy that held executive power from 1948 until 1994—greatly extended the enactment and enforcement of racial segregation with its apartheid policies, the Group Areas Act being among the most significant. The act used the Population Registration Act (also passed in 1950) for definitions of the racial categories into which the country would be divided. People were classified as either native (also called Black or Bantu), Coloured (those of mixed race), or white; a fourth category, Asian (also called Indian), was later added.

The Group Areas Act became law on July 7, 1950. It stated that the government could designate certain geographic areas for use by a single race, though the law itself did not actually create any specific group areas; the designation of such areas came later. The Group Areas Act was administered by the minister of the interior and the Land Tenure Advisory Board (in 1955 renamed the Group Areas Development Board, later the Community Development Board). The board would research and draw areas that its members considered to be apt for segregation and submit a map to the minister, who in turn would approve the creation of the new areas. The South African authorities began to enforce the act after the passage of additional laws, beginning in the mid-1950s, that dictated where certain races could and could not live and provided the procedural apparatus necessary for the expropriation of land, the resettlement of people no longer allowed to remain where they had been living, and the development of reclaimed land.

The Group Areas Act restricted all ownership in the newly formed areas to the races that were designated to reside there. However, while Black South Africans were barred from doing business in white areas, white South Africans and government agencies continued to own much of the land in Black areas, being exempt from the language of their own law. In 1959 the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act created 8 (later expanded to 10) Bantu homelands , or Bantustans. These regions were granted some semblance of self-rule, which allowed the South African government to further ignore their needs and placed responsibility for infrastructure on the residents.

Shelter and relocation costs were not considered when regions were created and maps redrawn; enforcement was left to other government departments. In the mid-1950s the police began to remove residents from their homes and communities in great numbers and to relocate them to new racially designated zones. These residents were not allowed to return; nonwhites who encroached on the new white lands had to carry documents to prove that they were permitted in prohibited zones ( see pass law ).

Enforcement of the Group Areas Acts meant that people were torn from their communities and families with little notice; those who defied the new racial borders were fined or imprisoned. Newly defined areas exploded in population. As a result, many South Africans, no longer having suitable accommodations, lived in makeshift homes. Relocation was enforced brutally. In one instance, in 1955 thousands of police officers descended on Sophiatown, a cosmopolitan and culturally significant, predominantly Black suburb of Johannesburg , and removed the Black residents. Some were taken in vans and left in the wilderness outside what is now Soweto . Another infamous instance of forced relocation involved the razing of District Six, a lively mixed-population neighborhood of Cape Town , that in 1966 was designated by the government as an area only for the white population. At least 60,000 people were relocated, most of them to the barren outskirts of town, and the area was cleared by bulldozers.

From the 1950s, apartheid laws like the Group Areas Acts were challenged across South Africa. Large demonstrations against them were regularly quashed with violence. Increasing pressure—both from within South Africa and from abroad—and a troubled economy compelled the South African government to gradually begin offering, in the 1980s, some reforms to apartheid policy and then, after F.W. de Klerk became president in 1989, to institute reforms in earnest. The final version of the Group Areas Act was repealed in 1991 by the Abolition of Racially Based Land Measures Act as part of the end to legislated apartheid. Still, the Group Areas Acts left a legacy of communal trauma and poor infrastructure. After the country’s first elections by universal suffrage, in 1994, Pres. Nelson Mandela ’s new government inherited these problems. His administration, and those of his successors, made strides toward addressing the housing shortage and the issue of land ownership, but the legacy of the Group Areas Acts remained visible in the distribution of poverty in the country.

South Africa and the Struggle for Racial Equality: Debating Deracialization, Non-racialism, Decolonization, and Africanization

• First Online: 26 January 2023

Cite this chapter

• Nikolay Zakharov 6 ,
• Shirley Anne Tate 7 ,
• Ian Law 8 &
• Joaze Bernardino-Costa 9  

Part of the book series: Mapping Global Racisms ((MGR))

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1 Citations

Deracialization is known/unknown, critiqued/valorized depending on political generation, involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle, decolonization, and Africanization movements. Black-generated discourses on non-racialism emerged from anti-racist, anti-colonial activism from the 1930s to the twenty-first century. The current state failings to stem the tide of anti-Black racism, contemporary ideas on re-racialization, and social justice transformation within the discourses and politics of Africanization, decolonization and twenty-first-century non-racialism, highlight the continuing (im)possibility of deracialization. Approaches to Black liberation and anti-racism—non-racialism, decolonization, and Africanization—are intertwined and critiqued. However, deracialization as a concept, politics, and worldview has limited resonance today. Nonetheless, Black liberation through anti-racism recognized by a variety of reparations approaches continues to be an important call within Black political, communal, and social life in South Africa.

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S. Africa Repeals Apartheid Basis : Reform: Killing of the Population Registration Act ends four decades of cradle-to-grave racial labeling. De Klerk sees the way clear for a ‘true democracy.’

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The Population Registration Act, the legal foundation of apartheid, was formally repealed by the white-controlled Parliament on Monday, ending four decades of cradle-to-grave racial labeling in South Africa.

The notorious statute, the last of the pillars of apartheid to fall this month, was the building block for hundreds of laws that have protected privilege for 4.5 million whites and denied the vote and other democratic rights to 28 million blacks.

President Frederik W. de Klerk said Parliament has “finally brought to an end an era in which the lives of every South African were affected in the minutest detail by racially based legislation.”

“Now everybody is free of it,” De Klerk told a special joint session of the white, Indian and Colored (mixed-race) houses of Parliament in Cape Town. “Now everybody is free from the discouragement and denial . . . and from the moral dilemma caused by this legislation, which was born and nurtured under different circumstances in a departed era.”

De Klerk said the way is now clear for constitutional negotiations with black leaders to “guarantee participation and representation to all South Africans in a true democracy, with effective protection of minorities.”

“It is within our reach within a few years,” he said. “I do not doubt for a moment that we shall succeed.”

The African National Congress, the leading black opposition group, welcomed the repeal Monday but said it does not go far enough.

Under the measure, the government will no longer register the race of newborns or immigrants. But the population register, which lists the race of the remainder of South Africa’s 36 million people, will be maintained until a new constitution is negotiated.

Government officials say that is a legal technicality required to temporarily support the current constitution, which still denies voting rights to black Africans and provides separate, less powerful houses of Parliament for Indians and Coloreds.

But by keeping the population register intact, the government also can maintain several apartheid laws. Among the more important are measures that give lower state pensions to blacks than whites and that allow government-run white schools to remain segregated if they want.

“As long as such blatantly racist practices continue, the Population Registration Act will have been removed in name only,” the ANC said in a statement Monday. It added that the average black South African is no better off now than before De Klerk launched his reforms.

The repeal of population registration marked the end of the first phase of De Klerk’s 17-month-old reform program. He has scrapped the Separate Amenities Act, which allowed towns to segregate everything from public toilets to libraries; the Group Areas Act, which segregated residential neighborhoods; the Land Acts, which denied blacks the right to purchase land in 87% of the country, and hundreds of other discriminatory measures.

De Klerk also has removed the countrywide state of emergency, freed 1,022 political prisoners and amended security laws that once allowed for indefinite detention without trial.

However, the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups say the government has simply removed laws that shouldn’t have been passed in the first place. And they contend that the president has so far failed to erase the legacy of apartheid.

They note, for instance, that the government has replaced residential segregation with measures that allow neighborhoods to draw up “norms and standards,” which could amount to apartheid in disguise. They also have criticized the government’s refusal to redistribute land to blacks, particularly the 3.5 million people forcibly removed from their property.

“All we’re doing is scrapping the legislation,” said Jan van Eck, a member of Parliament from the Democratic Party, the government’s white liberal opposition. “It’s like saying to the beggar: ‘You can go beg.’ It doesn’t mean he’ll be successful. The process of reform isn’t irreversible yet.”

However, the South African government clearly hopes that the removal of race classification will mark the final blow to international sanctions, which have taken an economic and psychological toll on the country.

The International Olympic Committee already has indicated that the act’s repeal, along with the creation of non-segregated sporting bodies inside South Africa, will be enough to earn Pretoria an invitation to the Olympics, perhaps in time for the Summer Games next year in Barcelona, Spain.

And the government believes that its action Monday clears the final hurdle for removing U.S. congressional sanctions, the world’s stiffest. President Bush has indicated that he will move quickly to lift sanctions when the conditions are met.

But the ANC contends that Pretoria has not yet met the U.S. conditions, which include the freeing of all political prisoners. De Klerk says the prisoner release is continuing and that the government still is deciding whether several hundred applicants, convicted of such crimes as murder and robbery, qualify as political prisoners.

The ANC said Monday that it wants sanctions maintained “until it is clear that the process of moving toward a non-racial and just society is irreversible.”

The Population Registration Act was repealed on a vote of 89-38 in the white house of Parliament, with all members of the right-wing Conservative Party voting against repeal. At least one Conservative member of Parliament was ejected from the chamber when he protested during De Klerk’s speech. The houses of Indian and Colored legislators approved the bill unanimously.

During debate on the measure, Jac Rabie, a Colored member of Parliament, seemed to sum up the hurt and confusion that the race registration act had caused since 1950, when it was passed by what was then a whites-only Parliament.

Rabie said his mother was first classified white, then Colored. He was classified Indian, but it was changed to Colored. One of his brothers is black and another is white. Each of his three sons is classified as a different subgroup of the Coloreds. And two of his uncles are white and members of the pro-apartheid Conservative Party.

“I can only say, hallelujah, amen. It is over,” Rabie said.

Many South Africans saw the move as a clear signal that the government is committed to ending racial discrimination. But others felt nothing but bitterness.

“We have waited so long for these things that it loses any sense of meaning,” said Peter Hendrickse, whose father, Allan Hendrickse, controls the Colored chamber of Parliament.

Peter Hendrickse added that discrimination, especially by private businesses and resorts, would take generations to erase. “They say I will no longer be ‘Colored,’ ” he said. “But I will still be treated like one.”

Despite his reforms, De Klerk, whose father helped institute and maintain apartheid, has dismayed many South Africans by refusing to apologize for the past. De Klerk still maintains that race classification and the apartheid laws built upon it were instituted with the best of intentions.

“This was, at the time, a very honest approach,” said Ivan Lambinon, the current director of the government’s population register. “It was an objective way of saying, ‘This is how we feel South Africa should develop.’ ”

The act and other apartheid laws determined from birth which school a person could attend, where he could live, whom he could have sex with and whom he could marry. Hundreds of thousands of people were hauled into court and jailed for violating those laws.

Each year, thousands of people applied to have their race changed, completing lengthy forms and offering letters of endorsement. Then they submitted to humiliating interviews, which often included an inspection of the kinkiness of their hair, in the hope that they could move up one rung on the ladder of privilege.

At the height of apartheid, 10 clerks in Pretoria sifted through applications for reclassification. But the number assigned to the task recently dwindled to one. Last year the government approved 455 applications for race reclassification, 175 for Colored to white and 280 for black to Colored.

In 1986, following the abolition of laws prohibiting mixed marriages and interracial sex, the government removed the race classification notation on new identity documents. Vast numbers of blacks applied for new papers, and the government says that since then it has issued new identity documents to 8 million South Africans.

