After the end of the second world war, the globe experienced social, political, and economic changes aimed to bring stabilization in the world. One of the most criticized and infamous social-political changes was the apartheid regime in South Africa, whereby, the non-white South Africans were segregated by the whites from living in specific areas and sharing public amenities. Among the many scholarly sources highlighting these changes is ' South Africa's Racial Past ' written by Maylam in 2017 . The article discusses how Apartheid came to be in South Africa, its course, and how it came to an end.
Pursuing this further, South Africa's Racial Past is a social-political scholarly source due to the fact that it discusses the sociology and politics of South Africa before, during, and at the end of the Apartheid regime. Although Apartheid was introduced by the Land Act of 1913, it gained momentum after the Population Registration Act of 1950, which created the basic framework of the social-political regime. The apartheid laws were legislated to separate whites and non-whites, and also to divide black South Africans among themselves in order to decrease their political power ( Maylam, 2017 ). “However, it can also be argued that an emphasis on the continuities, on the steady growth of the racial order over time, serves to mitigate the evils of apartheid” ( Maylam, 2017 ). Consequently, the reasonable livelihood of Bantustans was reduced to poverty and hopelessness after they were alienated from the fertile highlands to reserves by the government.
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In response to my peer's historical lens of Zimbabwe's land reforms, both legislations in the African countries were both social and political. However, the land reforms in Zimbabwe had an economic aspect which led to the fall of Zimbabwe's economy (Law, 2015). The difference of the land reforms is evident because Zimbabwe's reforms promoted African independence while South African changes encouraged white dominance and supremacy. “Following the negotiations of independence in 1979 in London, at the Lancaster House Conference, measures were enacted to protect settler interests, which meant that land could only be sold on a ‘willing seller/willing buyer’ basis” ( Law, 2015 ). As a result, the land stalemate was partially resolved and there was peace in the nation.
References
Law, K. (2015). The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers' Voices from Zimbabwe. Journal of Southern African Studies , 39 (1), 235-236. doi: 10.1080/03057070.2013.768840
Maylam, P. (2017). South Africa's racial past: The history and historiography of racism, segregation, and apartheid . Routledge.
