Remnants of Apartheid on South African Beaches

October 1, 2021 CATALYST Team

While apartheid has been dimantled in South Africa for more than 25 years, segregation is still visible on its seashores as the economic and social consequences of apartheid continue to disadvantage and discriminate against Black South Africans.

Beach in South Africa. South African Tourism. CC BY 2.0.

South African apartheid ended more than 25 years ago, but remnants of the racist system still linger. During the reign of the National Party, an all-white government which ruled from 1948 to 1994 in South Africa, everything from language to land was segregated. Apartheid itself means “apartness” in Afrikaans, which is one of the main languages in South Africa that descended from European colonists, with it often being referred to as the “language of the oppressor.” Land was at the core of the apartheid system as Black populations were expelled to townships inland and out of city bounds while the white minority enjoyed the luxuries of life in major cities and coastal towns.

The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953 legalized the segregation of public spaces, vehicles and services across South Africa. The Act was amended in 1960 to extend the segregation of amenities to “the sea and the seashore,” officially restricting beachgoers to their racially-designated beaches. In practice, the Act reserved the best amenities for white people and lower quality amenities for others.

As a part of this law, non-white South Africans were limited to small, low-quality and dangerous beaches that were far from the townships that they were expelled to, while white populations exclusively enjoyed 90 percent of the coastline in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, for example. Similarly, in Durban, a coastal city in eastern KwaZulu-Natal, more than two kilometers of beach were reserved for white South Africans (who made up 22 percent of the population at the time), which left only 650 meters of beach to the Black majority (who made up 46 percent of the population at the time).

Apartheid in the Republic of South Africa on January 1, 1970. United Nations Photo. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

With the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, the creation of a new constitution and the arrival of a new government—the African National Congress—came the fall of South African aparthied in the early 1990s. Although beaches were offically desegregated in 1990 when the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act was repealed, non-white South Africans had already been actively rebelling against the state-enforced segregation. Black South Africans attended white-only beaches and parks, and even stopped yielding the sidewalk to whites in major cities like Johannesburg.

Today, 75 percent of South Africans are Black and nine percent are white; however, apartheid’s legacy continues to disadvantage the Black populations in the coastal country. Most Black South Africans still live in inland townships and earn, on average, three times less than their white counterparts. According to the World Bank, South Africa is the most economically unequal country in the world.

Consequences of nearly 50 years of apartheid—lack of access to beaches, transportation considerations and other economic factors—make it difficult for Black South Africans to revel in their legally renewed right to sea and seashore. Generally, economic and social remnants of apartheid and the ANC’s unwillingness to conduct large-scale land transfers and pursue policies that may appear radical to international investors, have upheld the status quo set by segregation during the National Party’s reign. These consequences are not the only reason why Blacks and whites are only seen together at the beach during peak holiday seasons, as racism and white supremacy still haunt the coastal shores of South Africa.

In 2016, Penny Sparrow, former KwaZulu-Natal estate agent, took to Facebook to rant about the presence of Blacks on South African beaches, referring to them as “monkeys” and claiming that their presence was discomforting and troublesome. Although Sparrow was prosecuted for her racist rant, this was not an isolated incident. In 2017, Phillip Roodt, a white man from the South African province Limpopo, similarly wrote his racist thoughts on Facebook, calling Black beachgoers in Amanzimtoti “cockroaches,” thieves, and said he wished they would drown. A year later, Adam Catzavelos posted a video on Twitter praising the South African shore, the all-white beachgoers and the fact that there was “not one [k-word] (the equivalent of the n-word in South Africa) in sight.”

The racist comments escalated into racist actions in 2019 when business owners hired a private company to expel visitors from Clifton’s fourth beach in Cape Town following the alleged rape of two teenage girls in the area. While the business owners cited increased crime as their reasoning, beachgoers worried that this was an attempt to privatize a public space. Protestors took to Clifton’s fourth beach to voice their concerns about how Black individuals were unfairly targeted. The same security company was also accused of blocking access to a popular road on New Year’s at the request of residents who wanted to maintain their neighborhood’s exclusivity and deny outsiders the enjoyment of their street’s view of the New Year’s festivities.

Present-day segregation and racial discrimination on South African beaches is a haunting reminder for non-white South Africans of the atrocious, discriminatory system. With almost 50 years of apartheid and more than 25 years since apartheid has been dismantled in law, South African beaches have yet to really practice desegregation.