essay about apartheid in south

Apartheid in South Africa Essay

Introduction.

South Africa is one of the countries with rich and fascinating history in the world. It is regarded as the most developed state in Africa and among the last to have an elected black president towards the end of the 20 th century. Besides its rich history, the South African state has abundant natural resources, fertile farms and a wide range of minerals including gold.

The country is the world’s leading miner of diamonds and gold with several metal ores distributed around the country like platinum (Rosmarin & Rissik, 2004). South Africa experiences a mild climate that resembles that of San Francisco bay.

With its geographical location and development, South Africa is one of the most accessible African countries. All these factors contribute to South Africa’s global prominence, especially before and after the reign of its first black President, Nelson Mandela in 1994.

However, these alone do not add up to what the country’s history. In fact, South Africa’s history sounds incomplete without the mention of Apartheid, a system that significantly shaped and transformed the country in what it is today.

Without apartheid, many argue that South Africa would have probably been a different country with unique ideologies, politics and overall identity. In other words, apartheid greatly affected South Africa in all spheres of a country’s operation. From segregation to all forms of unfairness, apartheid system negatively affected South Africans and the entire country (Pfister, 2005).

On the other hand, some people argue that apartheid positively affected South Africa in countless ways. This essay gives a detailed coverage of the issue of apartheid in South Africa and its impact to the economy, politics and social life of South Africans.

To achieve this task, the analysis is divided into useful sections, which give concise and authentic information concerning the topic. Up to date sources were consulted in researching the topic to ensure that data and information used in describing the concept is up to date, from reputable and recommended authors.

Among important segments of the essay include but not limited to the literature review, history, background information and recommendations.

Research questions

In addressing the issue of Apartheid in South Africa, this essay intends to provide answers to the following questions:

• What was apartheid system?
• What are the factors that led to the apartheid system?
• What were the negative effects of the apartheid system?
• What were the positive effects of the apartheid system?
• Why was it necessary to end apartheid in South Africa?

Literature Review

Apartheid in South Africa is one of the topics which have received massive literature coverage even after the end of the regime. Most of the documented information describes life before 1994 and what transpired after Nelson Mandela took leadership as the first black African President of the state.

This segment, therefore, explores the concept concerning what authors, scholars and researchers have recorded in books, journals and on websites as expounded in the following analytical sections.

Apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid refers to a South African system that propagated racial discrimination imposed between 1948 and 1994 by National Party regimes. During this period of decades, the rights of the majority “blacks” were undermined as white minority settlers maintained their supremacy and rule through suppressive tactics.

Apartheid was primarily developed after the Second World War by the Broederbond and Afrikaner organizations and was extended to other parts of South West Africa, currently known as Namibia until it became an independent state four years before the end of apartheid.

According to Allen 2005, discrimination of black people in South Africa began long before apartheid was born during the colonial era. In his survey, Allen noted that apartheid was ratified after the general election which was held in 1948.

The new legislation that the governments adopted classified all South African inhabitants into four groups based on their racial identity (Allen, 2005). These groups were Asians, whites, natives and colored. This led to all manners of segregation that ensured complete distinction among these groups, achieved through forced displacement of the oppressed groups without necessarily thinking about their rights.

The practice continued throughout the period, reaching heightened moments when non-whites were deprived of political representation in 1970, the year when blacks were denied citizenship right causing them to become members of Bantustans who belonged to self-governing homes (Allen, 2005).

Besides residential removal and displacement, other forms of discrimination dominated in public institutions like education centers, hospitals and beaches among other places which were legally meant for everybody regardless of their skin color, gender or country of origin.

In rare cases where black accessed these services, they were provided with inferior options as compared to what whites received (Allen, 2005). As a result, there was significant violence witnessed across the country, accompanied by internal resistance from people who believed that they were being exploited and languishing in poverty at the expense of white minorities.

