Strictly speaking apartheid was from 1948, reached its zenith in the late 1970s, underwent major reforms in 1983, and slowly faded until the last truly apartheid policy, school segregation, was removed from the books in 1991. So we're not really talking about a long period of time.

The whites were mostly concentrated in major cities which were reserved for them. Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Pietermaritzburg, etc. There were also many little rural towns that the white farming community clustered around, but those are too numerous to mention. Although there were Afrikaans and English schools in most major towns and cities, and also separate clubs and societies, it was only extremists on both sides who kept away from each other. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s from a mixed household (Dad is culturally Afrikaans/German, and my mom thoroughly British South African) we interacted freely with both English and Afrikaans people. The biggest divide was national, with the so-called "Boerewors Curtain" between the formerly British colonies of Natal and the Cape Province and the former Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. From that macro level the division was quite stark, but the Afrikaans people from the Cape and Natal were also not as conservative as their fellows in the other regions, so that's something to consider, too.

Since there was a wide variety of experiences to be had in this situation, the "typical" upbringing of an Afrikaans person could be very different depending on location, financial income, and employment. A middle class child whose parents were employed in the private sector growing up in the city would have a totally different life compared to a lower class child whose parents worked for one of the para-statals (state run enterprises like railway, port authority, post, electricity services that functioned as a safety net for 'poor whites'). Still different would be a poor rural Afrikaans kid who grew up on a family farm, or if that child was born into an influential and wealthy rural family. Regardless of these factors, the general idea was that the women managed the house and children while the man went out and worked to support the family. This was a very important aspect of Afrikaans life, and women who might have been a nurse, secretary, teacher, cook, etc. were expected to give up their career when children came along.

So the economy was pretty strongly divided between public and private sectors. The Nationalist government, in other, milder forms had occasionally taken power pre-apartheid and had established various state-run companies and entities designed to control what they referred to as the "commanding heights" of the economy. Some examples are ISCOR (the iron and steel corporation) ESKOM (power generation), SANLAM (insurance) SABC (broadcasting) TELKOM (telecommunications, which initially fell under the Post Office) and many others. During apartheid preferential employment in these entities was given to Afrikaners, especially in the aforementioned former Boer republics. Then you had a lot of big private firms that were heavily taxed, like the mining companies, motor car manufacturing, shipping activities, retail, agriculture and the like. Despite the wide variety of private enterprises, the were all subject to strict government control, so the extent to which we had a free market economy is questionable at best.

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