Skip to content Apartheid era sign, South Africa, s. Do you find this information helpful? A small donation would help us keep this accessible to all. Forego a bottle of soda and donate its cost to us for the information you just learned, and feel good about helping to make it available to everyone! Evans, M. Apartheid Those who were not killed or driven out were forced into enslavement. In , the British took over the Cape Peninsula, abolishing slavery there in and relying instead on force and economic control to keep Asian people and Black South African people in their "places.
After the Anglo-Boer War of , the British ruled the region as "the Union of South Africa" and the administration of that country was turned over to the local White population. The Constitution of the Union preserved long-established colonial restrictions on the political and economic rights of Black South Africans.
Some , White males were sent to fight with the British against the Nazis, and at the same time, urban factories expanded to make military supplies, drawing their workers from rural and urban Black South African communities.
Black South Africans were legally prohibited from entering cities without proper documentation and were restricted to townships controlled by the local municipalities, but strict enforcement of those laws overwhelmed the police and they relaxed the rules for the duration of the war. As increasing numbers of rural dwellers were drawn into urban areas, South Africa experienced one of the worst droughts in its history, driving nearly a million more Black South Africans into the cities.
Incoming Black South African people were forced to find shelter anywhere; squatter camps grew up near major industrial centers but had neither proper sanitation nor running water. One of the largest of these squatter camps was near Johannesburg, where 20, residents formed the basis of what would become Soweto. The factory workforce grew by 50 percent in the cities during World War II, largely because of expanded recruitment.
Before the war, Black South African people had been prohibited from skilled or even semi-skilled jobs, legally categorized as temporary workers only. But the factory production lines required skilled labor, and the factories increasingly trained and relied on Black South African people for those jobs without paying them at the higher-skilled rates.
Xuma and the ANC called for universal political rights. In , Xuma presented the wartime Prime Minister Jan Smuts with "African's Claims in South Africa," a document that demanded full citizenship rights, fair distribution of the land, equal pay for equal work, and the abolishment of segregation.
In , a young faction of the ANC led by Anton Lembede and including Nelson Mandela formed the ANC Youth League with stated purposes of invigorating a Black South African national organization and developing forceful popular protests against segregation and discrimination.
On paper it appeared to call for equal development and freedom of cultural expression, but the way it was implemented made this impossible.
Apartheid made laws forced the different racial groups to live separately and develop separately, and grossly unequally too. It tried to stop all inter-marriage and social integration between racial groups. During apartheid, to have a friendship with someone of a different race generally brought suspicion upon you, or worse.
More than this, apartheid was a social system which severely disadvantaged the majority of the population, simply because they did not share the skin colour of the rulers. Many were kept just above destitution because they were 'non-white'. In basic principles, apartheid did not differ that much from the policy of segregation of the South African governments existing before the Afrikaner Nationalist Party came to power in The main difference is that apartheid made segregation part of the law.
Apartheid cruelly and forcibly separated people, and had a fearsome state apparatus to punish those who disagreed. Another reason why apartheid was seen as much worse than segregation, was that apartheid was introduced in a period when other countries were moving away from racist policies.
Before World War Two the Western world was not as critical of racial discrimination, and Africa was colonized in this period. The Second World War highlighted the problems of racism, making the world turn away from such policies and encouraging demands for decolonization. It was during this period that South Africa introduced the more rigid racial policy of apartheid. People often wonder why such a policy was introduced and why it had so much support.
Various reasons can be given for apartheid, although they are all closely linked. The main reasons lie in ideas of racial superiority and fear.
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The South African activist and former president Nelson Mandela helped bring an end to apartheid and has been a global advocate for human rights.
A member of the African National Congress party beginning in the s, he was a leader of both peaceful protests and The formal end of the apartheid government in South Africa was hard-won. From through the s, a single word dominated life in South Africa. It would take decades of struggle to stop the policy, which affected every facet The leader of Zimbabwe since its independence in , Robert Mugabe was one of the longest-serving and, in the latter years of his reign, most infamous African rulers.
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Started by Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the
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