Consequently, the country suffered trade embargoes as other countries around the world distanced themselves from South African rule as a way of condemning it and raising their voices in support for those who were considered less human in their own country.

Overwhelmed by the desire for equality, South Africa witnessed countless uprisings and revolts, which were welcomed with imprisoning of political and human rights activists who were strongly opposed to the apartheid rule.

Banning of opposition politics was also adopted in order to suppress leaders who believed in justice for humanity (Edwards & Hecht, 2010). As violence escalated around the country, several state organizations responded by sponsoring violence and increasing the intensity of oppression.

The peak of apartheid opposition was in 1980s when attempts to amend apartheid legislation failed to calm black people forcing President Frederik Willem de Klerk to enter into negotiations with black leaders to end apartheid in 1990.

The culmination of the negotiations was in 1994 when a multi-racial and democratic election was held with Nelson Mandela of African National Congress emerging the winner and the first black president in South Africa (Edwards & Hecht, 2010). Although apartheid ended more than a decade ago, it is important to note its impact and ruins are still evident in South Africa.

Background Information

Segregation took shape in the Union of South Africa in order to suppress the black people’s participation in politics and economic life. White rulers believed that the only way of maintaining their rule was to ensure that black people do not have opportunities to organize themselves into groups that would augment their ability to systematize themselves and fight back for their rights.

However, despite these efforts, black people in South Africa became integrated into the economic and industrial society than any other group of people in Africa during the 20 th century (Edwards & Hecht, 2010).

Clerics, educations and other professionals grew up to be key players as the influence of blacks sprouted with Mission Christianity significantly influencing the political landscape of the union. Studying in abroad also played a major role as blacks gained the momentum to fight for their rights as the move received support from other parts of the world (Burger, 2011).

There were continuous attempts from the government to control and manipulate black people through skewed policies, which were aimed at benefiting whites at the expense of the majority. The year 1902 saw the formation of the first political organization by Dr Abdurrahman which was mainly based in Cape Province.

However, the formation of the African National Congress in 1912 was a milestone as it brought together traditional authorities, educationists and Christian leaders (Burger, 2011). Its initial concern was defined by constitutional protests as its leaders demanded recognition and representation of the blacks.

Efforts by union workers to form organizations for the purpose of voicing their concerns were short-lived as their efforts were short down by white authorities. This led to strikes and militancy, which was experienced throughout 1920s. The formation of the Communist Party proved to be a force to last as it united workers’ organizations and non-racialism individuals (Beinart & Dubow, 1995).

Segregation of blacks was also witnessed in job regulations as skilled job opportunities remained reserved for white people. The introduction of pass-laws further aimed at restricting African mobility thus limiting their chances of getting organized.

These laws were also designed to have all blacks participate in forced labor as they did not have a clear channel to air their views. According to historic findings, all these efforts were inclined towards laying the foundation for apartheid in later years.

Noteworthy, there were divisions among whites as they differed with regard to certain ideologies and stances. For instance, they could not agree on their involvement in First World War I as the National Party dislodged from the South African Party (Beinart & Dubow, 1995). Conversely, allocation of skilled jobs to whites targeted high productivity from people who had experience while pass-laws prevented aimless movement.

Labor issues continued to emerge through organized strikes though these efforts were constantly thwarted by the government using brutal and inhumane ways like seclusion of migrant residential houses using compounds.

Miners also protested against low payment and poor living standards, conditions which promoted hostility between black and white labor forces, culminating into a bloody rebellion in 1922 (Beinart & Dubow, 1995).

Intensified discrimination against blacks mounted to serve the interests of white rulers through reinforcement of the unfair government policies and employment bar in certain areas like the railway and postal service to address the infamous “poor-white problem”.

The world depression of early 1930s led to the union of major white parties which was closely followed by the breakaway by a new Afrikaner led by Dr. DF Malan. The entrenchment of the white domination led to the elimination of Africans from the voters’ role in 1936 (Burger, 2011).

