Look here, I am not in support of Apartheid (or the current system for that matter). The fact is that Apartheid could not work (for a multitude of reasons, including economic reasons).
But a lot of attacks on Apartheid ignore the basic facts and do not perform a simple statistical comparison with the NSA.
> "separate development and rule for all ethnic and cultural groups" under Apartheid forced blacks onto 13% of the land, even though they formed by far the largest population group in South Africa.
What does this number include? Blacks were deprived of their land well before “Apartheid” started. During the creation of homelands, white people also lost their land (land was bought and sold to create contiguous homelands). A good example is the large farms of Lisbon, Berlin, etc… that became KwaNdebele.
It is clear that the deprivation of land from black people is wrong. But the fact is that most of the depravation/deprivation was done well before Apartheid.
> Nor does it mention the fact that generations of blacks were forced by state policy into inferior "Bantu Education"
Bantu education was inferior, that is a fact. But it is a question of resources. During Apartheid more money was spend on Bantu education than on the education of white people (although less per capita). White people almost exclusively pay taxation (as is still more or less true today).
The problem is that there are only so many math teachers, etc…
By the way, Bantu education is vastly superior to all education that every person in South Africa receives. This is not my opinion, but the opinion of Dr. Mamphela Ramphele and prof. Jonathan Jansen. OBE failed.
Even South Africa’s president Zuma, said the following of the previous education minister:
> This comes shortly after ANC president Jacob Zuma blamed former education minister Kader Asmal for closing down these institutions, causing more damage to education than had been done under apartheid.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=vn20080425091635396C60...
There were a lot of teacher colleges whose function it was to train teachers. These colleges were often in rural areas and focussed towards black people. The ANC government closed down basically all these colleges, leaving SA in a severe shortage of (black) teachers (and people in these places without the opportunity to get education).
How many black universities did Apartheid government build? I can think of quite a few (MEDUNSA, University of the North, University of Venda, several Technicons, etc…). How many was built by the ANC government? None – they however closed down colleges.
Why wasn’t there at least a University built in the past 20 years in Mpumalanga? The province doesn’t have a single university.
> Nor does it mention the fact that the migrant labour system,
Migration is a natural cause of South Africa’s industrialization. The population is still rural and development is in the cities.
What you should bear in mind is that Apartheid government tried to get industrial development started in black and rural areas. This was done by means such as development zones (e.g. Babelegi) and making companies in homelands free from VAT.
Another thing that the NP government was fearful for was that black unemployment would lead to revolution. There were active programs in order to reduce unemployment. During Apartheid, SA’s unemployment was much lower than it is now. Do you know what unemployment is now? Narrow definition 25,3% (people who are actively looking for work but do not find any: http://www.statssa.gov.za/keyindicators/keyindicators.asp). Broad definition (people who are capable of work but have given up) is over 40%! (see articles by Kingdon, G. and J. Knight)
This had another effect – spreading development around the country. Now we have a lot of development in cities, but many rural areas are basically abandoned. Rural areas (where many black people live) have now extremely high unemployment rates and there is almost zero industry. The ANC abandoned the country site to its own fate.
> Apartheid was designed to turn black people into failures, and into an exploitable manual labour pool.
That is debatable. The primary goal of Apartheid was arguably to ensure the existence and security of minority white people (from real and perceived threats such as communism (“Rooi gevaar”) and black crime (“Swart gevaar”).
The amount of money spent on black education (e.g. universities) would indicate that the “exploitable labour pool” theory is not completely correct. I would like to remind you amount of black teachers and craftsmen trained during Apartheid were much higher than it is now.
I personally suspect that the aim of the ANC government is to create very stupid and untrained voting cattle while cultivating a very small and rich black elite with close ANC ties.