South Africa: Did the end goals of apartheid have some truth to them?

[-:Undertaker:-]

South Africa: Did the end goals of apartheid have some truth to them?

Whenever apartheid is brought up, virtually everybody thinks of the horrid signs banning people of a different skin colour from a certain part of the beach or forbidding them from walking down certain streets, marrying people of a different colour or gaining access to a service that was whites-only. Of course most civilised people accept this as wrongful and rather vile, but few people are actually aware of what the end goals of apartheid were.

On the map above you can see the planned 'homelands' for the different groups and cultures of South Africa. It was argued that, as all the cultures were so different to one another - South Africa would have eventually been broken up into 'homelands' (otherwise known as bantustans) where each group would eventually gain control of their own territory which would - when ready - be granted independence and would become seperate sovereign states to the rump of South Africa.

A great deal of the problems Africa as a whole face are due to the badly drawn borders left from the colonial era where borders were drawn over different ethnic groups, differing cultures and so forth to mark British territory from Belgian territory, Portugese territory from French territory and so forth. The recent split in the Sudan for example marked the end of the Sudanese unified state which contained Christians in the south and Muslims in the north. A similar solution has often been suggested for Nigeria.

The argument that apartheid made as it's eventual aim was that the only way to solve these types of differences within South Africa was to have South Africa break up into it's different religious, tribal, ethnic and cultural groups. On the other hand it can be argued that this goes against multiculturalism and that breaking South Africa up into these different groups was wrong.

But what do you think? It's a complex one. As a more general point for debate, do you think that this kind of aim (of breaking these countries up into more suitable nation states - rather than supporting apartheid itself) is admirable and would solve a lot of the continents problems? Or do you believe in the multicultural concept of a 'Rainbow Nation' that Nelson Mandela often talked about?

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The debate is open to you.