Comprehensive segregation: the origins of the group areas act and its planning apparatuses

In the early months of 1990, as the excitement of F.W. de Klerk's change of direction captured international attention, government television in South Africa offered its white viewers a new serial which revealed that those previously 'disqualified' people, showing an increasing tendency to move in next door, might even be 'People Like Us'.' This crude, if entertaining, ideological manipulation provided an extraordinary antithesis to earlier National Party contortions. Exactly forty years before, when Dr T.E. Donges introduced the Group Areas Bill in the House of Assembly, his staff had to cast around for evidence of the popularity of generalised, compulsory urban racial segregation. In doing so they found many examples of demands for, moves towards and attempts at enforced separation of 'race groups' in urban areas. Some of these Donges cited during the lengthy parliamentary debates on the Group Areas Bill. But what were the forces pushing for comprehensive segregation? Who contributed to the framing of the Bill? Was there a preconceived scheme to impose a master plan for internal urban apartheid? Our inability to answer these questions stems from the fact that the creation of 'group areas', usually considered to lie at the very core of urban apartheid, has not yet been studied by scholars. The origins of the Group Areas Act have been the subject of some speculations but no serious research; the same applies to examination of the specific nature of the changes which it introduced, and to the