What’s apartheid?

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Apartheid was a system of legal racial separation which dominated the Republic of South Africa from 1948 to 1993. However, apartheid mechanisms were in place long before 1948 and South Africa continues to deal with the repercussions. Under apartheid, various races were separated in different regions, and discrimination against people of color was not only acceptable but legally entrenched, with whites having priority over housing, jobs, education, and political power. Although South Africa has been heavily criticized for the system, it wasn’t until 1991 that the apartheid legal system began to be dismantled, and in 1993 it was eliminated entirely with the election of Nelson Mandela, the first black president democratically elected South Africa. The term is also used more generally around the world to refer to systemic racism that is tolerated, rather than addressed.

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning “apart” or “separate”, and one of the first pieces of apartheid legislation was the Group Areas Act of 1950, which segregated living spaces, concentrating whites in cities and forcing black people in rural areas or the urban suburbs. In addition to separating whites from non-whites, apartheid also separated different races, and fraternization between Africans of different tribes, Asians and Europeans was frowned upon. Whites and non-whites held different jobs, lived in different regions, and were subject to different levels of pay, education, and health care. Apartheid paid no attention to former social or residential status, dividing people by color.

As non-whites were expelled from urban areas, most of them were mixed into the Bantustans, or “African homelands.” Because they were made citizens of the Bantustans, black South Africans were not allowed to participate in the government of South Africa and were forced to carry passes and obey curfew laws if they wanted to travel outside their homelands. Homelands were also established on land that was largely unusable and depended heavily on South Africa for assistance. On the edge of the cities, Africans lived in huge and terrible slums, often separated from their families because only one family member could get permission to live in the city.

Nelson Mandela, along with many others, is a member of the African National Congress, a group that worked to abolish apartheid. He joined just before World War II and was part of a major push to make the African National Congress a national movement, incorporating the ethic of nonviolent resistance, strikes and mass civil disobedience to fight for equality rights. In 1952 he was tried in court for participating in the Just Defiance Campaign and given a suspended sentence. He spent time in and out of prison throughout the 1950s and became an advocate to help black people who had been dispossessed under apartheid.

In 1960, the African National Congress was banned and Mandela was a founding member of Umkhonto we Sizwe, a violent civil rights organization. However, his membership was short-lived; in 1962, after traveling outside the country to talk about the situation in South Africa and receiving military training, Mandela was imprisoned for life and only released in 1990. The African National Congress was reformed in 1991, when apartheid began to be dismantled, and Mandela was elected President of the organization, taking office as President of South Africa in 1994, serving until 1999. In 1993 he won the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his efforts to end apartheid in South Africa.

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