Forced removal to the homelands resulted in uneven population growth; huge tracts of the country could well become perpetual wastelands if development was neglected in the areas made barren by the removals. On the homelands, large numbers of people had no land to cultivate and had to spend most of their money on imported basic foodstuffs. Children were often forced to work in an effort to counter the shortage of male labour, and were severely exploited; those who were not offspring of farm labourers lived in squalid communal huts and had to cook for themselves. They had an inadequate diet and received no education.
Apartheid viewed blacks as cheap labour without rights of their own. Black agricultural workers were excluded from unemployment and sickness benefits; black miners had to work in mines where lax or non-existent safety measures resulted in many accidents, some fatal, and those who refused to work in unsafe mines might be fired without notice; violations of trade union freedoms were rampant; and all blacks, regardless of their trade, had little or no hope for job improvement. Dissenters of apartheid, even women and children, were often subjected to brutal and sophisticated torture; political trials might last 3-4 years, with the accused spending all that time in goal; suspicious deaths of detainees were known; the press was forbidden to publish reports or photographs of people under 'banning orders', and those banned could not communicate with more than one other person at a time.
From the time of the first Dutch colony, the "whites" gradually extended their domination over the whole of South Africa. This trend intensified with the arrival of the British and other "white" population groups which, by violence or cunning, appropriated nearly all the agricultural and residential lands in South African territory. The "whites", who represented 20 per cent of the population, had control over and use of 80 per cent of the territory, whereas the "blacks", who represented 70 per cent of the population, controlled only 13 per cent of the lands. As stated above, this situation, maintained at the expense of the blacks, lasted for more than a century. That system was not peculiar to South Africa only. what is today Namibia was governed for a very long time by the same process consisting of a black majority dominated by a white minority. Even today, survivals of the system continue to produce victims.
2. Apartheid is the modern face of slavery; it is as cruel, as dehumanizing, as institutionalized as slavery was...It is the deepest scar of racism that disfigures our civilization... It has no equal in our time. (Commonwealth Secretary-General Shridath Ramphal, 1984).
3. Three factors contributed greatly to the defeat of the white South African regime: one, it could not attract enough white immigrants to offset black demographics. Two, as an overtly racist formulation, apartheid was deeply abhorrent to world opinion. Three, the African National Congress and its supporters exploited these two weaknesses of the apartheid regime with intelligence, perseverance, planning and organization.