Further friction was generated by the two world wars. Even though South Africa joined in on the side of the Allies in both conflicts, many Afrikaners were sympathetic towards Germany. There was an Afrikaner revolt in World War I and serious outbreaks of sabotage in World War II. World War II also revived fears of what Afrikaners called the swaart gevaar, or black peril.

With many of South Africa’s white adult males serving in the armed forces, the rules preventing blacks from doing semi-skilled work were relaxed. This prompted a huge influx of blacks into the cities, with the result that in 1946, for the very first time, the urban African population outstripped the European.

The beneficiary of white fears was the Afrikaner-based National party, which in 1948 won South Africa’s first post-war election and was to remain in power for the next 46 years. The Nationalists’ policy of South African apartheid – literally meaning ‘apartness’ – made segregation even stricter. Towns and rural areas had been divided up into ’specified’ zones in which only members of one racial group could live.

Marriage between individuals of different racial groups was prohibited, and it became an offence for non-whites to mix with whites on trains and buses, or to share public amenities for example parks, beaches and swimming pools. Each group also had to attend its own schools, universities and hospitals, though it was the non-whites who ended up using the worst facilities.

As a sop to globe opinion, the government set school aside 10 black homelands, or Bantustans, where blacks were to be given the full citizenship rights denied to them in South Africa itself. But the Bantustans contained only about 1 eighth of the geographical area of South Africa and included some of its poorest land. Many people both inside and outside South Africa opposed apartheid and it was condemned by the United Nations. The African National Congress (ANe), which led the campaign against South African apartheid inside the country, was committed at very first to peaceful resistance. But this began to change after 21 March 1960, when the police opened fire on black demonstrators within the town of Sharpeville, killing 69 and wounding 178.