Summary

Michelle Faul begins her article, “What Life Was Like In South Africa During Apartheid”, by presenting an incident from her childhood, which occurred while traveling in South Africa with her mother and sisters. At a gas station, the workers refused to give her mother keys to the toilet because it was for whites only, so the mother told her daughters to urinate next to the gas pump.

The event took place in the 1960s in South Africa during the apartheid regime, when her widowed mother took the writer and her sisters to visit relatives.

The writer recalls that while racism was also present in Rhodesia, it was not as institutionalized as it was in South Africa. In South Africa, there were black-only train carriages, most of the hotels were for whites only, and black persons were not allowed to enter shops and were served only at the back door. Black people often lived in poorer segregated ‘homelands’ and did not have access to well paying-jobs. Even those who were teacher...