Talk:Apartheid

Translation (literal vs. spin doctor)

Since I never actually was literate in Afrikaans, I relied on translation. My recollection was that the official government translation was "separate development". Was that at all idiomatic, or simply official-speak? That didn't make the reality any better.

It is, however, an interesting question of how many people in government actually believed that the "homelands" had meaningful development possibilities. As I rememember the population patterns, however, going back a few hundred years, it's not exactly as if the Transvaal was anyone's homeland until the 18th or early 19th century. Howard C. Berkowitz 19:50, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

"Separate development" (i.e. the "homelands" system) was just one (albeit essential) part of apartheid, not the whole program. In Afrikaans, "separate development" is "afsonderlike ontwikkeling," which I haven't seen used interchangeably with "apartheid" in official documents. That said, there was a lot of politicking around terminology from the 1960s on, at which point the term "separate development"/"afsonderlike ontwikkeling" came increasingly to appear in places where "apartheid" once would have (e.g. general election manifestoes make no mention of "apartheid" after 1958) and was often used euphemistically to refer to the government's full set of racial policies. Shamira Gelbman 20:52, 29 March 2009 (UTC)