Racism and Reproduction: The Institutional Effects of Apartheid on the South African Fertility Decline Tom A Moultrie Paper presented at the XXIV IUSSP General Population Conference Salvador, Brazil 18 – 24 August 2001 Session S19 – Fertility Transition Contact details: Tom A Moultrie Centre for Population Studies London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine 49-51 Bedford Square WC1B 3DP London, United Kingdom Phone: +44 (0)20 7299 4750 Fax: +44 (0)20 7299 4637 Email:
[email protected] PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE FROM THIS PAPER WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION 1 INTRODUCTION They said I should Learn to speak a little bit of English Maybe practise birth control Keep away from controversial politics… (Johnny Clegg and Savuka, “Third World Child”) Apartheid, in all its manifestations, impinged on every aspect of the daily lives of African South Africans. Racial segregation, job reservation, restrictions on mobility, and the provision of inferior education and health care were just some of the more obvious aspects of that system. However, recent histories have argued persuasively that apartheid was not a singular, coherent and hegemonic ideology, but an amalgam of policies forged out of conflict and compromise within the white ruling classes. Consequently, serious internal contradictions existed between different policy arenas. In the demographic realm, contradictions emerged between the desire to reduce African fertility (driven by a fear of White South Africans being “swamped”), and government policies that ensured that Africans were systematically denied access to education, health care and urban residence, all factors that are conducive to fertility change. Earlier work (Moultrie and Timæus (forthcoming); Moultrie and Timæus (2001)) has presented robust estimates of changes in fertility and birth intervals over the last few decades.