9
Lisa Sharlach
APSA 2004
Africa’s politics today (Jung 2000, 42).
In 1948, the white electorate brought an Afrikaner plurality to power in
Parliament, and the Afrikaner nationalist National Party was to dominate the government
until the multi-racial elections in 1994. In the middle of the twentieth century, most of
the countries on the African continent were soon to win independence from European
colonialism. Simultaneously, however, the National Party in South Africa was
entrenching the policies of “separate development” that kept more than four-fifths of the
country’s citizens disenfranchised (Jung 2000, 114, 138). Afrikaner nationalists, almost
all of whom belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, believed that they were a people
chosen by God to institute His will in this new promised land through the policies of
apartheid (Goodwin and Schiff 1995, 188-189). According to the National Party, the
goals of apartheid were: strict racial separation; white supremacy; and the social and
economic advancement of Afrikaners. Segregationist legislation known as the Group
Areas Act (1950) forced three and half million South Africans to relocate (Grundy 1991,
156; Chazan et. al. 1999, 471).
Particularly relevant to this study on sexual violence is the fact that policing sex
became a pillar of apartheid. For a white person to have sex with someone not white,
whether by rape or by consent, was illegal in South Africa after the 1950 Immortality Act
and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages (Unterhalter 1995, 227). The purported goal of
this legislation was to maintain racial purity, but it only prohibited marriage between
whites and non-whites. Asians, Africans, and the Coloured could intermarry (Norval
1996, 125-126).
5
Olivier 1993, 25.
Convention