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Characteristics, availability and uses of vital registration and other mortality data sources in post-democracy South Africa

Jané joubert.

1 School of Population Health, University of Queensland, Herston, QLD, Australia

2 Burden of Disease Research Unit, South African Medical Research Council, Tygerberg, South Africa

Chalapati Rao

Debbie bradshaw, rob e. dorrington.

3 Centre for Actuarial Research, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

Alan D. Lopez

The value of good-quality mortality data for public health is widely acknowledged. While effective civil registration systems remains the ‘gold standard’ source for continuous mortality measurement, less than 25% of deaths are registered in most African countries. Alternative data collection systems can provide mortality data to complement those from civil registration, given an understanding of data source characteristics and data quality. We aim to document mortality data sources in post-democracy South Africa; to report on availability, limitations, strengths, and possible complementary uses of the data; and to make recommendations for improved data for mortality measurement. Civil registration and alternative mortality data collection systems, data availability, and complementary uses were assessed by reviewing blank questionnaires, death notification forms, death data capture sheets, and patient cards; legislation; electronic data archives and databases; and related information in scientific journals, research reports, statistical releases, government reports and books. Recent transformation has enhanced civil registration and official mortality data availability. Additionally, a range of mortality data items are available in three population censuses, three demographic surveillance systems, and a number of national surveys, mortality audits, and disease notification programmes. Child and adult mortality items were found in all national data sources, and maternal mortality items in most. Detailed cause-of-death data are available from civil registration and demographic surveillance. In a continent often reported as lacking the basic data to infer levels, patterns and trends of mortality, there is evidence of substantial improvement in South Africa in the availability of data for mortality assessment. Mortality data sources are many and varied, providing opportunity for comparing results and improved public health planning. However, more can and must be done to improve mortality measurement by improving data quality, triangulating data, and expanding analytic capacity. Cause data, in particular, must be improved.

The importance of mortality data for public health and development is widely acknowledged and publicly recognised since the 1600s in Graunt's Bills of Mortality ( 1 ). Globally, the importance of this continues to be reflected in a number of initiatives, such as the inclusion of mortality as a component of the Human Development Index (HDI) ( 2 ) and the expression of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4, 5, and 6 in terms of mortality ( 3 , 4 ). Although global, these indicators and targets firstly need to be measured at national and sub-national levels. However, the required data for their measurement are often not readily available, particularly in developing countries and the world's poorest populations. In 2007, the Lancet “Who Counts?” series confirmed that few countries in greatest need of vital-event and cause-of-death data have the capacity to obtain these ( 5 ).

Civil registration systems, population censuses, and surveys are highlighted as principal sources for measuring mortality ( 6 – 8 ). Recent reports also include sample vital registration and demographic surveillance systems ( 9 ). Civil registration with high coverage and accurate medical certification and coding of the cause of death remains the ‘gold standard’ source of continuous mortality data. However, only approximately 30% of the world's population live in areas with >90% completeness of death registration ( 10 ). In most African countries, for example, less than one-quarter of deaths are registered ( 11 ). Only 2% of the countries in Africa and South-East Asia have complete death registration data and half of the countries in these regions record no cause-of-death data ( 5 ). Other challenges include incomplete birth registration, misreported age at death, delays of death records under medico-legal investigation, and delays in releasing the data. For cause-of-death data, limitations include omission of the cause on the death certificate, inclusion of a cause, but not certified by a physician, inclusion of a physician-certified cause, but recorded as ‘ill-defined’ or ‘undetermined’, or a physician-certified cause, but inadvertently misdiagnosed or advertently euphemised or misclassified.

In such settings, mortality researchers rely on available alternative data collection systems such as censuses, surveys, and sample and small-area systems ( 9 ). Censuses provide essential data on population denominators and the opportunity to collect national mortality data through direct recall of household events in defined time periods, or indirect measures by collecting information on parental, spousal, sibling or child survival. Accurate information can provide estimates of childhood and adult mortality by population sub-groups and small areas. Potential weaknesses include: recall bias, event omission due to population undercount, household collapse, or mother's death, question limitations due to the length of the questionnaire, inaccurate age reporting, and the relative infrequency of enumerations at 5- or 10-year intervals. Household surveys have played a significant role over the past four decades in assessing childhood mortality through birth histories in areas with inadequate civil registration ( 12 ). Such surveys can also inform adult mortality assessment through questions on parental, sibling and spousal survival, and questions about household deaths in a specified period. Household surveys have the advantage that they can be carefully monitored for data quality, but can also be compromised by insufficient fieldwork training and supervision. Further limitations include the inability to make estimates for areas below provincial/state level, recall bias, and missing births and deaths due to discord- or death-related household disintegration or zero-survivor families ( 11 ).

Health and demographic surveillance sites (HDSSs) in defined geographic area, such as those co-ordinated by the International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and their Health in Developing Countries (INDEPTH), constitute another approach to collecting mortality data and fills an important gap in mortality assessment in many low- and middle-income countries ( 13 ). Births and deaths information are critical in each HDSS, actively identified through regular visits by trained fieldwork staff to all households in the HDSS, recording events in the period since the previous visit. With most deaths in these sites not occurring in health facilities, the cause of death is typically assessed via a verbal autopsy instrument and interviews with close kin or carers of the deceased. This is commonly followed by physician assessment and consensus acknowledgement of the probable cause of death. As a promising alternative, computerised procedures have been developed with Bayesian probabilistic modelling over the past decade, leading to the InterVA suite of models and culminating with the recent, freely available InterVA-4 model ( 14 ). Though typically intensive and thorough in pursuing vital data, and usually achieving complete, or close to complete, death recording, HDSSs are generally restricted to small geographic areas and their populations are not necessarily representative of the national population. The lay report of the circumstances leading to death, often reported a few months after the event, can be a further limitation.

While civil registration systems remain under-developed in most African countries, recent political and public services transformation in South Africa, along with determined efforts by researchers, have focussed on enhancing the civil registration system and advancing mortality data availability from vital statistics compilation ( 5 , 15 ). Additionally, mortality data items have been included in local censuses, national surveys, HDSS data collections, and condition-specific registry, disease notification and mortality audit programmes. Each of these sources has relative strengths and limitations, and an understanding of the characteristics of these sources and the quality of the data produced by them is important to guide the utilisation of their data and exploit potential complementary properties. As South African cause-specific mortality patterns have been used to model mortality in many sub-Saharan Africa countries ( 16 , 17 ), a closer look at the availability and quality of such data may be useful beyond its local value.

This article aims to review civil registration and alternative data collection systems for mortality estimation in post-democracy South Africa. Our objectives are to document these data sources, report on public availability and possible complementary uses of data from these sources, discuss data limitations and strengths in the context of their use for particular mortality indicators and analyses, and make recommendations for improving data quality and the reliability of mortality estimation.

Study design

Background information of mortality data sources, data availability, and possible complementary uses of mortality data were assessed by reviewing blank survey and census questionnaires, death notification forms, death data capture sheets, and patient treatment and clinic/hospital cards; legislation; electronic data archives and databases and web-based data repositories; and related information in scientific journals, research reports, statistical releases, government reports, working papers, and books.

In the context of the Africa Programme on Accelerated Improvement of Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (APAI-CRVS) ( 18 ), and the global importance attached to civil registration systems for mortality assessment ( 19 ), the review includes a particular focus on the development of the country's civil registration and vital statistics system over the past century. Additionally, summary background information was extracted and data availability assessed for three post-democracy population censuses, a number of national household surveys, one rapid mortality surveillance system, and three HDSSs. Tuberculosis, cancer, and injuries are major contributors to the country's mortality burden, and key information was obtained of three facility-based surveillance systems related to these causes. Additionally, given the international pressure to provide reliable information about child and maternal health to inform MDGs 4 and 5, and the potential to complement vital registration data, summary information was extracted about three facility-based mortality audit programmes for peri-natal, child and maternal deaths.

Mortality data sources in South Africa

Civil registration and vital statistics systems in south africa: a century of challenges.

Starting in 1867, a series of laws on birth and death registration were enacted at sub-national level. Half a century later, the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act of 1923 promised the possibility of uniform registration practice across the country ( 20 – 23 ). The act remained in place until replaced by the Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1992 that, unlike the 1923 act, required complete coverage of all people and all geographic areas ( 24 ). Between 1923 and 1992, however, the civil registration and vital statistics systems faced numerous challenges. Neither the single, national act of 1923, nor the establishment of the national statistical office in 1914 brought about an inclusive, comprehensive civil registration system. Instead, it was a partial registration system, covering selected segments of an ideologically contrived population, based on ‘homeland’/common land, rural/urban, and population-group differentiation.

Over time, geographic and population fragmentation became further entrenched, formalised by legislation, significantly stunting the civil registration system through the under-registration of deaths in large parts of particularly the majority, Black African, 1 population group. Such legislation included the restriction of land leasing and ownership among Black Africans to ‘homelands’ or designated reserves, mainly in under-developed rural areas with limited economic possibilities ( 25 ), and dividing the non-‘homeland’ or common area into freely accessible (rural) and restricted (urban) areas. This residence and movement control confined the majority of Black Africans to rural residence. With the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1979, Black Africans were required to become a citizen of one of 10 ‘homelands’ ( 22 , 23 , 26 ). After granting independence to four ‘homelands’, they became excluded from the South African statistical system and responsible for generating their own vital registration information ( 21 ). However, these states were largely incapable of doing this ( 27 ) and, in the remaining six ‘homelands’, several laws and circumstances constrained civil registration ( 22 ).

The Population Registration Act of 1950 made provision for the compilation of a manual population register that, counter-intuitively, played a minor role in producing vital statistics ( 22 , 23 ). In 1972, a computerised population register was initiated, but did not capture the civil details of Black Africans until 1986 ( 21 , 22 ). The civil registration was also affected by the 1923 act under which death registration for rural-living Black Africans was voluntary ( 20 , 21 ), implying that during the 1920s approximately 86% of Black Africans ( 28 ) were under no obligation to register any death. Medical certificates were required for urban but not rural deaths ( 20 ), further inhibiting vital statistics in South Africa.

In addition to these inhibiting effects and the lack of registration infrastructure and resources in most of the ‘homeland’ areas, reporting of vital events was also probably restrained by the many disruptive effects of forced removal and resettlement ( 25 , 29 – 32 ) on people's motivation and means to do so ( 25 , 31 , 33 ). Moreover, legislation, including civil registration legislation, itself impeded vital registration for decades as one act ensured that, for the majority population, rural living was compulsory while, at the same time, another ensured that rural death registration was not ( 21 ). With completeness of Black African death registration estimated to have ranged from about a quarter of all deaths during the late 1960s to about half in the mid-1980s ( 34 ), the vital-event details of this group in particular became severely under-represented in vital statistics, limiting the use and generalisability of civil registration data considerably. ( 21 , 22 ), Thus, although official mortality statistics have been collated and published since 1910 ( 20 ), the above events led to large biases in vital statistics data, and numerous barriers to producing reliable, representative and timely mortality statistics.