These continued up to the end of the Second World War when the government intensified segregation rules in 1948 that led to the conception and birth of Apartheid in South Africa.

Desmond Tutu against Apartheid

As mentioned above, Mission Christianity played a major role in the fight against apartheid and restoration of justice in South Africa. This saw several leaders rise to the limelight as they emerged to be the voice of the voiceless in the South African State.

One of these Christian leaders was Archbishop Desmond Tutu who has remained in the history of South Africa, featuring prominently in the reign of apartheid (BBC, 2010). He is well known worldwide for his anti-apartheid role and for boldly speaking for the blacks.

He served a very important role, especially during the entire time when Nelson Mandela was serving his prison term making him nominated for the highly coveted and prestigious Nobel Peace Prize award in 1984 for his relentless anti-apartheid efforts.

This was a real implication that the world had not only observed Tutu’s efforts but also raised its voice against the discriminatory rule in South Africa.

After Nelson Mandela was elected democratically in 1984, he appointed Archbishop Desmond Tutu to steer the South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was mandated to investigate all forms of crimes committed by blacks and whites during the whole period of apartheid.

Although Tutu was a teacher by training, he dropped the career after the adoption of the Bantu Education Act in 1953 (BBC, 2010). The act was meant to extend apartheid to black schools around the country, causing several schools to close down due to lack of finances after the government discontinued subsidized programs for those that did not comply.

To confirm and affirm that apartheid was not the best regime option in South Africa, Desmond Tutu was highly influenced by white clergymen like Bishop Trevor Huddleston, who strongly opposed the idea of racial discrimination that was being propagated by the white government (BBC, 2010).

Although he was closely involved in active politics, he remained focused on religious motivation, arguing that racialism was not the will of God, and that it was not to live forever. His appointment as the head of the Anglican church in 1986 did not deter him from fighting apartheid as he risked being jailed after he called the public to boycott municipal elections that were held in 1988.

He welcomed President FW De Klerk’s reforms in 1989, which included the release of the one who was later to become the first black president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela and the reinstatement of the African National Congress (BBC, 2010).

Nelson Mandela against Apartheid

Nelson Mandela is regarded as a key player in the fight against apartheid in South Africa as he led black people together with other activists to publicly denounce and condemn the discriminatory regimes of the time. As a way of demonstrating his dissatisfaction and criticism of apartheid, Mandela publicly burnt his “pass”.

All blacks were required to carry their passes as the government prohibited the movement of people to other districts (Atlas College, 2011). While working with ANC, Mandela’s involvement in anti-apartheid efforts was increased as he realized the need to have active resistance in dealing with apartheid.

He was severally charged with treason and acquitted although in 1964, Mandela was life imprisoned a move that was considered to be ill-motivated to maintain the white rule supremacy. He continued his fight while in prison as his message penetrated every village and district in the country.

Although he acted together with like-minded people, Nelson Mandela’s name stands high as the leader of the anti-apartheid campaign which culminated in his election as the first black president of South Africa in 1994 (Atlas College, 2011).

Opposing opinion

Although apartheid was highly condemned and still receives high-charged criticism, some people view it from a different perspective. Did apartheid have any benefit to the people of South Africa and to the nation at large?

Apart from propagating injustices across the country, apartheid is one of the economic drivers of South Africa with some of the policies and strategies used during that time still under active implementation by the government.

For instance, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was orchestrated by ANC and served as the core platform during the elections that were held in 1994 (Lundahl & Petersson, 2009). The programme focused on improvement of infrastructure, improvement of housing facilities, free schooling, sharing of land to the landless, clean water and affordable health facilities among others.

This led to the improvement of social amenities in the country. RDP also continued financing the budget revenue. It therefore suffices to mention that those who support apartheid base their argument on the status of the country after 1994 when subsequent governments chose to adopt some strategies from apartheid to drive the reconstruction agenda (Lundahl & Petersson, 2009).

