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)

Thank you! I knew that separate development was indeed a subset, not considering things like the Pass Laws, but the English-language official documents I read in the late sixties and early seventies, and certainly the personnel at the Washington Embassy, always explained that as the translation. This distinction is decent to make in the article. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:24, 29 March 2009 (UTC)