Segregation

Africans, Asians, Arabs, and mixed-race people in Africa were viewed through the same cultural lens—Europeans were inherently superior, and Africans were the most inferior. They were uncivilized, lazy, and childlike in their behavior. They were prone to criminal activities and therefore had to be controlled and segregated for the protection of whites. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, biology spawned ideas about race that were used to justify racial segregation in the Americas and Africa. The belief developed that there were distinct races with different levels of intelligence, capacities, and abilities guided by the laws of nature. These ideas were given scientific and academic legitimacy through the writings of historians, anthropologists, and geographers. South Africa's Howard Pim, Maurice S. Evans, Edgar H. Brookes, James Hertzog, Jan Christian Smuts, and Charles Loram advocated racial segregation. Evans studied South Africa and the United States and concluded that segregation was a good policy because it would help to ensure the survival of European civilization. Loram supported the idea of separate vocational education along the lines of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. Africans and people of color were viewed as unhealthy, diseased, and contaminated, and they had to be segregated from whites. Segregation was also needed for economic reasons: the African communal economy was not compatible with the European capitalist economy, so a dual economy was needed. Finally, it was thought that African and European cultures were too different to coexist. African society was "primitive," and its customs would not be able to survive contact with Europeans.

When the National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948, the ideas of apartheid, or separate development, were codified into law. The major supporters of these ideas included Daniel Malan, J. G. Strijdom, and Hendrik Verwoerd, whose campaign slogan was "the white man must remain master." The cultural ideas that espoused a racial hierarchy throughout the Americas and Africa served as the foundation for religious, political, and economic ideas that embraced segregation. Segregation was supported both in the Americas and in Africa by Christian churches, especially in South Africa by the Dutch Reformed Church (until the 1990s) and in the American South by most of the predominantly white Christian denominations (until the 1960s). Religious leaders and church members argued that the Bible upheld segregation and that forced integration was against God's will because God ordained people to live separately.