It was better for everybody except the communist racist monsters who seized power with their boxes of matches and their "necklaces".
I heard the justifications for Apartheid, in that blacks and whites have different systems of beliefs, and on the surface there was some merit to it.
The problem was that the whites still exploited the blacks economically, using them for cheap and dangerous labor, and instead of having completely separate societies that could live the way they wanted, the whites made that impossible for the blacks. Blacks were completely dependent on the Whites for their well-being. That simply could not be sustained over the long haul.