| Search Google images for "apartheid" and you will get, along with the protest posters, images of beaches, parks, benches, public lavatories, train carriages, railway crossing pedestrian bridges, all with signs saying "Whites Only", "Europeans", "slegs vir blankes" or less frequently "non-whites". These are the amenities segregated by the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, Act No 49 of 1953.
The aim was a society in South Africa that was not a society. This cornerstone and introduction of petty apartheid aimed to create and keep distance between the "race groups" created by the Population Registration Act. It did that, but it wasn't enough to make the system work indefinitely.
The act allowed these facilities to be not only separate, but also unequal. And they were.
The act was repealed in 1990, under the reforms of F.W. De Klerk that rolled back much of petty apartheid, four years before the mass democratic elections of 1994.
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