As one of the leading economies in Africa, some of the institutions, factories and companies which were established during apartheid significantly contribute to development in the country. Even though new plans have been adopted, majority have their foundations rocked on apartheid.

As a result of these development initiatives, a lot has changed in South Africa. There has been substantive economic growth augmented by several factors which relate to apartheid (Lundahl & Petersson, 2009). Improved living standards among South Africans cannot also be ignored in any discussion of apartheid.

Many jobs have been created for the skilled people who never found an opportunity to work when the regime was at its operational peak. South Africa also prides on some of the most prestigious learning institutions in the region which are highly ranked on the world list. It therefore suffices to mention that apartheid had several advantages which cannot be overshadowed by its disadvantages.

Against Apartheid

Despite the advantages of apartheid discussed above, there is no doubt that the system negatively impacted South Africans in a myriad of ways. From undermining of human rights to promotion of hostility and violence among residents, there is enough evidence to condemn the regime. It affected several social structures people were not allowed to freely intermarry and interact.

This was coupled with limited expression rights as they were believed not to have rights. Movement was highly restricted as black people were to walk with passes and restricted to move within one district. Additionally, forceful evacuation was a norm as black people never owned land and houses permanently (Burger, 2011). What about employment?

Many skilled jobs were strictly reserved for whites as black people survived on manual duties with little or no pay. This contributed to low living standards and inability to meet their needs, manifested through labor strikes which were continuously witnessed in several organizations.

Consequently, violence escalated with police brutality hitting high levels and several people losing their lives as others spent the rest of their lives in jail. It was a system that needed more condemnation than just protesting in order to allow justice to prevail (Pfister, 2005).

Apartheid in South Africa is one of the most outstanding in the history of the country with millions of people with painful and remarkable memories.

With its culmination in 1994 democratic elections which saw Nelson Mandela rise to power, the regime had severe negative effects, which necessitated the need to end it and pave the way for a fair nation that respects humanity regardless of skin color, ethnicity, country of origin and gender (Pfister, 2005).

Based on the above analysis, it is important for a number of lessons to be learnt from it. World leaders need to establish and implement leadership mechanisms that would prevent recurrence of apartheid in South Africa or in other parts of the world.

To the millions who suffered under rule, reconciliation efforts are essential in allowing them to accept themselves and move on with life as they mingle with thousands of white settlers who continue owning parcels of land in the country. It should however to be forgotten that apartheid was important in transforming South Africa into what it is today. From factories and infrastructure to a stable economy, it had lifetime merits that ought to be acknowledged throughout in history.

Allen, J. (2005). Apartheid South Africa: An Insider’s Overview of the Origin and Effects of Separate Development . Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse.

Atlas College. (2011). Nelson Mandela and Apartheid. Atlas College . Web.

BBC. (2010). Profile: Archbishop Desmond Tutu . BBC News . Web.

Beinart, W., & Dubow, S. (1995). Segregation and apartheid in twentieth-century South Africa . London: Routledge.

Burger, D. (2011). History. South African Government Information . Web.

Edwards, P., & Hecht, G. (2010). History and the Techno politics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies, 36 (3), p. 619-639.

Lundahl, M., & Petersson, L. (2009). Post-Apartheid South Africa; an Economic Success Story? United Nations University . Web.

Pfister, R. (2005). Apartheid South Africa and African states: from pariah to middle power, 1961-1994 . London: I.B.Tauris.

Rosmarin, I., & Rissik, D. (2004). South Africa. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish.

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What Was Apartheid in South Africa?

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Apartheid is an Afrikaans word that means "separation." It is the name given to the particular racial-social ideology developed in South Africa during the twentieth century.

At its core, apartheid was all about racial segregation. It led to the political and economic discrimination which separated Black (or Bantu), Coloured (mixed race), Indian, and White South Africans.

What Led to Apartheid?