Transformation during the 1990s affecting civil registration

During the 1990s, however, under a new, democratic dispensation, major and rapid political and social transformation ensued in all spheres of governance, including a commitment to transforming the civil registration and vital statistics systems into an information system that effectively serve civil record-keeping and public health planning. Bah ( 23 ) identified three key events during the 1990s which held new promise for vital registration coverage and content: 1) the passing of the Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1992 ( 24 ), leaving no scope for optional or differential registration; 2) the adoption of the interim Constitution of South Africa in 1993 ( 35 ), ensuring the consolidation of all geographic segments into one geo-political unit and, therewith, the centralisation of the civil registration system under one entity; and 3) the agreement among three key role players – the Department of Health, Department of Home Affairs (DHA), and the official national statistical agency, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) – to establish, in collaboration with health researchers, a joint technical committee tasked to enhance civil registration and improve the vital statistics system ( 23 , 36 ). These events spawned a range of initiatives to increase the registration of deaths and improve the quality of vital-event data ( 23 , 37 , 38 ), including the introduction of a new death notification form to bring local data in line with international standards and to achieve compliance with WHO standards for the certification of causes of death ( 36 , 39 , 40 ).

Institutional capacity was strengthened through study tours and visits of key government officials to civil registration/vital statistics offices in Australia, Sweden, and the United States ( 23 ). More capacity and initiatives have been developed to enhance coverage of death registration, including the establishment of provincial task teams who developed a strategy to enhance registration, and facilitated the introduction of the new death notification form to ensure its implementation; distribution of certification and ICD code manuals to hospitals and health professional and academic organisations for staff training; letters to all registered doctors, informing them of the new procedures and relevant guidelines; the development of guidelines by the Department of Health on birth and death registration; training of health workers in all provinces about the importance and process of vital registration; making the necessary forms for birth registration available to mothers at the time of delivery; and assisting mothers to complete and submit the forms to the DHA ( 21 , 36 , 41 ).

Capturing the effects of transformation in completeness estimation

These specific efforts, along with the political and social transformations mentioned previously, are likely to have contributed to the increasing levels of completeness of registration for both adult and child deaths over the past two decades. Estimation of completeness of registration during the 1980–90s was a very complicated task. However, meticulous, comprehensive research since the late 1980s has carefully sought to understand the merit of different local mortality data sources and the applicability of different indirect methods in the South African mortality data context over time ( 27 , 42 – 44 ). Application of the Bennett and Horiuchi's Synthetic Extinct Generations method ( 45 ), for example, to deaths from Stats SA's vital registration database and the Population Register, relative to population estimates from the ASSA600 AIDS and Demographic Model of the Actuarial Society of South Africa, estimated that the level of adult death registration improved from 85% to about 90% for the period 1996–2000 ( 43 ).

For the period 1996–2006, the estimated level of death registration improved from 43 to 89% for infants; from 44 to 78% for children under 5 years; and from 43 to 57% for children aged 1–4 years ( 46 ). These childhood estimates were derived using a multi-stage method described in Darikwa and Dorrington ( 46 ), using registered death data from civil registration; data from the 2007 Community Survey (child deaths over the past 12 months as reported by households, children ever born/children surviving data, and data on the survival of the last child born to women aged 12–49 years); 2001 Census (reported household deaths); and data from previous research ( 47 – 50 ) based on the 1998 South Africa Demographic and Health Survey (SADHS) and 1996 Census. Completeness levels between 1996 and 2006 were determined by assuming that the completeness of death registration follows a logistic trend over time; that completeness in any age group did not decrease over the period; and that the trend in completeness is smooth (i.e. fluctuations in the data are not due to fluctuations in completeness). A logistic curve was then fitted ( 46 , 51 ).

The completeness in infant death registration has increased particularly rapidly since 2001, most probably resulting from the government's intensified efforts to register births and deaths, particularly in facilities, along with many infant deaths occurring before leaving these facilities. This bodes well for more accurate estimates of this important indicator, in particular the prospect of deriving infant mortality directly from vital registration data with minimal adjustment ( 46 ).

Mortality data and data availability from civil registration

Death notification forms are administrated by DHA. These forms are then processed by Stats SA to capture the mortality and selected socio-demographic and health data ( 52 ). From this, cause-specific mortality statistics are produced by Stats SA, coded to three-digit codes according to the tenth revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) ( 53 ). Anonymous unit record cause data for 1997–2009 are available electronically upon request, subject to a data user's agreement. To protect the identity of the deceased, certain fields such as the date of death and place of death or residence, are not publicly available. Mortality and cause-of-death data for 2006–2008 are additionally freely available in web-based data repositories, and users can analyse and tabulate a number of variables with socio-demographic (e.g. age and sex), health status (e.g. smoking and pregnancy status), and cause data (e.g. immediate and underlying cause) with online and available software Nesstar and SuperWEB ( 54 ). Reports (online or hard copy) from 1997 to 2009 offer a variety of tabulations for all-cause and cause-specific mortality, both nationally and provincially ( 55 ). The latest reports additionally offer tabulated numbers of death and selected cause patterns by district municipality ( 55 ). Over the past decade, the production of official mortality statistics has improved considerably, and mortality data are available annually, reporting on deaths that occurred in the calendar year 2 years prior to publication.

National surveillance, censuses and surveys

Rapid mortality surveillance system using national data from the population register.

The 1990s, still suffering the effects of the pre-democratic civil registration and vital statistics system, presented with a substantial time lag in the production and release of mortality data. These delays were particularly problematic amidst the rapid unfolding of an enormous HIV/AIDS epidemic and the perceived significant mortality changes in the population. An urgent need thus arose for more up-to-date mortality statistics and the continuous monitoring of more recent mortality trends. In response, the South African Medical Research Council (MRC) in collaboration with the University of Cape Town, negotiated access to death data by age and sex as recorded on the National Population Register maintained by the DHA. A project was set up at the MRC in 1999 to capture and monitor trends in these data as rapidly as possible. The MRC database is updated monthly with death data provided electronically by the DHA, allowing mortality by age and sex to be monitored within a few months after the date of death ( 56 , 57 ).

As for the vital statistics system of Stats SA, the source of the Rapid Mortality Surveillance System (RMS) is death notifications submitted to the DHA. However, there is a difference between the numbers of deaths captured by these two systems. Stats SA captures all deaths notified to the DHA, while the RMS only captures those deaths notified to the DHA which have been recorded onto the National Population Register, i.e. only the deaths of individuals with a South African birth or identity certificate (as only people with these certificates are on the Population Register). The RMS, therefore, captures fewer deaths compared to Stats SA's vital statistics system, on average about 12% less for the years 2002–2009, but more than sufficient numbers to serve the purpose for which it was developed (on average 493,000 deaths for 2000–2011) ( 57 ).

While mortality reports currently are being published with a time lag of approximately two years, the RMS remains useful for providing information about deaths within months after occurrence. Additionally, the RMS is useful for tracking changes in mortality due to the roll out of interventions such as programmes to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and provision of antiretroviral therapy.

The RMS data are received and stored by the SA MRC for continuous rapid assessment of changing trends in the deaths by age and sex. The availability of the data has been negotiated with the purpose of rapidly assessing and informing about changes as assessed by experienced mortality researchers. To inform research and policy action adequately, the data needs to be interpreted taking into account the prevailing levels of completeness of death registration, the extent of birth and death registration into the population register, and levels of population growth. Findings from the rapid mortality surveillance system are regularly reported in publicly available papers, reports, and conference presentations ( 43 , 56 – 59 ).

Post-democracy population censuses: 1996, 2001 and 2011

Post-unification (1910) and pre-democracy (1994), 14 population censuses with variable coverage have been conducted in South Africa, the first in 1911. Since democracy, three censuses that covered the total South African population have been conducted, respectively, in 1996, 2001, and 2011. For all three censuses, a post-enumeration survey was undertaken to determine the degree of under- or over-count in the population. For the 1996 and 2001 censuses, the population was undercounted by an estimated 10.7% ( 60 ) and 17.6% ( 61 ), respectively. Results from the 2011 census have not been published yet. More information is available at the Population Statistics Section of the Stats SA website ( 62 ).

Mortality data from censuses and data availability

Information about the types of census data collected to measure mortality in different interest groups, and the years for which such data were collected, are shown in Table 1 . Census data tabulations at national and sub-national level are available on request from Stats SA. Children ever born/children surviving (CEB/CS) and parental survival data from a 10% sample of the household unit record data for the 1996 and 2001 censuses are available together with selected socio-demographic variables in web-based data repositories via Nesstar and SuperWEB ( 54 ). For 2001, deaths reported by households are also available in the 10% sample. Metadata for the census variables are available on Stats SA's 1996 and 2001 census web pages ( 62 ). Additional data input is required to calculate adult and child mortality rates from these variables. Stats SA commissioned the Centre for Actuarial Research to analyse and evaluate the mortality data collected in the 2001 census. The resultant detailed report ( 44 ) contains essential information for users on the quality of child and adult mortality data collected.

Post-democracy data sources for mortality analysis in South Africa by enumeration years

Source: Table created by authors from vital registration and survey information as follows: VR: Stats SA, 2012 ( 54 ), Stats SA, various years ( 55 ); Census 1996: Stats SA, 2012 ( 88 ); Census 2001: Stats SA, 2012 ( 54 ); OHS: National Research Foundation ( 63 ); GHS and CS: Stats SA web-based Nesstar information and Stats SA electronic reports ( 54 , 69 , 89 ); DHS: Department of Health et al ., 2002 ( 47 ), Department of Health et al ., 2007 ( 68 ); NIDS: Moultrie & Dorrington, 2009 ( 90 ).

Post-democracy national surveys

Brief background information of five national surveys is individually given below after which mortality data from these surveys and its availability for public use are discussed collectively. Details about the enumerated number of households and participants, and the types of mortality data collected, are in Tables 1 and ​ and2 2 .

National surveys measuring mortality, by year of survey, number of households and persons enumerated, and different methods of mortality measurement

Source: Table created by authors from the following information on surveys: OHS: National Research Foundation ( 63 ); GHS and CS: Stats SA web-based Nesstar information and Stats SA electronic reports ( 54 , 69 , 89 ); DHS: Department of Health et al ., 2002 ( 47 ), Department of Health et al ., 2007 ( 68 ); NIDS: Moultrie & Dorrington, 2009 ( 90 ), Leibbrant et al ., 2009 ( 71 ).

October Household Surveys: 1993–1999

The establishment of the October Household Surveys (OHS) programme in 1993 marked the beginning of the national collection of demographic information on an annual basis. The OHS was a cross-sectional sample survey undertaken by Stats SA from 1993 to 1999, aiming to collect individual and household information that covered a range of development and poverty indicators. The OHS was replaced by the General Household Survey. The surveys were based on a probability sample of a large number of households, targeting residents in private households and workers–hostels countrywide. Fieldworkers visited sampled households and filled the survey questionnaire during face-to-face interviews ( 63 ). See Tables 1 and ​ and2 2 and the Stats SA ( 64 ) and University of Cape Town's DataFirst ( 65 ) websites for more information.

General Household Survey: 2002–2012

The General Household Survey (GHS) has been conducted annually by Stats SA from 2002 to 2011 and was in the field until September 2012 for the next round. The GHS was instituted to monitor development indicators and development programmes on a regular basis. The survey aims to measure multiple facets of the living conditions of the country's households, and the quality of service delivery in selected service sectors. The GHS is a cross-sectional survey, based on a representative sample drawn from the total population. The target population is private households and residents in workers–hostels. Using probability-proportional-to-size principles, a multi-stage, stratified random sample is drawn. Households are visited by fieldwork teams and an extensive questionnaire is filled by enumerators during face-to-face interviews ( 66 , 67 ). Further information is available in Tables 1 and ​ and2, 2 , and at the Stats SA ( 64 ) and DataFirst websites ( 65 ).

