Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Impact of apartheid
Nelson Mandela when fighting apartheid
Nelson Mandela when fighting apartheid
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Impact of apartheid
INTRODUCTION:
In this paper I will be talking about the history of South Africa and how it was segregated and how apartheid came about and give some acts that were used in order to segregate. I talk about the ANC and how the “white” government outlawed it. I will also show how the apartheid became a thing of the past and was accepted by the new government in order to make peace and bring unity.
CREATION:
The National Party went into power in 1948 to strengthen “white Supremacy”. The National Party made it obvious to the public that it identified this political, economic and social policy with the ideology of ‘apartheid’. They immediately made laws that gave apartheid a legislative reality, which could not be overturned easily. These laws separated whites and blacks and formed the theory that whites should be treated more favorably than blacks.
The Population Act of 1950 was the beginning for separating South Africa’s population into different races. There were only three different races and they were white, coloured and Bantu (black). This act helped pave the way for other acts that were strictly developed to separate whites and blacks. Listed below are just few of the acts:
· The Group Area Act- mapped out areas that were “black free”
· Mixed Marriage Act- made it illegal for whites and blacks to marry
· The Immorality Act- made it illegal for whites and blacks to have sexual relations
· Separate Representation of Voters Amendment Act- made it mandatory that their could only be white representatives when it came to politics
The National Party gained a tremendous amount of support from the white electorate. The National Party, which has five-year terms, was re-elected in 1953 and in 1958, which promoted segregation more and more.
While this is going on, the African National Congress (ANC) is fighting for the rights of black people. They were having many boycotts, sit-ins and walking to work instead of having to pay for a ride. While demonstrating in front of a police station in 1960, police fired on demonstrators killing sixty-seven and injuring one hundred eighty-six. A peaceful march took place a while later with 30,000 joined, but led to the arrest of over 18,000 of them. Leaders of the ANC were also arrested, including Nelson Mandela.
Prohibited from operating peacefully in South Africa, the ANC established underground organizations in 1961 to continue their struggle with the government. The ANC bombed police stations and power plants, but was very careful not to take any lives.
Groups of people soon received new rights. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It gave black Americans full citizenship and guaranteed them equal treatment. Also, it passed the Fourteenth Amendment to make sure that the Supreme Court couldn’t declare the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. The amendment made blacks citizens of the United States and the states in which they lived. Also, states were forbidden to deprive blacks of life, liberty, or property without due process. Additionally, blacks could not be discriminated by the law. If a state would deprive blacks of their rights as citizens, it’s number of congressional representatives would be reduced. The Civil Rights Act as well as the Fourteenth Amendment affected both the North and the South.
This led to the passing of the civil rights act and the voting act in the 1964 and 1965. This allowed for the African Americans to have the right to vote.
By 1874 schools had increased literacy skills among black people to 20%. Many States took this to their advantage and used it as an excuse. to limit the rights of black people. In other words if you weren’t. able to read and write, then you are not allowed to vote!
...judicial belief that it was proper to separate white and black people for the benefit of white people.
After many years, the African Americans demanded for their freedom and equality with white people. As a result, the white Americans created the Jim Crow system. The Jim Crow laws were racial segregation laws and used from 1876 to 1965 in the United States. The laws used to organize life between African Americans and white people. The system was dealing with African Americans as second level citizens and with people as first citizens.
The laws undermined the thirteenth, fourteenth,and fifteenth amendments. The thirteenth amendment completely abolished slavery.The fourteenth amendment stated that all people born or naturalized in America were American citizens, even African Americans and former slaves. The fifteenth amendment stated that people could not be denied the right to vote no matter their race, color, or former condition of servitude. States, especially those in the south, started passing laws that pushed African Americans down into second class. Southern states soon made the Grandfather Clause, all voters must pay a poll tax, take a literacy and property test, and an understanding clause. They were able to do this by saying it was to disqualify the the poor and unintelligence people from voting.
For nearly forty-six years whites ruled South Africa with licit supremacy under Apartheid laws. With roots in its history, the segregation of races reigned from its colonization by the Dutch to the late 1900's when it was weakened by social unrest and financial burden, and finally abolished by Nelson Mandela. The impact of apartheid stood after apartheid's abolition, as non-whites still had unresolved feelings towards those who supported apartheid, but with Mandela's election and the renouncement of apartheid laws, the country could move forward toward creating a "rainbow nation."