Racial segregation in South Africa began after the Boer War and really came into being in the early 1900s. When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 under British control, the Europeans in South Africa shaped the political structure of the new nation. Acts of discrimination were implemented from the very beginning.

It was not until the elections of 1948 that the word apartheid became common in South African politics. Through all of this, the White minority put various restrictions on the Black majority. Eventually, the segregation affected Coloured and Indian citizens as well.

Over time, apartheid was divided into petty and grand apartheid . Petty apartheid referred to the visible segregation in South Africa while grand apartheid was used to describe the loss of political and land rights of Black South Africans.

Pass Laws and The Sharpeville Massacre

Before its end in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela, the years of apartheid were filled with many struggles and brutality. A few events hold great significance and are considered turning points in the development and the fall of apartheid.

What came to be known as "pass laws" restricted the movement of Africans and required them to carry a "reference book." This held identification papers as well as permissions to be in certain regions. By the 1950s, the restriction became so great that every Black South African was required to carry one.

In 1956, over 20,000 women of all races marched in protest . This was the time of passive protest, but that would soon change.

The Sharpeville Massacre on March 21, 1960, would provide a turning point in the struggle against apartheid. South African police killed 69 Black South Africans and injured at least another 180 demonstrators who were protesting the pass laws. This event earned the opprobrium of many world leaders and directly inspired the start of armed resistance throughout South Africa. 

Anti-apartheid groups, including the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan African Congress (PAC), had been forming demonstrations. What was meant to be a peaceful protest in Sharpeville quickly turned deadly when police fired into the crowd.

With over 180 Black Africans injured and 69 killed, the massacre caught the attention of the world. In addition, this marked the beginning of armed resistance in South Africa.

Anti-Apartheid Leaders

Many people fought against apartheid over the decades and this era produced a number of notable figures. Among them, Nelson Mandela is probably the most recognized. After his imprisonment, he would become the first democratically elected president by every citizen—Black and White—of South Africa.

Other notable names include early ANC members such as Chief Albert Luthuli and Walter Sisulu . Luthuli was a leader in the non-violent pass law protests and the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1960. Sisulu was a mixed-race South African who worked alongside Mandela through many key events.

Steve Biko was a leader of the country's Black Consciousness Movement. He was considered a martyr to many in the anti-apartheid fight after his 1977 death in a Pretoria prison cell. 

Some leaders also found themselves leaning toward Communism amidst South Africa's struggles. Among them was Chris Hani , who would lead the South African Communist Party and was instrumental in ending apartheid before his assassination in 1993.

During the 1970s, Lithuanian-born Joe Slovo would become a founding member of an armed wing of the ANC. By the 80s, he too would be instrumental in the Communist Party.

Legal Implications

Segregation and racial hatred have been witnessed in many countries throughout the world in various ways. What makes South Africa's apartheid era unique is the systematic way in which the National Party formalized it through the law.

Over the decades, many laws were enacted to define the races and restrict the daily lives and rights of non-White South Africans. For instance, one of the first laws was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949  which was meant to protect the "purity" of the White race.

Other laws would soon follow. The Population Registration Act No. 30 was among the first to clearly define race. It registered people based on their identity in one of the designated racial groups. That same year, the Group Areas Act No. 41 aimed to separate the races into different residential areas.

The pass laws that had previously only affected Black men were extended to all Black people in 1952. There were also a number of laws restricting the right to vote and own property.

It was not until the 1986 Identification Act that many of these laws began to be repealed. That year also saw the passage of the Restoration of South African Citizenship Act, which saw the Black population finally regain their rights as full citizens.

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• Pre-Apartheid Era Laws: Natives (or Black) Land Act No. 27 of 1913

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From Segregation to Apartheid

The gains achieved by the White minority in the first four decades of the 20th century were, by the 1940s, increasingly under threat however, as African resistance to the racially based system rapidly escalated. This crisis was brought to a head by the continuing decline of the reserve economies. Full proletarianisation in South Africa, would threaten the migrant labour system upon which White profitability depended. This crisis coincided with rapid secondary industrialisation and a substantial growth of urban African populations, as well as growing trade union activity and rising African working class militancy. These developments were threatening not only the conditions for accumulation but White political hegemony itself.

