Championing Apartheid (racial segregation), anti-communism and the right of self-government, the Nationalist Party won the greatest number of parliamentary seats in South Africa’s 1948 elections. Nationalist Party leader Daniel F. Malan, 76-year-old Afrikaners and Hitlerite, replaced Jan Smuts as prime minister. Immediately, he implemented apartheid (meaning apartness), a plan to preserve white supremacy by legislating a racially separate and unequal South Africa.

Note: Afrikaners are white natives of South Africa who are descendants of Dutch settlers and who speak Afrikaans

Apartheid divided the South African population into four distinct racial groups: white (who were seen as "civilised" and thus had the right to control the state), African blacks, Coloureds (people of mixed European-African ancestry), and Asian (Indians and Pakistanis). In 1948, South African blacks, Coloureds and Asians numbered 11 million, while the whites only 2.5 million.

Malan’s government soon forced on a series repressive laws through Parliament. One of the earliest and most blatant laws passed was 1949’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. A year later, the Suppression of Communism Act effectively outlawed labour strikes when blacks earned 17 cents a day working under inhuman conditions in diamond mines. The Population Registration Act, also enacted in 1950, made the racial classification of every man, woman, and child compulsory. Different races were assigned to specific areas to stay in (the black majority was allotted a mere 13 percent of South Africa’s land area, and no black could leave his "group area" without a special work pass); and public facilities such as hospitals, schools, and parks had to racially separate.

The first apartheid-sparked riots erupted in Johannesburg in 1949. Not until the 1990s would apartheid’s victims have any real hope of equality.