Apartheid A History Author:Brian Lapping No political theory has become mor universally condemed that aparthied, yet to be fully understood one must look at its roots in South African History. The humiliation suffered by the Afikaners at the hands of the British during the 19th Century and the Boer War hardened their determination to be absolute masters of what they considered their c... more »ountry. When Britian handed complete power in South Africa to a white electorate in 1910, Afrikaner Nationalists began their steady rise to political dominance. In the decades after the National Party victory in the election of 1948, while the European empires were collapsing and the imperial relationship was everywhere being severed, the white population to their society. Where in imperial times most social rules were informal and capable of flexibility, since 1948, in South Africa they have been made rigid and enforced by law. Apartheid: A History is the first book to trace the story of apartheid from its beginnings almost three hundred years ago through the accretion of habits, institutions, laws, resentments, ambitions,acquiescences and evasions that have formedthis rigid system of segragation today.« less