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Absolutism
Apartheid was the highly unequal, extractive system of racial segregation in South Africa and Namibia from 1948 to 1994. The word can also be used to refer more generally to separation or segregation.
Apartheid Quotes in Why Nations Fail
The Why Nations Fail quotes below are all either spoken by Apartheid or refer to Apartheid. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
Quotes
In South Africa the dual economy was not an inevitable outcome of the process of development. It was created by the state. In South Africa there was to be no seamless movement of poor people from the backward to the modern sector as the economy developed. On the contrary, the success of the modern sector relied on the existence of the backward sector, which enabled white employers to make huge profits by paying very low wages to black unskilled workers. […] Black Africans were indeed “trapped” in the traditional economy, in the Homelands. But this was not the problem of development that growth would make good. The Homelands were what enabled the development of the white economy.
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Apartheid Term Timeline in Why Nations Fail
The timeline below shows where the term Apartheid appears in Why Nations Fail. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9: Reversing Development
...than Transkei’s—but Transkei isn’t underdeveloped simply because it’s part of Africa. Rather, South Africa’s white apartheid government deliberately underdeveloped and impoverished it to give white-run businesses a source of cheap labor.
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...the land for the white fifth of the population. This set the foundation for the apartheid system. In the mid-20th century, development economists viewed South Africa as a natural example of...
(full context)
...economy didn’t end through natural economic development, but rather through the political movement that ended apartheid.
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Chapter 12: The Vicious Circle
...passed laws to prevent Black citizens from voting and segregated all public services, creating an apartheid system similar to South Africa’s. They also stopped the federal government from passing development projects...
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Chapter 13: Why Nations Fail Today
Zimbabwe was a British colony until 1965. Then it was an independent white apartheid state, similar to South Africa, until native African revolutionaries overthrew the government in 1980. Their...
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Chapter 14: Breaking the Mold
...poor. It had virtually no infrastructure or education system, and its neighbors were all white apartheid regimes. However, it grew extremely fast and is now sub-Saharan Africa’s wealthiest country. It succeeded...
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