The nationalist regime that came into power in 1948 offered a hard solution to this crisis. Instead of pursuing what appeared to be the inevitable liberalisation and deracialisation of South African society, the nationalists proceeded to freeze the existing segregationist framework into the institution of apartheid. Thus, apartheid was very much about maintaining migrant labour, and extending the economic and political benefits of cheap and controlled workers not only for the mines and farms but also for the now rapidly growing manufacturing sector.

In addition, the process of modernisation in White agriculture that had started in the 1920s and 1930s continued after World War II and into the 1950s and 1960s. What was seen as backward and uneconomic methods of farming were increasingly being pushed aside by a more aggressive and profit-oriented approach. There were growing numbers of tractors, harvesters and combines on farms, and the area of land under cultivation was expanding. With this process of modernisation however, the labour requirements of farmers began to change. The labour shortages of the 1930's and 1940s were now turning into labour surpluses. The large numbers of Africans that had been successfully tied to rural areas were now becoming increasingly superfluous.

The nationalists, having come to power on a strong rural vote, embarked on a process of systematically eliminating the few African tenants that remained in White farming districts and of transforming labour tenancy into wage labour. Farmers, who in the 1930s and early 1940s were desperate for unlimited supplies of labour, now began to view labour tenancy itself as economically backward. The consensus was that if agriculture was to modernise, labour tenancy had to be abolished. These calls by White agriculture were not ignored. The 1964 Bantu Laws Amendment Act, which repealed the 1932 Native Service Contract Act, and amended the tenancy provisions in the 1936 Land Act dealt the final blow to labour tenancy. Over the decades that followed labour tenancy was progressively eliminated. Evictions were carried out by farmers themselves or by officials of the Bantu Administration.

"We then heard that the six-month system had been abolished and we had to wok for the farmer all year round in order to continue living on our land. We were quite agreeable to this but said that our children would starve if we had to live in the low wages that we were getting on the farm for the whole 12 months. If the farmer would pay us more, we would gladly stay on the farm where we were happy. The farmer refused. The Bantu Administration Department told us if we were unwilling to work for the whole 12 months we would have to go to the location." - Dombi Khumalo, labour tenant.

Once a blanket ban on labour tenancy had been achieved, the government targeted the remaining African tenants on absentee landowner farms. These pools of labour were no longer needed by the agricultural sector, and the 1964 legislation resulted in the growing removal of these tenants from White farming areas. It is estimated that between 1960 and 1983 approximately 1.1 million people were removed from White rural areas to the reserves that were then re-constituted as ethnic 'homelands' by the apartheid regime.

The process of re-engineering the role and function of the reserves and the traditional African leadership was a central feature of apartheid. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) ushered in a system that formalised the territorial separation of the Black majority from Whites in the countryside. The creation of separate 'Homelands' or 'Bantustans' for different 'ethnic' groups to be administered by a system of traditional authority based on a formal hierarchy of chiefs and headmen, left a legacy that the country is still struggling to overcome today. The concept of political control, that was located in pre-colonial African society, was now finally transformed into a key pillar of the government's apartheid apparatus. Chiefs and headmen had finally become "salaried officers in a White state" (Ross, R. (1993). Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p.228.)

The Bantustan Self-Government Act (1959) took the country further along the apartheid regime's Bantustan schema and introduced the first stages of self-rule. Local administrative authorities were elevated to the level of semi-autonomous governments. This Act also transferred the burden of certain social welfare costs and unemployment responsibilities, as well as the task of political administration, to the Bantustans.