South Africa Demographic and Health Survey: 1998 and 2003

Post-democracy, two national Demographic and Health Surveys (DHSs) were conducted collaboratively by the Department of Health, SA MRC, and OrcMacro. The 1998 SADHS employed a two-stage sample based on 1996 census demarcations and stratified according to the nine provinces, each subsequently stratified by urban/non-urban residence ( 47 ). The 2003 survey sample, based on the enumeration areas created during the 2001 census, was designed as a nationally representative sample of households. Stratification took place according to the provinces and subsequently by urban/non-urban residence ( 68 ). Eligible women were prompted for full birth histories in both surveys. Tables 1 and ​ and2 2 highlight more information about the types of mortality data collected. More information about the 1998 and 2003 surveys is available in the final full reports ( 47 , 68 ).

Community Survey: 2007

The Community Survey (CS), conducted by Stats SA, was a large-scale nationally representative inter-census household survey conducted in 2007, designed to provide information on the trends of selected demographic, social, and socio-economic profiles of the population. The sampling procedure included a two-stage stratified random sampling process, the first involving the selection of enumerator areas within each municipality, and the second the selection of dwelling units within enumerator areas. Enumerators visited the selected sampled dwelling units and completed questionnaires during face-to-face interviews with study participants ( 69 ). The realised sample was adjusted to replicate the national population in a way that the data are consistent internally and with other censuses and surveys ( 70 ). Tables 1 and ​ and2 2 and the Stats SA ( 64 ) and DataFirst ( 65 ) websites hold more information.

National Income Dynamics Study, Wave 1: 2008

The National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) was South Africa's first national panel study to document the dynamic structure of households and changes in the incomes, expenditures, assets, access to services, education, health, and well-being of household members. The target population was private households in all provinces and residents in workers–hostels, convents, and monasteries. Households were sampled with a stratified, two-stage cluster sample design, randomly selecting 400 primary sampling units in the first stage from Stats SA's 2003 master sample. In each primary sampling unit, two dwelling-unit clusters were selected. The first fieldwork wave commenced in February 2008. Information was collected on all household members, both resident and non-resident. A household questionnaire and an individual questionnaire for each adult and child in the household were administered via face-to-face interviews in each household ( 71 ). See Tables 1 and ​ and2 2 and the NIDS methodology report ( 71 ) for more information.

Mortality data collected in national surveys and data availability

Mortality was assessed for different age or interest groups across the surveys, and mortality items sometimes varied within surveys across time ( Tables 1 – 2 ). Items to assess mortality via both direct and indirect measures were included in these surveys. Assessments of deaths in the household, parental survival, and summary birth histories were included most frequently across time and surveys. When a death was reported, selected further information about the death and deceased were collected. The years of enumeration, interest group, and mortality data items used are shown in Tables 1 and ​ and2 2 .

Unit record data from the OHS can be requested for use in the DataFirst Research Data Centre at the University of Cape Town. The Research Data Centre makes data, statistical analysis software, and trained staff available, free of charge, for this purpose ( 65 ). OHS data and metadata are available on compact disc for a fee from Stats SA ( 72 ). Unit record data from the GHS and CS are available on disc from Stats SA via request. Stats SA's web-based data repositories ( 54 ) contain information about mortality as collected in the GHS and CS. From the GHS, parental survival data for 2002–2010 can be found via SuperWEB, and for 2002–2008 via Nesstar ( 54 ). From the CS, parental survival data are available via Nesstar and SuperWEB, and summary birth histories and death-in-the-household data via Nesstar ( 54 ). Users can tabulate CS death-in-the-household data by selected demographic variables (e.g. age and sex) and sub-national entities (e.g. province and district council). Stats SA also responds to special requests for tabulations from the Stats SA surveys without requiring a data user's agreement. Due to the poor quality of the data, the 2003 DHS failed to provide reliable estimates of adult and maternal mortality from the parental and sibling survival questions ( 68 ). The birth history data, however, were used to estimate levels and trends in infant and child mortality, and apart from a chapter presenting these results ( 68 ), unit record data from the 1998 and 2003 DHS surveys are available per request and by signing a data user's agreement, from the Department of Health and SA MRC. For NIDS, data and supportive documentation for Wave 1 are available via DataFirst servers upon completion of an online form and agreement to the terms of data use ( 71 ). Publicly available datasets from any of these surveys contain only non-confidential data.

Extensive resources and information related to these surveys, including questionnaires, reports, metadata, code lists, public data downloads, and microdata-request forms, are available from the University of Cape Town's DataFirst webpage ( 65 ).

Small-area Demographic and Health Surveillance

Three INDEPTH HDSSs collect longitudinal health and demographic data in three rural surveillance areas. The Agincourt HDSS in the Bushbuckridge district of Mpumalanga province has collected data since 1992 ( 73 ); Dikgale HDSS in the Mankweng district of Limpopo, since 1996 ( 74 ); and the Africa Centre Demographic Information System (ACDIS) in the Umkhanyakude district in KwaZulu-Natal, since 2000 ( 75 ). Agincourt had a population of approximately 90,000 people in 2011 ( 73 ); Dikgale, approximately 8,000 in 2008 ( 74 ); and ACDIS, approximately 85,000 in 2008 ( 75 ).

Mortality data collected in and available from HDSSs

Mortality information and a range of other socio-demographic and health information are collected through annual censuses and updates of vital events in each household in the site. Verbal autopsies, a well-established method in the absence of routine death registration, are used for classifying causes of death from population-based inquiries ( 76 – 78 ), and are conducted by specially trained fieldworkers who interview a close relative or caregiver of the deceased. Efforts to refine the approach, have led to international standards for verbal autopsy and strengthening standardised interpretation of verbal autopsy data through the InterVA tool, recently culminating in the launch of the InterVA-4 model ( 14 , 79 , 80 ). At Agincourt and ACDIS, the probable cause of death has been attributed via subsequent physician assessment of the verbal autopsy information ( 73 , 81 , 82 ). However, more recently all three sites have been utilising the automated InterVA tool for probabilistic verbal autopsy interpretation and probable cause attribution ( 83 – 85 ) (e-mail communication from Dr. Chifundo Kanjala and Prof. Marianne Alberts, 4–5 April 2012).

Mortality and population data from ACDIS and Agincourt are available through data products, data downloads, and accompanying supportive documentation at the HDSS’ websites ( 86 , 87 ). Public access to ACDIS and Agincourt data is available via links to downloadable datasets comprising an approximate 1%- and 10%-sample, respectively, of the full datasets ( 86 , 87 ). These sample datasets can be used for teaching, familiarising potential users with the structure and availability of data, or developing selected analyses before requesting the full dataset. Unit record data that are not publically available can be requested from senior site staff at ACDIS and Agincourt, accompanied by a motivation, analysis plan, and data user's agreement ( 86 , 87 ). The INDEPTH Network is committed to the principles and practice of data sharing, and has launched the iSHARE portal aiming to make data from the HDSSs publicly available ( 13 ).

Selected facility-based reporting systems

Apart from South Africa's routine notification system currently reporting incidence and deaths from 33 notifiable medical conditions to local, provincial, and/or national health departments, the country's particularly sizeable burden of disease from cancer, injury, and tuberculosis is reflected in facility-based surveillance systems to help assess the extent and impact of these conditions. Table 3 provides key information about these surveillance systems. Recognising the current international pressure to provide reliable information about maternal and child health to monitor MDGs 4 and 5, and acknowledging the shortcomings in reporting such mortality via civil registration, Table 3 refers additionally to three facility-based structured mortality audits for peri-natal, child and maternal deaths. The value of other national reporting systems, including the South African Birth Defects Surveillance System (SABDSS), South African Dialysis and Transplantation Registry (SADTR), Surveillance of Work-Related and Respiratory Diseases in South Africa (SORDSA), as well as injury-reporting of the Mine Health and Safety Inspectorate, National Transport Information System, and the South African Police Services, are acknowledged but not described here.

Selected facility-based data sources that may complement vital registration mortality data

Source: Table created by authors from the following: CEMD: National Committee CEMD, 2008 ( 91 ); PPIP: Pattinson (ed), 2011 ( 92 ), Bradshaw et al ., 2008 ( 93 ); Child PIP: Stephen et al ., 2008 ( 94 ), Bradshaw et al ., 2008 ( 93 ); NCR: Albrecht, 2006 ( 95 ), Mqoqi et al ., 2003 ( 96 ); NIMSS: Matzopoulos, 2002 ( 97 ); TB: Dept of Health, 2004 ( 98 ), Dept of Health, 2007 ( 99 ).

Secondary data source: ASSA AIDS and Demographic Model

Despite having improved vital registration data and nationally representative HIV prevalence data, these data sources do not provide decision makers with a direct measure of the mortality impact of the country's extensive HIV/AIDS epidemic ( 56 , 100 ). Mathematical models have hence become necessary, and local actuarial researchers have developed the ASSA AIDS and Demographic Model ( 101 ) to estimate such impact. The model has been calibrated to empirical data sources, including vital registration, census, and survey data adjusted for biases ( 100 , 102 ). As time passed and more relevant empirical data became available, updated revisions of the model were released. A number of mortality and population indicators are available from the models and are widely used as a basis for health policy and planning by both government and the public health research community in South Africa ( 103 – 110 ). While these models are of much practical use, they should be considered ‘interim’ measures until complete vital registration and improved medical certification of causes of death are achieved. Upon online registration, mortality indicators such as 5 q 0 (under-5 mortality) and 45 q 15 (adult mortality) are freely available at the website of the Actuarial Society of South Africa ( 101 ).

Adult mortality measures from selected sources

As this article aims to review mortality data sources and not results from these sources, Fig. 1 is merely provided to indicate the variety of data sources available for estimating adult mortality, specifically the probability of dying between ages 15 and 50 ( 35 q 15 ). Estimates of 35 q 15 were derived from using both direct and indirect methods, as indicated in Fig. 1 . A fairly consistent trend of increasing mortality for most of the 1990s and early 2000s is produced by the different data sources and methods, with a levelling and decline in mortality in more recent years.

The probability of dying between ages 15 and 50 ( 35 q 15 ) from different data sources.

Source: OHS and DHS estimates extracted from Figure 6.2 in Dorrington RE, Moultrie TA, Timæus IM, 2004 ( 44 ). ASSA2008 estimates calculated from ASSA life table values which are based on vital registration data ( 101 ).

This review demonstrates a rich and varied list of mortality data sources in South Africa. However, it is important to be aware of the strengths and limitations of the different sources and the quality of their data to ensure suitable and strategic utilisation thereof. Different mortality indicators are required for different purposes, and at varied levels of population aggregation. For instance, reliable measures of peri-natal and under-5 mortality at the health-district level are of critical importance in planning and providing for maternal and child health services. Therefore, it is necessary to have robust measures of these indicators at this level, or even at sub-district level. Mortality rates for specific conditions such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, injuries, cardiovascular conditions, neoplasms, and respiratory disease – the high-burden conditions in South Africa – should ideally be measured at magisterial level and at least at health-district level to inform planning for prevention, detection and treatment optimally. Mortality from maternal conditions and other less-prevalent non-communicable diseases, in contrast, can at best be effectively monitored for differences and change at the provincial level, given their relatively infrequent occurrence.

