In his article on the history of physical anthropology in South Africa, Phillip Tobias expressed the opinion that no South African physical anthropologist had contributed to the development of apartheid (Tobias 1985a). He was right in that no scientist with physical anthropology training had sat on the National Party committees in the late 1940s that had conjured up the complex web of legislation known as the policy of apartheid. There was no need to have a scientist on any of these committees because apartheid was never intended to be a scientific process. But Tobias was also wrong in that physical anthropologists did have other roles in relation to apartheid.

The apartheid policy implemented by the National Party codified something that already existed. South African society was already highly racialised by the end of the nineteenth century, but there was no legal structure to racial segregation. Education in the Cape Colony included elite schools for white students only (Bickford-Smith 1995, 24), but the exclusion was social rather than legislated. A partial franchise allowed educated black people to vote in the Cape Colony, but they had no such rights in the Boer republics. Miscegenation was not illegal in the Boer republics, but there was strong religious and social pressure against intermarriage between black and white people.

The real pressure for a legal system of segregation only came after the end of the South African War in 1902. Before the war, the British government had used the mistreatment and exclusion of Africans from political life as one of the excuses for the war, but it agreed to continue the exclusion of people of colour from political power in the Boer provinces of the new Union of South Africa in 1910. The Union Parliament passed the Land Act in 1913, which restricted African ownership of land, and also passed an early version of the Immorality Act in 1927, but the real stimulus for the implementation of legislated segregation came with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s. Saul Dubow (1995, 247) suggests that the immediate cause of apartheid (coined in 1935 and meaning separateness) was the recognition of the large degree of poverty among white Afrikaners and how they could be uplifted and protected from competition against black people. This could not work without a complex network of legislation that would define and apply formal separation.