I want to prefix my question/point of discussion by saying that this is in no way intended to drive vitriol the way of OP or any other posters who’ve shared similar. Just seeking genuine good-faith input from my compatriots and kids born in the late 90s-mid 2000s. Discomfort is normal, don’t be dooses🤙🏾.

Looking at photos like this, I’ve always wondered whether we focus too much on the aesthetics of apartheid rather than the actual machinery both of the regime from 1948-‘94 as well as those that preceded it from even before 1910 and regrettably, endure into the present day. 

We endlessly circulate images of segregated benches, buses and beaches because they’re visually shocking and morally straightforward but obviously the enduring consequences of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa stem less from whether white and black people sat together and more from the laws that governed land ownership, education, urbanisation, employment, wealth accumulation and political power.

This isn’t to say that the aforementioned images aren’t powerful in their own right to some degree but do you guys rate we see so much of them that we almost downplay the actual mechanical causes of the world-leading inequality we see today? 

Growing up we hardly heard about the actual architecture of oppression that existed long before apartheid became official policy. Legislation like the Glen Grey Act of 1894, various pass laws, labour controls, land dispossession measures, and other colonial-era policies which were already engineering a society designed to extract black labour while limiting black ownership, mobility and political power. 

We saw what I generously call snippets of how the Union of South Africa inherited and expanded many of these systems through policies like the Natives Land Act of 1913, the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923, the Colour Bar, job reservation policies and numerous other measures which entrenched a racialised economic order decades before the National Party came to powerbut the focus has largely been on Apartheid itself although less how Apartheid then refined, expanded and bureaucratised the already existing architecture that has and would go on to have far more of an effect on our nation and its makeup for generations than 2 scummy tannies being scummy on a bench. 

Like yeah man I’m a Xhosa gent from a rugby school in the EC and I’m currently with my Portuguese gf living in a small WC town so I know quite well that a rude racist can ruin your afternoon but that’s beyond meh in comparison to how a century of legislation can shape the life chances of your grandchildren.

Why do we spend so much time discussing the former and comparatively little discussing and adequately addressing the latter? 

Further to that, do you guys think this may be linked to how easily some can identify interpersonal racism/prejudice while finding it impossible to identify its much more consequential structural manifestation? Do you guys think that links in any way to the prevailing sentiment we’ve seen recently from certain figures that “people don’t eat ideology” and that governance is no more than fixing potholes, water pipes and robots and then letting the dice fall as they may?

Saw a post on here recently and it sparked a thought…