Under-5 mortality

The under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) is a key indicator of child health and overall development. While its measurement at national level is important for monitoring countries’ progress towards the targets of MDG 4, timely and accurate measurement at sub-national levels are critical for evaluating and prioritising child health care needs and services. Although vital registration is the optimal data source for this, the under-reporting of stillbirths, live births and childhood deaths in South Africa results in under-estimates of child mortality ( 43 , 46 , 57 ). Furthermore, in the context of rapid epidemiological change, the current 2-year reporting delay reduces the utility of the rates. Data from complete birth histories collected in DHSs, are generally a key source for measuring U5MR trends ( 111 , 112 ), but do not permit estimates lower than provincial/state level. In addition, data quality problems in both the 2001 Census and 2003 DHS have rendered it impossible to derive reliable estimates of under-5 mortality from these sources ( 113 ). Census-based summary birth histories may yield estimates at the health-district level, but apart from recall and omission biases, such estimates are limited by their availability only once in 5 or 10 years, and for a reference period of several years preceding the census. Finally, the existing audit programmes for child (Child PIP) and peri-natal (PPIP) events are rich in their content, but biased in that only facility-based events are recorded, and participation in most provinces continues to be voluntarily.

For as long as birth and death registration are incomplete, a strategy is required that would distinguish and integrate useful, quality data from different well-administered sources towards deriving robust data on the levels and determinants of U5MRs at district level. Research in Indonesia, for example, has demonstrated the low-cost, time-efficient potential to adapt the DHS model into a ‘mini-DHS’ to collect data and provide robust under-5 mortality measures at the district level, allowing researchers to point out significant differentials at this level, thus assisting health-district officials to plan for a locally-appropriate response towards achieving national targets for MDG4 ( 114 ). Alternatively, South Africa needs to further strengthen the efforts towards complete birth and death registration, a process that has significantly progressed in a short period ( 57 , 115 ). Particular efforts for children aged 1–4 years are needed ( 46 ). The APAI-CRVS ( 18 ) initiative and the recommendations of the Health Data Advisory and Co-ordination Committee ( 109 ) show great potential for further stimulating vital registration towards completeness.

Adult mortality levels and causes

Overshadowed by a focus on child health for many decades, it has taken a severe epidemic to modify the neglect of adult mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. This neglect was partly due to the lack of reliable empirical data to measure adult mortality in the region. For most of the past century, South Africa was no exception ( 41 , 116 ). During the 1980s and 1990s, however, meticulous research efforts started putting together pieces from the disjointed vital registration puzzle ( 42 , 117 – 119 ). As alternative data sources became available in tandem with improved civil registration and vital statistics practices, researchers were in a position to triangulate and interrogate different sources and started having a better handle on estimating adult mortality levels ( 18 , 34 , 43 , 44 , 56 , 120 – 124 ). Differences in adult mortality estimates are shown in these publications, indicating data limitations such as event omission and recall bias in data from censuses and surveys, age misreporting, violation of selected assumptions in indirect methods, and uncertainty about the level of completeness of death registration.

More challenging has been deriving cause-specific mortality estimates. The vital registration system is likely the optimal source to calculate cause-specific estimates from, but a number of problems limit its utilisation, including an incomplete national cause profile due to incomplete death registration, and an urban bias in registration. For reported deaths, limitations of cause data include incomplete medical certification of the cause(s) of death, relatively high proportions of deaths in the ill-defined natural and undetermined unnatural categories, and misclassification of causes of death ( 104 , 110 , 117 , 119 , 125 , 126 ). Cause limitations are exacerbated by the continued practice that traditional headmen, on the basis of relatives’ information about the deaths, are allowed to certify deaths from natural causes. This may affect up to 10% of primarily rural registered deaths ( 127 ). While it is a welcome practice in terms of improving completeness of death reporting, it is not ideal for cause-of-death data.

Tuberculosis

Alternative sources of causes of adult deaths could be useful for mortality estimates from specific causes. Tuberculosis reporting is compulsory in terms of the National Health Act, and the Register operated by the National Tuberculosis Control Program could play a complementary role, both as a tool to keep track of deaths at the health-district level, and, where data could be matched via linking variables, as a means of assessing agreement of cause attribution between the Tuberculosis Register and vital registration. In addition, this may be useful in assessing the completeness of tuberculosis reporting on the death notification form. The close association between HIV and tuberculosis calls for appropriate strategies to cross-reference data from these two sources for verifying event occurrence and capturing suitable additional data to guide programme improvement to prevent or curb mortality. Similarly, towards optimally informing MDG5, teasing out differing estimates of maternal mortality ( 109 , 128 ) may gain from linking death records from the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths and vital registration databases, and triangulation with census data.

Cancer has a considerable impact on the country's disease burden as the 4th leading category of cause of death in 2000 ( 104 ). One in 12 cancer causes, accounting for almost 2,400 cases, were ill-defined and could not be attributed to a site-specific cancer ( 129 ), thereby diminishing the utility of the information. It may hence be useful to link records from the Cancer Registry and vital registration databases in a capture–recapture design towards reducing ill-defined cancer diagnoses in the vital registration database. Compared to vital registration data, such registers or audits generally have a considerable advantage in terms of disease control in that they have the potential to measure cause-specific incidence, prevalence, treatment, and case fatality at the health-district or at least provincial level, thus being able to point out differentials at this level, and assisting health-district and provincial officials to identify potential patient load and priorities for locally-appropriate health services.

For injuries, there is a system problem because the South African death notification form does not include a field for the apparent manner of death (homicide, suicide or accident). All deaths from injuries are certified as ‘unnatural’ deaths, and must undergo a medico-legal investigation at a state mortuary. However, some forensic pathologists consider that, in terms of the Inquest Act, they cannot indicate the circumstance of the death on the death certificate. Thus, the external cause (e.g. burn, firearm discharge, or fall) of many injury deaths is undetermined. While the National Transport Information System records information for selected motor vehicle collision deaths, the Mine Health and Safety Inspectorate records fatal mining injuries, and the South African Police Services violence-related injury, mortality from other external causes is not monitored by any agency ( 130 ). The National Injury Mortality Surveillance System (NIMSS) data are filling this gap by providing more comprehensive external cause information which would be valuable in the design and evaluation of injury control programs, but are limited by the lack of full-country coverage and an urban bias ( 104 , 107 ). For as long as the civil registration data do not include the external cause of injury deaths and NIMSS data do not include all injury deaths, the response to this large cause of premature death and disability can neither be comprehensive nor adequate. It may therefore be worthwhile to adapt the death notification form to include the external cause of injuries, apparent manner of death, scene of injury (e.g. private house, or street/highway), and district of injury (which may differ to the district of death). The value of these data items for injury prevention and safety and peace promotion speak for themselves.

Finally, HIV/AIDS was estimated the single largest cause of both death and years of life lost (YLLs) in 2000, respectively, accounting for 30% of total deaths, and 39% of total YLLs ( 104 ). Despite its enormous impact on mortality and premature death, HIV is not notifiable in South Africa, and no register or audit are assigned to capture details of suspected or confirmed HIV cases. A number of studies have found HIV/AIDS under-certified in both adult and paediatric deaths ( 110 , 126 ) ( 131 – 134 ) and although these reports are valuable in alerting data users to problems with the accuracy of cause attribution, they should also be seen as valuable in alerting certifying officers, coders, and researchers to indicator conditions, alternate terminology, and euphemisms that are used to indicate HIV as a possible cause.

A national initiative to improve the quality of medical certification should emphasise the importance of appropriate recording of HIV on death notifications, particularly in the new political climate of acceptance of the role of HIV in causing AIDS ( 135 , 136 ), towards accurately informing local responses and reliably reporting progress on Target 6A of MDG6 (i.e. have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS). This initiative should be monitored by a medical record review in a representative sample of death notifications to ascertain the veracity of certification and coding practices. Additionally, the HDSSs have built considerable relationships of trust in their communities, and matching HDSS and vital registration records may generate valuable knowledge of the extent of HIV/AIDS misclassification in registered rural deaths. While substantial problems of accuracy have been identified with physician-assigned causes of death in national vital registration data ( 110 , 126 ), and even in deaths that occurred in tertiary health facilities ( 39 , 132 , 133 ), local HDSS studies using verbal autopsy data have shown successful detection and a substantial presence of HIV-related mortality with closely comparable findings between physician- and InterVA-assessments. ( 84 , 85 )

Challenges and opportunities for mortality measurement

While our review suggests that there are a number of potentially useful data sources on mortality, some of which could be used complementary, it is also clear that data use and analysis based on these collections have been restricted by limitations. At times, mortality data collection has been poor and mortality levels could not be derived due to the extent of missing or illogical data in selected surveys and censuses. For some earlier data sources, the quality of the data was unassessed and the data unused. This may have resulted from a lack of knowledge on how to assess data quality issues, limited capacity to apply selected methods of mortality estimation, prolonged time periods before data become available for public use, financial costs to obtain data, or bureaucratic processes that hinder data access and use. Additionally, sample sizes varied across years for surveys – at times substantially, and not necessarily congruent with national population numbers; the age ranges of respondents for the same data items at times differ across surveys, or across years within a survey; and changing administrative borders and place names have sometimes affected mortality reporting and measurement.

Recognising these challenges presents an important step towards improving mortality measurement, from the planning of enquiry/reporting systems through data collection, processing, and compilation, to depositing data in the public domain for independent evaluation and analysis. Stats SA has greatly improved availability of national mortality data over the past 20 years, has reduced public use waiting time, and has collaborated with strategic partners to improve completeness of vital registration. Mortality measurement will further gain from creating opportunities for wider public knowledge about the importance and public health uses of reliable and valid mortality data; further improvements in completeness of registration and timeliness of data availability; adequate, on-going training of certifiers and coders in cause attribution; and strategic strengthening of analytical capacity at Stats SA and research and academic institutions.

In a continent often reported as lacking the basic data to infer levels and trends of all-cause and cause-specific mortality, this article has identified a number of data sources in South Africa that, after critical review and adjustment, could yield valuable policy insights into mortality change over the past two decades. Data sources with mortality items are many and varied, offering a promising scenario for improved population health planning from an evidence base informed by multiple sources. However, it is clear that more can and must be gained for mortality measurement by tackling three key issues: data quality, data triangulation, and analytic capacity.

Data quality in surveys and censuses can be improved by demanding nothing less than excellent fieldworker training and excellent quality control measures in the field. For improved quality in vital statistics, further focussed advances in completeness of death registration, and, in particular, a strong, co-ordinated national response towards improved coverage and accuracy of medical certification of causes of death is recommended. The latter is simply critical. Moreover, with studies pointing to problems in physician-certified causes, ( 137 , 138 ) such causes should not be taken as automatically having content validity, and the possibility of routinely comparing a sample of death certificates with hospital records/doctors’ notes/clinic or day hospital cards, should be pursued.

