Category: History, Conflicts and International

Tags: apartheid, in, south, africa, timeline, today, history, nelson, mandela, ended, article, books, summary, the, 1970s, laws, brief, background, when, did, beg

Apartheid was a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government of South Africa between 1948 and 1993, under which the rights of the majority 'non-white' inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by white people was maintained. The government of South Africa also practiced the same discriminatory policies while occupying South West Africa, known after 1966 as Namibia. Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times. However, apartheid as an official policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. New legislation classified inhabitants into racial groups ("black", "white", "coloured", and "Indian"), and residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals. From 1958, black people were deprived of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands called bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government segregated education, medical care, and other public services, and provided black people with services inferior to those of white people. Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance and violence as well as a long trade embargo against South Africa. Since the 1980s, a series of popular uprisings and protests were met with the banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders. As unrest spread and became more violent, state organizations responded with increasing repression and state-sponsored violence. Reforms to apartheid in the 1980s failed to quell the mounting opposition, and in 1990 President Frederik Willem de Klerk began negotiations to end apartheid, culminating in multi-racial democratic elections in 1994, which were won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela. The vestiges of apartheid still shape South African politics and society. Internal resistance to the apartheid system in South Africa came from several sectors of society and saw the creation of organisations dedicated variously to peaceful protests, passive resistance and armed insurrection. It came from both black activists like Steve Biko and Desmond Tutu as well as white activists like Harry Schwarz, Joe Slovo and Trevor Huddleston. A bantustan (also known as black African homeland or simply homeland) was a territory set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of the policy of apartheid. Ten bantustans were established in South Africa, and ten in neighbouring South-West Africa (then under South African administration), for the purpose of concentrating the members of designated ethnic groups, thus making each of those territories ethnically homogeneous as the basis for creating "autonomous" nation states for South Africa's different black ethnic groups. The term was first used in the late 1940s, and was coined from 'Bantu' (meaning 'people' in some of the Bantu languages) and '-stan' (a suffix meaning 'land' in the Persian language). It was regarded as a disparaging term by some critics of the apartheid-era government's 'homelands' (from Afrikaans tuisland). The word 'bantustan', today, is often used in a pejorative sense when describing a region that lacks any real legitimacy, consists of several unconnected enclaves, and/or emerges from national or international gerrymandering. Some of the bantustans received independence. In South Africa, Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei (the so-called TBVC states) were declared independent, while others (like KwaZulu, Lebowa, and QwaQwa), received partial autonomy, but were never granted independence. In South-West Africa, Ovamboland, Kavangoland, and East Caprivi were granted self-determination. The condition of sovereign independent states was not recognised outside of South Africa.

 Send to a friend