Apartheid Summary

1238 Words5 Pages
Summary of Apartheid in South Africa |[pic] | The first people to live in the area now known as South Africa were black | | |Africans who spoke the Bantu language. They raised cattle and sheep near the | | |coast. In 1652, the Dutch came to settle in South Africa. Even though recent | | |immigrants, they believed the land was theirs. These Dutch immigrants defeated | | |many Africans and forced them to work as servants and slaves as they established | | |a colony. | In 1806, Great Britain captured the colony from the Dutch. The British and descendants of the Dutch settlers, known as the Boers, fought for control of the country for about 100 years. The British finally won in 1910. When diamonds and gold were discovered, the British forced blacks off the mineral rich lands into land they though had little value, known as “reserves.“ In 1948, the racist Nationalist Party was elected to power. The Nationalist government combined all the poor treatment of blacks into an official policy called apartheid. Apartheid (pronounced apart hide) means apartness in Afrikaans, the language of South Africa’s Dutch descendants. Under apartheid, the |government divided people into racial categories. Four major ethnic groups were | | |considered in South Africa. The Europeans who arrived were first known as Boers | | |and later came to be called Afrikaners. Their language was a mixture of Dutch |
Open Document