A focussed agenda is recommended towards data triangulation and contestability via linkage and validation studies that will allow drawing on complementary properties of different sources and, in particular, will assist in completeness estimation and improve our understanding of the accuracy in cause-of-death attribution. Such improved understanding holds clear gains for improved mortality estimates, enhanced resource and service distribution, and, eventually, better meeting the health needs of the population.

However, data quality assessment and triangulation, like other aspects of mortality measurement, require sufficient competent analytic capacity. As analytic capacity has not been expanded upon compared to mortality experiences in the population, nor the increase in national mortality data collection and availability, the expansion and strengthening of analytic capacity is a critical, overarching recommendation.

Achieving these will not be easy, and a co-ordinated research agenda for mortality data collection, evaluation, comparison, analysis, and use, along with an operational agenda for quality assurance and analytical capacity strengthening, are recommended. These should be generated and backed-up by adequate and independent human and fiscal resources. For the future, it will be important to adopt a strategic approach to data collection, streamlined by lessons from past experience, and enhanced by successes and innovative modes of data collection elsewhere.

Acknowledgements

The research was carried out while the first author was holding a University of Queensland Research Scholarship and Endeavour International Postgraduate Research Scholarship at the University of Queensland.

1 ‘Population group’ is used as a collective term that may elsewhere be called ‘race’ or ‘ethnic group’. The use of the terms ‘Black African’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Indian/Asian’, and ‘White’ are not intended to denote biological difference, neither to support a racial or ethnic classification system. Under the Population Registration Act of 1950, South Africans were classified into these groups. The classification was associated with disparities in many spheres of life, including health. To acknowledge this impact, and to help track progress in redressing past inequalities based on the classification, mortality and other data are still classified by these terms, although individuals self-classify. For this reason, and because a historical perspective is presented at times, it is necessary to reference these terms in this article.

Author contributions

JJ and CR conceptualised the article. JJ undertook the review and wrote the first draft with substantial inputs from CR. All co-authors gave expert inputs and contributed to the critical review of subsequent drafts. JJ produced the tables and graph with expert inputs from CR (tables) and RD (graph).

Conflict of interest and funding

No funding was received to conduct the review. The authors have no conflict of interest.

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"The Group Areas Act affected us all": Apartheid and Socio-Religious Change in the Cape Town Muslim Community, South Africa

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The Group Areas Act of 1950

The National Party was elected in 1948 on the policy of Apartheid ('separateness'). This 'separateness' put South Africans of different racial groups on their own paths in a partitioned system of development. The policy goal of separate development allowed the National Party to maintain the status quo of white supremacy as well as control the African labour needed for rapid industrial development (Baldwin, 1975: 218). Separate development was supposed to allow Africans to develop themselves under their own self-government, but the economic structure of South Africa made that impossible (Marquard, 1969: 256). During the Second World War, there was rapid urbanization by Africans. The lack of infrastructure in South African cities led to the phenomenon of overcrowding and squatting on empty land by those seeking employment. In many cases, the scramble for housing created mixed neighbourhoods (Marquard, 1969: 43). The Group Areas Act was fashioned as the “cornerstone” of Apartheid policy and aimed to eliminate mixed neighbourhoods in favour of racially segregated ones which would allow South Africans to develop separately (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1950: 26).

When the Group Areas Act (GAA) was passed in 1950, it imposed control over interracial property transactions and property occupation throughout South Africa (Horrell, 1978: 71). It was amended almost annually and was re-enacted in the Consolidation Acts of 1957 and 1966. The GAA created the legal framework for varying levels of government to establish particular neighbourhoods as 'group areas', where only people of a particular race were able to reside (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1952: 32). The GAA displaced hundreds of thousands of people; breaking up families, friends, and communities. This was due in large part to the retroactive application of the law, meaning that once an area was declared a group area, the GAA had the power to demolish all the houses there and displace everyone who was not of the designated group (Mabin, 1992a: 422). The GAA added more restrictions to the lives of Africans and it was one of the first drastic rights infringements for the Indian and Coloured populations (Marquard, 1969: 163).

Origins of the Group Areas Act

The GAA was one of many pieces of legislation used to control the lives of Indians, Coloureds, and Africans, in this instance by limiting property rights. A distinction between the GAA and its predecessors was that segregationist measures passed before 1948 were less coherent and often provisional in nature. Legislation passed by the Apartheid government were done in a more clearly defined pattern to implement Apartheid (Horrell, 1978: xi). Many pieces of legislation passed under the pretence of segregation were in actuality attempts to control the labour of Africans. The GAA was another layer in controlling the movement and life of urban Black, Indian or Coloured persons (Baldwin, 1975: 218).

Rural immigration to cities began as early as the middle of the 19th century, though the amount of time these migrants stayed in urban centres was fairly different case by case. As the rapid expansion of the production of export products like wine and wool began, so too did African urbanization, as migrants found jobs working on railways, docks, and in manufacturing. Along with the varying amount of time spent working in cities, the extent to which families migrated to join the urban breadwinner varied greatly. This is a trend that continues in the present day (Mabin, 1992b: 14).

The Glen Gray Act of 1894 restricted the ability for African men to own land in the Cape (Root & Wachira, 2009: 668). The Act also imposed a labour tax of ten shillings a year on land owned by Africans unless they could prove that they had been employed outside of their designated reserve area for at least three months (Wilson, 1953: 243).

During the early 20th century, many of the impositions of segregation were associated with emergency epidemics. For example, shortly after the discovery of bubonic plague in Johannesburg in 1904, the city burned down its African slums which drove Africans to the Kilpspruit sewage farm, creating the first exclusively African settlement (Swanson, 1977: 388). The late 19th century approach of “containment” to control outbreaks in Europe with sanitary legislation was highly influential to South African policies towards slum and overcrowding which were identified as the source of the outbreaks of disease. European “containment” was seen by Whites in South Africa as the appropriate response to what they perceived as their country's social problems as from the 1870s onwards. Fear of cholera, small pox, and plague epidemics were used to justify the efforts to segregate Indians and Africans in urban areas (Swanson, 1977: 390). This method of behaviour is illustrated by the 1885 Asiatic Bazaar law (No. 3 of 1885) which authorized the government to create separate districts for Indians for reasons of sanitation (Dison and Mohamed, 1960: 24). The Asiatic Bazaar law was reinforced in 1932 by a committee in Transvaal known as the 'Transvaal Asiatic Land Tenure Act'. It included a clause that was later dropped which would have forced local authorities to set aside 'Asiatic' areas (Mabin, 1992a: 409). During the plague crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century in the Cape, the government used the Public Health Act to move between six-thousand and seventhousand Africans to Uitvlugt, a sewage farm several miles from the city in the Cape Flats (Swanson, 1977: 393).

The Locations Act of 1903 in Port Elizabeth aimed to control the settlement of Africans in the region. The Mayor estimated that about ten thousand Africans lived within the city limits, and another four-thousand had moved beyond the city limits. It tried to facilitate African migration to an area called 'New Brighton' but was largely unsuccessful in this goal (Swanson, 1977: 401).

The 1913 Natives Land Act was one of the first pieces of legislation that limited property rights of Africans in South Africa. Before the Natives Land Act, Africans were able to purchase land outside of their reserves, with differing degrees of restrictions, but the Natives Land Act limited the landmass where they were allowed to own land to approximately 9 million hectares, and created specific areas (which came to be known as 'homelands') within which whites were not allowed to buy land (Horrell, 1978: 3). The outcome of the act was, as Sol Plaajte said, to make the African “a pariah in the land of his birth.” (1914: 1). Africans who had purchased land outside of homelands were generally allowed to keep it in cases where it was adjacent to a homeland. In cases where a African owned farm was surrounded by White-owned farms, it became known as a “black spot”. Later in the 20th century, the government took steps to eliminate these black spots. The Natives Land Act initially allocated approximately 8 per cent of South African land to be purchasable by Africans (Beinhart, 2001, 10).

Ten years after the Natives Land Act was passed, the Smuts government passed the 1923 Native Urban Areas Act which gave municipalities greater powers to segregate housing, to police African communities and to control movement by imposing passes. It specified that alternative housing had to be provided for those who were moved by its implementation (Horrell, 1978: 2). An amendment to the Act in 1937 forbid Africans from acquiring property from non-Africans in cities and townships (Kirkwood, 2: 1951). However, the act led to constant housing shortages throughout the 20th century. Since Whites were legally stipulated to be paid more than Africans for the same work, the regulations that required Whites to do most of the work on public housing projects significantly exacerbated their cost (Horrell, 1978: 77).

In 1924, the Smuts and then the Pact government aimed to pass the “Class Areas Bill,” which would have restricted Indian residential and trading rights. However, the Bill was never passed, as it was faced with vehement opposition within South Africa as well as abroad (Horrell, 1978: 5).

New powers were given to the Governor-General by the 1927 Native Administration Act. It allowed Governors-General to govern Africans by proclamation, including the ability to order that any tribe, section of a tribe, or African to move from one place to another without notice. It also allowed the Governor-General to be able to decree that Africans were not to leave any stated area for a specific period (Horrell, 1978: 4).

The Native Land Act was updated in 1936 via the Native Trust and Land Act which added an additional 6.2 million hectares to the reserves where Africans could purchase land (Horrell, 1978: 4). This expanded the total percentage of land in South Africa which could be purchased by an African from 8% to 13%. (Hellmann, 1949: 174). While Africans did still occupy land owned either by the Crown or by absentee white landlords, as nearly a quarter of a million did by the late 1920s, their tenure was insecure as they were not legally entitled to hold the deed for that land, and thus could be evicted at any time (Bundy, 1972: 384). The Native Trust and Land Act gave new powers to the Department of Native Administration and Development which allowed it to begin to evict owners of 'black spots' (land owned by Africans surrounded by White-owned farms) (Horrell, 1978: 203). Furthermore, during the 1930s, White farmers tried to force Africans to labour on their farms for six months as a payment of rent towards land tenure. While they were unsuccessful in doing so, this demonstrates the degree of ambiguity that African tenure held during the early 20th century (Beinhart, 2001: 136). Africans were prohibited from acquiring land from non-Africans by the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1937. The only circumstance under which it was allowed was with the consent of the Governor-General. Additionally, it prohibited the construction of new churches, schools, or other institutions which would mainly cater to Africans in urban areas without approval from the Minister of Native Affairs, though this did not affect institutions established before 1938. It allowed towns to apply to have areas declared as closed to entry of Africans other than those who were either visiting, employed, or seeking to be employed there (Horrell, 1978: 3).

In 1950, the Population Registration Act provided for compulsory racial classification on a national register. Documents were issued to people based on the racial group they were designated. The groups named were Europeans, Coloured, and Natives. Coloured people and Natives were also subcategorized according to their ethnic group. A Race Classification Board was set up to adjudicate disputed cases. Identity cards were issued to all people over the age of sixteen and authorized officials (e.g. police officers) were empowered to demand anyone of that age or older to produce their identity cards. Those who failed to produce their identity cards had seven days to report to a police station (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1950: 24).

The Group Areas Act: 1950

In April 1950, the Minister of the Interior introduced the “Group Areas Bill,” which became law on July 12th of that year. The Group Areas Act (GAA) systematized segregation in the control of transfers of land and immovable property (property which cannot be moved without being severely altered or destroyed, like a house) as well as occupation rights throughout the Union of South Africa, with the exception of reserves. The consequence was that one could only buy property from people of the same race (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1950: 26). Many of the measures in the Act were interim measures until the establishment of 'full group areas', or complete residential segregation (Kirkwood, 1951: 24).