In response to the 1954 Tomlinson Commission report, which highlighted the state of decay in the reserves where poverty and landlessness was rife and agriculture had all but collapsed, Betterment or Closer Settlement Schemes were introduced in an attempt to arrest the situation, which was beginning to threaten the very basis of the system of cheap labour. The intention was to increase crop production and introduce land-use planning and animal husbandry. The Betterment Schemes did not however improve the situation in the Bantustans; instead it caused untold suffering and misery. Under the guise of 'betterment' stock ownership rights and land sizes were further reduced and people were once again forcibly removed.

In addition, the National Party tried to promote the economic development of the Bantustans. Each 'homeland' would have to become self-sufficient and build its own economy - this, despite the fact that the reserves had no access to natural resources, industries or basic infrastructure. In this way, White South Africa pushed all responsibility for millions of its citizens into a system that had no means to build or sustain itself.

From the outset, the essence of political power in the Bantustans was in the words of Govan Mbeki (1964) "a toy-telephone system", advisory boards that were given to Africans and in return for their co-option, chiefs were placed on the pay-role of the apartheid regime. In so doing, the apartheid regime legitimised the complete disenfranchisement of all oppressed people.

Resistance Intensifies

The rise of aggressive Afrikaner nationalism and the attempts to reshape and re-engineer rural villages and to co-opt the traditional leaders were fiercely resisted. There were massive explosions of violence against chiefs who collaborated with the apartheid state, and spontaneous revolts against further intrusion into rural African life.

The period also saw a convergence of rural resistance and the rising tide of struggle in urban cities and towns. The role that migrant workers played in the rural areas is illustrated in a number of rural struggles. The Pondoland uprising was dominated by migrants retrenched from the sugar plantations in Natal (1959-1960), and the Tembuland resistance was led by migrants relocated from the Western Cape. Similarly, the Witzie and Sekhukuneland resistance highlighted the levels of co-ordination between the migrant associations in the compounds and structures in the reserves. Migrant workers collected funds, appointed lawyers and provided input into these struggles.

Despite this urban-rural connection, however, these struggles did not cross the boundaries of the localities in which they were waged. They remained isolated from each other and while they indicated the depth of reaction to the repressive conditions in the countryside and increased the general tide of militancy, they were ultimately unsustainable. National campaigns increasingly focused on urban issues and a co-ordinated national rural movement that could galvanise the struggles of rural people and place the issue of land and agrarian reform on the centre-stage of the liberation struggle did not emerge.

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Key Steps That Led to End of Apartheid

By: Becky Little

Updated: August 22, 2023 | Original: November 20, 2020

The formal end of the apartheid government in South Africa was hard-won. It took decades of activism from both inside and outside the country, as well as international economic pressure, to end the regime that allowed the country’s white minority to subjugate its Black majority. This work culminated in the dismantling of apartheid between 1990 and 1994. On April 27, 1994, the country elected Nelson Mandela , an activist who had spent 27 years in prison for his opposition to apartheid, in its first free presidential election.

The white minority who controlled the apartheid government were Afrikaners—descendants of mostly Dutch colonists who had invaded South Africa starting in the 17th century. Although Afrikaner oppression of Black South Africans predates the formal establishment of apartheid in 1948, apartheid legalized and enforced a specific racial ideology that separated South Africans into legally distinct racial groups: white, African, “coloured” (i.e., multiracial) and Indian. The apartheid government used violence to enforce segregation between these groups, and forcibly separated many families containing people assigned to different racial categories.

South African Resistance

Black South Africans resisted apartheid from the very beginning. In the early 1950s, the African National Congress, or ANC, launched a Defiance Campaign. The purpose of this campaign was for Black South Africans to break apartheid laws by entering white areas, using white facilities and refusing to carry “passes”—domestic passports the government used to restrict the movements of Black South Africans in their own country. In response, the government banned the ANC in 1960, and arrested the prominent ANC activist Nelson Mandela in August 1962.

