It is exactly that cut and dried: We have primary source accounts from the architects and implementers of Apartheid where they outlined their rationale and their beliefs that black South Africans were inherently morally, intellectually, and culturally inferior in every way to white South Africans.
They banned racial iteractions to absurd degrees, forbidding interracial marriages, dancing, education, and a host of other things. They forced black South Africans into intentionally inferior education systems, the so-called 'Bantu Education', designed to keep them broadly uneducated and only able to carry out semi-skilled work at best. They implemented a brutal system of repression and pass laws. I could go on and on.
It was a system explicitly and unmistakably based on racism.
They banned racial iteractions to absurd degrees, forbidding interracial marriages, dancing, education, and a host of other things. They forced black South Africans into intentionally inferior education systems, the so-called 'Bantu Education', designed to keep them broadly uneducated and only able to carry out semi-skilled work at best. They implemented a brutal system of repression and pass laws. I could go on and on.
It was a system explicitly and unmistakably based on racism.