Apartheid: Color Classification

The population of South Africa was split into four different racial groups: Black, White, Asian, and "Coloured." The "coloured" group were people of Bantu, Khoisan, and European descent (with some Maylay ancestry). The Apartheid bureaucracy employed many laws that determined who was in the "coloured" group. These laws could move out families to seperate "townships," and remove them from places that they had lived in for generations. Blacks and "coloureds" were denied the rights of voting from 1950 to 1983 (the Apartheid Era)---these continued until the abolition of Apartheid.