Ordinary White South Africans and apartheid – bound to a racist system they helped prop up

A 1982 Afrikaner cultural festival in Pretoria.& Paul Weinberg/Wits University Press by Neil Roos, University of Fort Hare In South Africa, apartheid was a divisive political system entrenched by a White minority who regarded other ethnic groups as inferior, creating townships on the outskirts of cities to house the Black population and legislation to control their movements. Many academic studies have focused on Black life under apartheid, but few on White life – and even fewer on the role of working-class Whites in the system. A new book, Ordinary Whites in Apartheid South Africa: Social Histories of Accommodation, does exactly that. We asked historian Neil Roos about his study. What’s the book’s premise? Apartheid was a state system of racial oppression in South Africa initiated when the National Party came to power in 1948. It lasted formally until 1994. While we know much about the nature of Black life under apartheid, we know virtually nothing about Whites. It’s inconceivable to fully understand the complexity of an oppressive society only from the perspective of the victim and not also the perpetrators. Apartheid was notorious for its energetic approach to social engineering, using “scientific” data to develop policy and mechanisms to manage...