One of the first major changes in South African property law made by the GAA was the creation of 'controlled' areas. Controlled areas were any area which was not a group area; a Native area, location, or village; or a Coloured persons settlement, mission station, or communal reserve. Controlled areas had particular provisions for the ownership of immovable property (1.v). In specified and controlled areas, inter-racial property transactions and changes in occupation of property were subject to permit. In controlled areas, the criteria for occupation was the group of the owner, whereas in specified areas it was the group of the occupier. So for instance in a controlled area, if the owner of the property was White then the occupant needed to be White, while in a specified area the owner could be White while the occupant could be Indian. Disqualified persons or companies were allowed to enter, or continue, an agreement for a lease or sub-lease of a property in a specified area but could not do so in a controlled area without a permit (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1953, 45).

The GAA was administered by the Land Tenure Advisory Board (the Board) and the Minister of the Interior (the Minister). Group areas were created, after the bill passed, by making a proposal to the Board, which was appointed by the Minister. The Board had to make a report to the Minister as to whether or not an area should have been proclaimed a group area. Before it advised the Minister, the Board had to give the public an opportunity to have input on the decision (27.2, 27.3). The Board also had to take into consideration the availability of accommodations for the people displaced by the decision. However, it was the role of other departments, not the Board, to find alternative accommodation for people displaced by the declaration of group areas (27.5). The Minister was not compelled to listen to the advisement of the Board but was required to read it before issuing a proclamation (26). The Board modelled after the Asiatic Land Tenure Board (from the previously mentioned Transvaal Asiatic Land Tenure Act of 1932). It was composed of no more than seven members who could be dismissed by the Minister (24.1 and 24.4d). Unlike the Asiatic Land Tenure Board, members could serve for no longer than five years and there were no explicit provisions allowing Coloureds or Africans to serve on the Board (24.3).

Section 2 of the Act defined the 'groups' as White, Native, and Coloured. The group of women was determined by who they married to or cohabited with (2.1.abc). African or Coloured groups could be further subdivided by the Governor-General on ethnic, linguistic, or cultural grounds (2.2). The Governor-General would declare areas as 'group areas' and give the residents who are not of the specified group at least one year to leave (ie, that a particular neighbourhood is now a White neighbourhood so all Coloured or Native residents must leave the area by the date specified in the proclamation)(3.1a). The GAA did not itself create 'group areas' but established the machinery to create them (Kirkwood, 1951: 8).

The creation process of group areas was explained in Section 3. It specified that, for the first five years after the passage of the GAA, the Governor-General had the power to create group areas for Whites in provinces of the Cape of Good Hope and Natal, or areas already set aside in the Transvaal for people who were Native or Coloured. After the first five years had elapsed, these proclamations would be subject to approval by both Houses of Parliament (3.3a). Proclamations could only be given once the Minister had considered a report by the Board and had to consult with the Administrator of the Province affected, the Minister of Mines in the case of any land proclaimed under any mining related law and the Natural Resources Development Council if the area was on any land which they controlled (3.3b). However, proclamations would be withdrawn at any time by the Minister or the Governor-General (33).

Those who were not of the 'group' of an area became a 'disqualified person' under Section 4. Disqualified persons were not allowed to occupy any land or premises in any group area to which a proclamation relates, except under the authority of a permit (4.1). The exceptions to this section were any servant or employee of either the state, a statutory body, or of those who were lawfully occupying the land; a visitor staying in a home of a lawfully residing person or at hotel for no more than ninety days; or any person under the control of the state, either as a patient of a hospital or of a similar institution or as an inmate of a prison or similar institution (4.2). This section also made the proclamation of a group area override any legal agreements which would prohibit or restrict those who were designated as the lawful occupants (ie, if an African is leasing an apartment in a White area, the lease would expire after the date specified in the proclamation) (4.3). No one lawfully occupying any land was allowed to help a disqualified person occupy land without the authority of a permit (10.1). The GAA would not interfere with arrangements made by the Housing Act (1920) or Housing (Emergency Powers) Act of 1945 as long as they were of the appropriate group for the group area (10.2d). It also made exceptions for native labourers governed by the Native Labour Regulation Act (1911) as along as the company which recruited them was lawfully occupying the land or premises where they were housing them (10.2i). The ownership rights of disqualified people and companies were further clarified in Section 5, as to the acquisition of property in group areas, and Section 8, as to the acquisition of property by disqualified people in controlled areas. Disqualified persons and companies were not allowed to acquire any property in group areas without a permit (5.1a). The inheritance of any immovable property by a disqualified person was made illegal unless they had a permit to do so. The executor of the will had a year (or longer if the Minister of the Interior allowed it) to sell the now illegally owned property. The inheritor was entitled to the profit of the sale, as long as it was done in time (5.3). The ownership of property by disqualified companies in group areas were required to pursue a permit to continue to own it and their ownership would expire after ten years (5.1bc). However, mining companies were exempt from this portion of the law (5.2) Section 8 detailed the restrictions on disqualified persons and immovable property in controlled areas. It disallowed disqualified people from acquiring immovable property, unless they were a Native acquiring property already governed by preceding legislation, and made state officials as being authorized to act on the behalf of those who owned the property (8).

If any immovable property was acquired or held illegally without the correct permit, Section 20 of the GAA empowered the Minister to force the owner to sell the property within a three months, but if it was not sold within one month the Minister could sell it at public auction (20.1). The proceeds of the sale were first used to cover any associated costs and, in the case of the property being owned by a company, the rest would go to the company. In any other cases, unless otherwise directed by the Minister, the money would be directed into the Consolidated Revenue Fund (20.2). Furthermore, the Minister and any officer designated by him were empowered to do whatever was necessary to effect the transfer of any property sold to whomever purchased it (20.6). Any property registered in the name of someone who was not lawfully able to hold or acquire it was subject to penalties (22.2).

The GAA stringently restricted trading licenses. Any officer of licenses could withhold or not issue a license to an applicant who they “[had] reason to believe” is applying on the behalf of someone for whom it would be illegal to hold such a license (23.1). Controlled and specified areas also had consequences for businesses. Controlled areas allowed only persons of the same racial group as the owner to trade on the premises, while in specified areas only members of the same racial group as the people who occupied the area could trade on the premises (Kirkwood, 1951: 27).

Failure to comply with the GAA had significant consequences. Violators of the act could receive fines of up to two hundred pounds, imprisonment for a period not exceeding two years, or both punishments (34.1). Violators of the act could have also been faced with forced evictions. If they did not comply they received either fines of sixty pounds, imprisonment for six months or both, as well as an additional fine of five pounds for each day they failed to comply with the eviction order (34.2 and 34.3).

Effects of the Group Areas Act

The GAA had strange implications for governance and responsibility as it became more elaborate and amended. For example, the Coloured townships of Coronationville, Noordgesig, Newclare, Riverlea, and Western Township are administrated by Johannesburg City Council while Bosmont is the responsibility of the Department of Community Development (South African Institute of Race Relations, 1964: 216). The work of welfare organizations was made more difficult by the GAA, like Lunalegwaba House, a group home for African boys, in Johannesburg could not operate because the regulations of the GAA did not allow the White charity to own the property (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1967: 306). People attempted to use the courts to overturn the GAA, though each time they were unsuccessful (Dugard, 1978, 324). Others decided to use civil disobedience and other protests, like ‘sit-ins’ at restaurants, were experienced across South Africa in the early 60s. The 'sit-ins' were not ill-received by the average White citizen, which the South African Institute of Race Relations believed proved that they did not object to sharing restaurants with the other racial groups (1961: 183). There was also resistance from Cape Town City Council who voted before 1964 to keep District Six and the central business district not dedicated to any one racial group; they had the support of the Cape Town Chamber of Commerce on this decision (South African Institute of Race Relations, 1964: 213).

The GAA had immense effects on communities and people across South Africa. By 1983, over 600 000 people had been removed and relocated from their original homes (Pirie, 1983: 348). There were varying levels of consolidation of the Act in different regions. For example in Port Elizabeth by 1960, approximately 90% of the African population was housed within designated 'African' areas, by 1985 it was 96% (Christopher, 1987: 200). The fight for Indian occupation of Cato Manor in Durban was fierce. There were major clearances of the shacklands in Cato Manor by the government in 1951, when the government declared it to be a White zoned area (Maharaj,1994: 6). The GAA destroyed District Six, a crowded, racially mixed neighbourhood with a unique, traditional character of its own (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1966: 187). Many parts of the contemporary urban landscape in South Africa are still structured in the image of the GAA (Maharaj,1994: 21). Squatting, which became prevalent during the existence of the GAA, was a symptom of the massive housing shortage in the Cape. In 1977, the Government removed of 15 000 squatters from Modderdam without alternative accommodation, many of the squatters had been displaced by the GAA in the first place (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1977: 438-439)

As the terms of the Native Urban Areas Act required local authorities to set aside areas for African occupation, they were not the worst hit in the rezoning of neighbourhoods. Colouredpeople suffered because housing schemes for them were often delayed due to plans for racial zoning (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1954, 57). The GAA particularly hurt Indian South Africans because many of them had historically been present in other ethnic communities as traders and landlords. This is clearly documented by the South African Indian National Congress. In 1963, it was estimated that over a quarter of Indian men and women were employed as traders (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1963: 13). Indians were also known as landlords, especially in Natal. For example, in Cato Manor Indian landlords allowed Africans to built shacks on their land for rent. Before the GAA, this method of housing was accepted because the city of Durban was unable to provide alternative housing (Maharaj, 1994: 5). It was condemned for economic reasons by the Natal Indian Congress in 1955 . The National Government completely ignored the protests of the Indian community. In June 1977, the Minister of Community Development stated that he knew of no instances where an Indian trader was resettled and was not pleased with their new accommodation, and the subsequent day a number of Indian traders expressed their dissatisfaction in the Sunday Express in the Transvaal (South African Institute for Race Relations, 1977: 437)

This article was written by Patricia Johnson-Castle and forms part of the SAHO Public History Internship

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The FDA understands that there is increasing interest in the potential utility of cannabis for a variety of medical conditions, as well as research on the potential adverse health effects from use of cannabis.

To date, the FDA has not approved a marketing application for cannabis for the treatment of any disease or condition. The agency has, however, approved one cannabis-derived drug product: Epidiolex (cannabidiol), and three synthetic cannabis-related drug products: Marinol (dronabinol), Syndros (dronabinol), and Cesamet (nabilone). These approved drug products are only available with a prescription from a licensed healthcare provider. Importantly, the FDA has not approved any other cannabis, cannabis-derived, or cannabidiol (CBD) products currently available on the market.

