The South African Apartheid, instituted in 1948 by the country’s Afrikaner National Party, was legalized segregation on the basis of race, and is a system comparable to the segregation of African Americans in the United States. Non-whites - including blacks, Indians, and people of color in general- were prohibited from engaging in any activities specific to whites and prohibited from engaging in interracial marriages, receiving higher education, and obtaining certain jobs. The National Party’s classification of “race” was loosely based on physical appearance and lineage. White individuals were superficially defined as being “obviously white'' on the basis of their “habits, education and speech as well as deportment and demeanor”; an analogous sort of definition existed for all “races." The Apartheid system mimicked the Soviet Union in that all blacks and natives were to carry passbooks containing fingerprints, photos, and other forms of identification. In 1951 the country was broken up into “Bantu homelands” or districts to which certain races of individuals would be herded and allocated certain civil rights. Early on, resistance to the derogatory and racist Apartheid Nationals mounted. The African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, The Congress of South African Trade Unions, women, and select individuals such as Nelson Mandela, act as but a few examples of both active and passive resistance to the Apartheid which ultimately led to its downfall and the ushering in of a new era of cooperation amongst all South African peoples.
The African National Committee, first established in 1912, campaigned on a platform of unity for all Africans for the sake of civil rights and liberties. After the rise to power o...
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...ngst the people of South Africa regardless of ethnic background.
Works Cited
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Around the 1970s, due to South Africa’s internal contradictions with its economy and people, the Apartheid began its slow demise. Soon the united nation began to take notice of South Africa and began to get involved. With South Africa now in the spot light, Prime Minister P.W Botha left office due to his belief that he had failed to keep order in the country. After the reassignment of P.W Botha, F.W Klerk had taken office. The final stage of the demise of the Apartheid began when Klerk lifted the ban off the ANC and other African political parties. The last blow was the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison. Now that South Africa’s hope was out of prison he continued to ...
The End of Apartheid - HistoryWiz South Africa. (n.d.). HistoryWiz: for students, teachers and lovers of history. Retrieved February 19, 2011, from http://www.historywiz.org/end.htm
What was Apartheid? Apartheid was when people were segregated into different groups: White, Black, Indian, and Colored, as a government policy. In the South African language apartheid means separateness. In 1958 Blacks were deprived of their citizenship. There were separate schools, buses, shops and hospitals for blacks and colored people and the services available were well under the standard provided for the white people. Even laws were different. Apartheid touched every part of social life, including a prevention of marriage between non-whites and whites, and the sanctioning of "white-only" jobs. This spiraled out of control under Dr. Daniel Malan when he became Prime Minister because the Afrikaans (white South Africans) were worried black people had started taking over skilled and semi-skilled jobs and black workers were moving into the cities/towns and staying. Many didn’t know what apartheid meant but they did know it kept the white people separate from the black people.
Apartheid was a system of separation of the races both politically and socially in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. This system was said to be one of the last examples of institutionalized racism, and has been almost universally criticized. These Apartheid rules and restrictions were put in place by the National Party which had power over South Africa during this time period. The purpose of Apartheid legislation was to bring the Afrikaner ethnic group to a higher power in South Africa, and accomplished just that. The Afrikaner group was made up of descendants from Dutch colonists who settled in South Africa in order to make a refreshment station, a sort of rest stop, for the Dutch East India Company. The longer people stayed in Africa, the more they started to associate with it as their home. With the enslavement of many Africans, it is easy to see how these Afrikaners would associate themselves as above them and would feel entitled to power over them. This entitlement it how Apartheid rules were born.
How my partner and I chose Apartheid in South Africa as our topic is when our National History Day teacher, Mr. Peterson had us look into what Nelson Mandela did that affected the people of South Africa. Originally we had Nelson Mandela as our topic. Later into this paper you will see how exactly we got our topic. My partner and I debated over two topics and we chose Nelson Mandela. We ended up writing a semi biography instead of a topic for out theme. Our National History teacher, Mr. Peterson had us go deeper to find a topic that would have been reliable. That's how we ended up finding apartheid in South Africa.
Curtis, Jerry. "The Role of Nelson Mandela in the Fight against Apartheid in South Africa." Humanities. Humanities, n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2013.
University of Pennsylvania-African studies center. Inaugural speech, Pretoria (Mandela)- 5/10/94 in Nelson Mandela’s inaugural speech-Pretoria ,May 10 from ancdip@WN.APC.ORG
The apartheid era in South Africa began shortly after the Boer War as the Afrikaner National Party overtook the government following the country’s independence from Great Britain. The Afrikaners, or Dutch descendants, won the majority in 1948 in the first election for the country’s government. Only a short time after were apartheid laws initiated by the minority white descendants. In the Afrikaans language, apartheid’s literal meaning is “separateness,” which is exactly what the laws were designed for. The Afrikaner National Party initiated the laws to ensure their dominance of economic and social powers, but more importantly to strengthen white people’s preeminence by segregating whites and colored peoples. In order to do this, the Afrikaners limited the freedom of colored people in various ways. First, t...
Mandela went on to study law, and found his way into the African National Congress, or, the ANC. He quickly made a
Coster, P., & Woolf, A. (Eds.).(2011). World book: South Africa’s Anti-Apartheid Movement, (pp. 56-57). Arcturus Publishers: Chicago.
Deegan, H. (2001). The Politics of the New South Africa: Apartheid and After. England: Longman
This is relevant because It shows the brief journey he through before joining the African national congress.
Apartheid consisted of a set of unequal laws that favored the whites (“History of South Africa in the apartheid era”). The Race Classification Act, which divided everyone into four race groups, whites, blacks, coloreds, and Indians were the first of many major laws (Evans, 8). Hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were forced to leave their homes and move into special reservations called “homelands” or Bantustans that were set up for them (Evans, 8). There were twenty-three million blacks and they were divided into nine tribal groups, Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, North and South Sotho, Venda, Tsonga, Swansi, and South Ndebele, and each group were moved into a separate homeland (Evans, 8). Another major law was the Groups Area Act, which secluded the twenty-three million blacks to 14 percent of land, leaving 86 percent of the land for the 4.8 million (Evans, 9). Under apartheid laws a minority ...
Apartheid is a word that means ‘separation’ in Afrikaans which is a spoken language in southern Africa. Apartheid was used in the twentieth century for racial segregation and political and economic discrimination in the late 1940’s . This is the separation between the blacks, coloured, and white South Africans. The apartheid in South Africa displays racial inequalities by having the twenty percent of whites rule over the majority of blacks and coloured. All whites wanted the blacks to have a whole other separate society. The African National Congress (ANC) which began as a nonviolent civil rights group tried to get rid of apartheid which was not successful until Nelson Mendela became the president and restored the South Africans natural rights.
I was treated well in prison; security guards grew a certain respect for me. I decided not to waste my time, so I informed my cellmates about the apartheid, and their horrible laws. They listened attentively, and wanted to help, so together we organized hunger strikes and protests. After 27 years, on February 11, 1990 I was released from jail. I could’ve got out of jail in 1985, P.W. Botha offered me a release but only if I would stop the armed conflict. Without a doubt, I chose to stay in prison because I believed that the right thing to do was to put an end to apartheid. P.W. Botha was an evil man, he committed to state terrorism and to thwart black majority rule. He had a stroke in 1989 and Frederick Willem replaced Botha. Frederick on the other hand, was the complete opposite of Botha. He set me free from jail.”