It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Apartheid was a system of racial segregation and deeply entrenched social, political, geographical, and environmental racism that affected South Africa between 1948 and 1994. Trevor Noah calls apartheid “perfect racism” (19). In the early 20th century, South Africa’s white minority leaders traveled and observed governments founded upon systemic racism all over the world, including the United States, to avoid their mistakes and take inspiration from their so-called successes. Both the establishment and the dissolution of apartheid were enacted via a series of gradual laws, rather than distinct beginning and end dates.

Though ideological precedents for apartheid were present all throughout the history of colonialism in South Africa, legal apartheid began after World War II. “Apartheid” means “apartness” in Afrikaans, the language of the white, Dutch-descended South African colonists. The Afrikaners’ National Party won the election in 1948 by using the concept of apartheid as a slogan. They soon began passing a series of racist laws to oppress Black and indigenous South African people, as well as other non-white immigrants to South Africa. They made interracial relationships illegal and designated parts of the country as “white-only.” Cities like