Apartheid as defined by Hendrik Verwoerd is a policy in which one can do in the direction of what one regards as an idea . Apartheid is the form of a systematic segregation where people are isolated by social-economic status, race, gender and other classifications. Race is a coined modern term in which people are classified upon their distinct physical characteristics. Oxford dictionary explains that racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. In South Africa, the Apartheid legislation began in 1856 beginning with the Masters and Servants Act of 1856 . Over the years, multiple prime ministers up held this act and added even more to the Apartheid legislation. In the constant reinforcement of the apartheid, South Africa elected J.G Strijdom as the Prime Minister in November of 1954. He was a firm believer of segregation and he believed that the country should be full of pure white bred people . After he died,
Nelson Mandela’s commitment to politics and the ANC grew stronger after the 1948 election victory of the Afrikaner dominated National Party, which formed a formal system of racial classification and segregation “apartheid” which restricted non whites basic rights and barred them from government.
How the Apartheid fell was a chain link of events. The early stages of the demise began around the early 1900s when new laws were placed out and riots broke out in the streets. When the Apartheid outlawed and banned the African National Congress (ANC) as well as sent many of its leaders to prison by convicting them of treason, including Nelson Mandela, the black community of South Africa were outraged. After the ban was placed out, the remaining anti-Apartheid fled to other surrounding independent African countries including Nambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. There, they continued to set up camps and fight the Apartheid. Back in South Africa, protesting increased during the middle years of the apartheid after Nelson Mandela is imprisoned again after being suspected to heave being involved in a bombing. This time he is imprisoned for life.
...w its power from its strong appeal to the Afrikaner race. The Afrikaners had once thrived, and the British had taken that power from them. Now that they had declared independence from Britain, the British politicians stood no chance against the aggression of a race of people feeling put down. This strong racial identity that stood with the party naturally shifted; after escaping the trenches of powerlessness the national party had to continue on the route of being supreme, as any political party does. This becomes a problem because having a strong racial identity is one thing, but when using it to gain power it becomes your race against all other races. The strive for dominance in power and politics drove the National Party to put down non-white people in the population, and eventually enact pro-white legislation, specifically the Apartheid rules and regulations.
Human history has been marked with long and painful struggles that fought for human rights and freedoms. Discrimination and racial oppression has always been one of the most controversial struggles for mankind. For South Africa, it was a country where black people were oppressed by the white minority. The colonization of South Africa began in the 18th century by the Dutch empire after Dutch trading companies started using its cape as a center for trading between Asia and Europe (sahistory.org.za). Soon after, the British took over the country and declared it part of the British Empire (sahistory.org.za). Decades after, Afrikaners, who descended from the original Dutch settlers that occupied South Africa, started working on creating a state that separates between black people and whites. Their plans were to create a separation between black people and whites that involved excluding blacks from all types of social, economic, and political activities within the country. All South African natives knew the bad conditions that their people were forced to live in but only a few of them took the responsibility of sacrificing their lives and freedom for the rights of their people. One South African citizen, Nelson Mandela, can be considered the main hero for the South African freedom revolution and the hero for millions of people fighting for their freedoms worldwide. Mandela’s long walk for freedom defined South African history and entered world history as one of the most influential fights for freedom and human rights in the world.
South Africa really began to suffer when apartheid was written into the law. Apartheid was first introduced in the 1948 election that the Afrikaner National Party won. The plan was to take the already existing segregation and expand it (Wright, 60). Apartheid was a system that segregated South Africa’s population racially and considered non-whites inferior (“History of South Africa in the apartheid era”). Apartheid was designed to make it legal for Europeans to dominate economics and politics (“History of South Africa in the apartheid era”).
It was now illegal to have the “separate but equal” facilities as in previous years. It enabled the schools to be intergraded giving everybody the opportunity to receive the education they needed or desired. Not long after this Act was passed, the Voting Rights of 1965 was signed into law. President Lyndon Johnson signed both acts into law. President John F. Kennedy first proposed the Civil Rights Act but was assassinated before it was signed into law. The act made it illegal to administer voting restrictions. Many Southern states had poll taxes which many African Americans could not afford, or literacy tests that the black men were not able to pass. If one was not able to pass the test or pay the poll tax they were omitted from being able to vote. This was unfair because the schools were segregated and the material needed to pass the test was more than likely taught in the “white” schools and was not covered in the “black” schools. This just proves the fact that “separate but equal” mat not always have been as true as perceived as in the court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which at first decided was constitutional.
Apartheid was considered a necessary arrangement in South Africa, as the Afrikaner National Party gained a strong majority political control of the country after the 1940’s and the economic dependence on their fertile natural resources, such as diamond and gold mines and other metals such as platinum. This required intense labor and the white dominant control over the repressed black majority allowed for an