What was the apartheid system?

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about what the apartheid system was, focusing in particular on: (i) apartheid as an Afrikaner word, the language of descendants of Dutch settlers who arrived in Africa in the 17th century, which means separateness; (ii) the National Party as the Afrikaner-founded party which enforced the apartheid regime; (iii) Nelson Mandela as the first President of the reformed South Africa in 1994; (iv) the origins of ethnography and understanding the concept of race; (v) Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach as key figures in the development of ‘race science’; (vi) understanding South Africa as a region within the continent of Africa; (vii) the condition of the African person in apartheid South Africa as having no rights, yet still having obligations to the state.

About the lecturer

Dr Onyeka Nubia is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham. Dr Nubia’s research interests are in the recontextualising of popular perception of British ethnicity throughout history. Some of Dr Nubia’s recent publications include ‘The Language of Racism’ (2019) and ‘Africans in Early Modern England’ (2019).