Apartheid was codified into law by an intellectual elite within a single decade

Evidence

The social and political interests represented by the Broederbond prevailed from the 1940s until the close of the 1980s, translating Afrikaans experience into the governing philosophy underlying state policy and structure. Under its deific directorship, formulated largely by the guiding hand of a group of academic intellectuals, apartheid gripped state and society, assuming formalized power in 1948. It was translated into a series of concrete and codifying legislation soon after. Mixed marriages were outlawed in 1949, and mixed intercourse – especially sexual – legally immoralized a year later. From 1950 also, every person was required to be racially classified and registered at birth, racially defined groups were to be set aside in formally and forcefully segregated residential areas mapped out by the state, and any resistance to state rule – characteristically charged as “Communist” – was outlawed. A year later again, “Native homelands” were established on the basis of “Native reserves” created under British rule that would come to be known as “Bantustans,” job color bars were cemented in place, and “Coloureds” were denied participation in the common (now effectively all-white) voters roll. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1542