Implanting racial ideology: Bus apartheid in Cape Town

Abstract

Cape Town's buses were the last in South Africa to be segregated forcibly on racial lines. Bus apartheid was not imposed overnight however. In the hostile environment of the late 1950s, it was enforced by degrees only. Organised resistance waned gradually and was deflected. A new norm of bus travel was allowed to take root and social cleavages became accentuated. With a foot in the door, apartheid did its own work and was rewarded by a remarkable surge of white opinion in favour of even more thorough racialism as from the late 1960s. Slow racial desegregation of buses a decade later owed little, if anything, to pressure from individual Capetonians who by then were firmly under the apartheid spell.