• Cannabis sativa L. is a plant that contains over 80 different naturally occurring compounds called “cannabinoids”
• Cannabidiol (CBD)
• Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)
• Plants are grown to produce varying concentrations of cannabinoids – THC or CBD
• These plant variations are called cultivars

Cannabis-derived compounds

• Compounds occurring naturally in the plant – like CBD and THC
• These compounds are extracted directly from the plant
• Can be used to manufacture drug products
• Example: highly-purified CBD extracted from the plant

Cannabis-related compounds

• These synthetic compounds are created in a laboratory
• Can be used to manufacture drug products 
• Some synthetic compounds may also occur naturally in the plant and some may not
• Examples: synthetically-derived dronabinol (also naturally occurring) and nabilone (not naturally occurring) 

FDA has approved Epidiolex, which contains a purified form of the drug substance cannabidiol (CBD) for the treatment of seizures associated with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome or Dravet syndrome in patients 2 years of age and older. That means FDA has concluded that this particular drug product is safe and effective for its intended use.

The agency also has approved Marinol and Syndros for therapeutic uses in the United States, including for nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy and for the treatment of anorexia associated with weight loss in AIDS patients. Marinol and Syndros include the active ingredient dronabinol, a synthetic delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) which is considered the psychoactive intoxicating component of cannabis (i.e., the component responsible for the “high” people may experience from using cannabis). Another FDA-approved drug, Cesamet, contains the active ingredient nabilone, which has a chemical structure similar to THC and is synthetically derived. Cesamet, like dronabinol-containing products, is indicated for nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy.

FDA is aware that unapproved cannabis and/or unapproved cannabis-derived products are being used to treat a number of medical conditions including, AIDS wasting, epilepsy, neuropathic pain, spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis, and cancer and chemotherapy-induced nausea. Caregivers and patients can be confident that FDA-approved drugs have been carefully evaluated for safety, efficacy, and quality, and are monitored by the FDA once they are on the market. However, the use of unapproved cannabis and cannabis-derived products can have unpredictable and unintended consequences, including serious safety risks. Also, there has been no FDA review of data from rigorous clinical trials to support that these unapproved products are safe and efficacious for the various therapeutic uses for which they are being used.

FDA understands the need to develop therapies for patients with unmet medical needs, and does everything it can to facilitate this process. FDA has programs such as Fast Track, Breakthrough Therapy, Accelerated Approval and Priority Review that are designed to facilitate the development of and expedite the approval of drug products. In addition, the FDA’s expanded access (sometimes called “compassionate use”) statutory and regulatory provisions are designed to facilitate the availability of investigational products to patients with serious diseases or conditions when there is no comparable or satisfactory alternative therapy available, either because the patients have exhausted treatment with or are intolerant of approved therapies, or when the patients are not eligible for an ongoing clinical trial. Through these programs and the drug approval process, FDA supports sound, scientifically-based research into the medicinal uses of drug products containing cannabis or cannabis-derived compounds and will continue to work with companies interested in bringing safe, effective, and quality products to market.

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The FDA has an important role to play in supporting scientific research into the medical uses of cannabis and its constituents in scientifically valid investigations as part of the agency’s drug review and approval process. As a part of this role, the FDA supports those in the medical research community who intend to study cannabis by:

• Providing information on the process needed to conduct clinical research using cannabis.
• Providing information on the specific requirements needed to develop a human drug that is derived from a plant such as cannabis. In December 2016, the FDA updated its Guidance for Industry: Botanical Drug Development , which provides sponsors with guidance on submitting investigational new drug (IND) applications for botanical drug products. The FDA also has issued “ Cannabis and Cannabis-Derived Compounds: Quality Considerations for Clinical Research, Draft Guidance for Industry .”
• Providing specific support for investigators interested in conducting clinical research using cannabis and its constituents as a part of the IND or investigational new animal drug (INAD) process through meetings and regular interactions throughout the drug development process.
• Providing general support to investigators to help them understand and follow the procedures to conduct clinical research through the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) Small Business and Industry Assistance group .

To conduct clinical research that can lead to an approved new drug, including research using materials from plants such as cannabis, researchers need to work with the FDA and submit an IND application to CDER. The IND application process gives researchers a path to follow that includes regular interactions with the FDA to support efficient drug development while protecting the patients who are enrolled in the trials. An IND includes protocols describing proposed studies, the qualifications of the investigators who will conduct the clinical studies, and assurances of informed consent and protection of the rights, safety, and welfare of the human subjects. The FDA reviews the IND to ensure that the proposed studies, generally referred to as “clinical trials,” do not place human subjects at an unreasonable risk of harm. The FDA also requires obtaining the informed consent of trial subjects and human subject protection in the conduct of the clinical trials. For research intending to develop an animal drug product, researchers would establish an INAD file with the Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) to conduct their research, rather than an IND with CDER.

FDA is committed to encouraging the development of cannabis-related drug products, including CBD. Those interested in cannabis-derived and cannabis-related drug development are encouraged to contact the relevant CDER review division and CDER’s Botanical Review Team (BRT) to answer questions related to their specific drug development program. The BRT serves as an expert resource on botanical issues and has developed the Botanical Drug Development Guidance for Industry to assist those pursuing drug development in this area. FDA encourages researchers to request a Pre-Investigational New Drug application (PIND) meeting to discuss questions related to the development of a specific cannabis-derived and cannabis-related drug product.

Please note that certain cultivars and parts of the Cannabis sativa L. plant are controlled under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) since 1970 under the drug class "Marihuana" (commonly referred to as "marijuana") [21 U.S.C. 802(16)]. "Marihuana" is listed in Schedule I of the CSA due to its high potential for abuse, which is attributable in large part to the psychoactive intoxicating effects of THC, and the absence of a currently accepted medical use in the United States. From 1970 until December of 2018, the definition of “marihuana” included all types of Cannabis Sativa L. , regardless of THC content.  However, in December 2018, the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (also known as the Farm Bill) removed hemp, a type of cannabis that is very low in THC (cannabis or cannabis derivatives containing no more than 0.3% THC on a dry weight basis), from controls under the CSA. This change in the law may result in a more streamlined process for researchers to study cannabis and its derivatives, including CBD, that fall under the definition of hemp, a result which could speed the development of new drugs containing hemp. 

Conducting clinical research using cannabis-derived substances that are considered controlled substances under the CSA often involves interactions with several federal agencies. For example:

• Protocols to conduct research with controlled substances listed in Schedule I are required to be conducted under a site-specific DEA investigator registration. For more information, see 21 CFR 1301.18 .
• National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Drug Supply Program provides research-grade marijuana for scientific study. Through registration issued by DEA, NIDA is responsible for overseeing the cultivation of marijuana for medical research and has contracted with the University of Mississippi to grow marijuana for research at a secure facility. Marijuana of varying potencies and compositions along with marijuana-derived compounds are available. DEA also may allow additional growers to register with the DEA to produce and distribute marijuana for research purposes. DEA that, as the result of a recent amendment to federal law, certain forms of cannabis no longer require DEA registration to grow or manufacture.
• Researchers work with the FDA and submit an IND or INAD application to the appropriate CDER divisions or other center offices depending on the therapeutic indication or population. If the research is intended to support the approval of an animal drug product, an INAD file should be established with CVM. Based on the results obtained in studies conducted at the IND or INAD stage, sponsors may submit a marketing application for formal approval of the drug.

Cannabis Study Drugs Controlled Under Schedule I of the CSA (greater than 0.3% THC on a dry weight basis)

Sponsor obtains pre-IND number through CDER review division to request a pre-IND meeting. For new animal drug research, a sponsor may engage with CVM to establish an INAD file. A pre-IND meeting with CDER is optional, and an opportunity to obtain FDA guidance on sponsor research plans and required content for an IND submission .

The sponsor contacts NIDA or another DEA-registered source of cannabis and/or cannabis-derived substances to obtain information on the specific cultivars available, so that all necessary chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC) and botanical raw material (BRM) information can be included in the IND. Importation of products controlled under the CSA are subject to DEA authorization.

The sponsor may contact DEA to discuss Schedule I drug research plans that may require DEA inspection for an investigator and study site Schedule I license.

Step 4: If the selected BRM or drug substance manufacturer holds a Drug Master File (DMF) , the sponsor must obtain a Letter of Authorization (LOA) to reference CMC and BRM information. Alternatively, an IND submission would need to contain all necessary CMC data characterizing their study drug and ensuring it is safe for use in humans.

The sponsor sends a copy of the IND and clinical protocol, including a LOA (if applicable), to FDA.

FDA reviews the submitted IND. The sponsor must wait 30 calendar days following IND submission before initiating any clinical trials, unless FDA notifies the sponsor that the trials may proceed sooner. During this time, FDA has an opportunity to review the submission for safety to assure that research subjects will not be subjected to unreasonable risk.

If the IND is authorized by FDA as “safe to proceed” the sponsor may then submit their clinical protocol registration application, including referenced IND number, to DEA to obtain the protocol registration. Once this is received, the sponsor contacts NIDA or another DEA-registered source to obtain the cannabis and/or cannabis-derived substances and they can then begin the study.

For nonclinical research, including research conducted under an INAD file submitted established with CVM, there is no requirement of prior authorization of the protocol by FDA before the investigators may proceed with a protocol registration application submitted to DEA. For these nonclinical protocols, investigators may immediately pursue investigator and study site licensure, and protocol registration with DEA, so they may then obtain their Schedule I cannabis-derived study drug from supplier.

Cannabis Study Drugs Containing Hemp (no more than 0.3% THC on a dry weight basis)

Sponsor provides all applicable chemistry, manufacturing, and controls (CMC) and botanical raw material (BRM) information in the IND for review by FDA, including hemp cultivars.

If the selected hemp manufacturer holds a Drug Master File (DMF) , the sponsor must obtain a Letter of Authorization (LOA) to reference CMC and BRM information. Alternatively, an IND submission would need to contain all necessary CMC data characterizing their study drug and ensuring it is safe for use in humans.

FDA’s Role in the Drug Approval Process

The FDA’s role in the regulation of drugs, including cannabis and cannabis-derived products, also includes review of applications to market drugs to determine whether proposed drug products are safe and effective for their intended indications. The FDA’s drug approval process requires that clinical trials be designed and conducted in a way that provides the agency with the necessary scientific data upon which the FDA can make its approval decisions. Without this review, the FDA cannot determine whether a drug product is safe and effective. It also cannot ensure that a drug product meets appropriate quality standards. For certain drugs that have not been approved by the FDA, the lack of FDA approval and oversight means the safety, effectiveness, and quality of the drug – including how potent it is, how pure it is, and whether the labeling is accurate or false – may vary considerably.

• Product-Specific Guidance for Generic Drug Development: Draft Guidance on Cannabidiol Oral Solution (PDF - 42KB)
• Cannabis Clinical Research: Drug Master Files (DMFs) & Quality Considerations Webinar
• Cannabis and Cannabis-Derived Compounds: Quality Considerations for Clinical Research, Draft Guidance for Industry
• FDA Regulation of Cannabis and Cannabis-Derived Products, Including Cannabidiol (CBD): Questions and Answers
• Development & Approval Process (Drugs)
• From an Idea to the Marketplace: The Journey of an Animal Drug through the Approval Process
• FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Small Business and Industry Assistance group
• CVM Small Business Assistance
• National Institutes of Health (NIH): Guidance on Procedures for Provision of Marijuana for Medical Research
• National Institute on Drug Abuse's (NIDA) Role in Providing Marijuana for Research
• Drug Enforcement Administration - Registration of Manufacturers, Distributors, and Dispensers of Controlled Substances
• International Narcotics Control Board: Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961)
• National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA): Ordering Guidelines for Marijuana and Marijuana Cigarettes