The banning of the ANC and the incarceration of its leaders forced many ANC members into exile. But it did not stop resistance within South Africa, says Wessel Visser , a history lecturer at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

“What many dissidents started to do inside the country was to form a kind of an alternative…resistance movement called the United Democratic Front,” he says. The UDF, formed in 1983, “was a [collaboration] of church leaders and political leaders who were not banned at that stage, community leaders, trade unionists, etc.,” he says.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Reverend Allan Boesak, two of the UDF’s main leaders, “started to organize marches to parliament, in Cape Town, in Pretoria, Johannesburg—crowds of 50 to 80,000 people, so there was definitely a groundswell of resistance against apartheid,” he says. And around the world, this activism drew attention.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s Opposition to Sanctions Are Overruled

One of the big moments for international awareness of apartheid was in 1976, when thousands of Black children in the Soweto township protested a government policy mandating that all classes be taught in Afrikaans. Police responded to the protests with violence, killing at least 176 people and injuring over 1,000 more. The massacre drew more attention to activists’ calls to divest from South Africa, something the United Nations General Assembly had first called on member states to do back in 1962 .

Campaigns for economic sanctions against South Africa gained steam in the 1980s, but faced considerable resistance from two important heads of state: United States President Ronald Reagan and United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Both Reagan and Thatcher condemned Mandela and the ANC as communists and terrorists at a time when the apartheid government promoted itself as a Cold War ally against communism.

Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, but the U.S. Congress overrode his decision with a two-thirds majority, passing the act to impose sanctions on South Africa. The U.K. also imposed limited sanctions despite Thatcher’s objections. The combination of international sanctions placed significant economic pressure on South Africa, which was then at war with the present-day nations of Namibia, Zambia and Angola.

International Pressure Builds to Release Mandela

Anti-apartheid activism also drew international attention to Mandela. International advocates urged South Africa to release him and other imprisoned ANC members and allow exiled members back into the country.

“As early as 1984 there were attempts by national intelligence inside the government structures and also by some of the ministers to make contact with the ANC … and sound out the waters of a possibility of a negotiated settlement,” says Anton Ehlers , a history lecturer at Stellenbosch University.

Berlin Wall Falls, Nelson Mandela Is Freed

Visser speculates that the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 helped speed the process of ending apartheid along because it took away one of the government’s main defenses of itself among Western allies: that it needed to remain in place to fight communism. “The argument that the ANC are only the puppets of the Reds couldn’t be used anymore,” Visser says, both because the Cold War was ending and because the ANC now had a lot more support in Europe and the U.S.

Mandela finally walked free on February 11, 1990 , and negotiations to end apartheid formally began that year. These negotiations lasted for four years, ending with the election of Mandela as president. In 1996, the country initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to reckon with the gross human rights violations during apartheid.

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The Struggle against Apartheid: Lessons for Today's World

About the author, enuga s. reddy.

The United Nations has been concerned with the issue of racial discrimination since its inception. The UN General Assembly adopted on 19 November 1946 during its first session a resolution declaring that "it is in the higher interests of humanity to put an immediate end to religious and so-called racial persecution and discrimination", and calling on "Governments and responsible authorities to conform both to the letter and to the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations, and to take the most prompt and energetic steps to that end". Racial discrimination became one of the main items on the United Nations agenda after African nations attained independence and after the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa on 21 March 1960 sensitized world opinion to the perils of apartheid and racial discrimination. In 1963, the Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which led to the International Convention in 1965. It proclaimed the International Year for Action to Combat Racial Discrimination in 1971 and the three Decades for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination, starting in 1973, as well as the International Year of Mobilization against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001. The United Nations also organized two world conferences against racial discrimination, more recently the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, in Durban, South Africa. The General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and the Commission on Human Rights have devoted thousands of meetings to the discussions on racial discrimination and adopted hundreds of resolutions. Other UN agencies, notably the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), have made significant contributions to the common effort. Racial discrimination is now being condemned by all Governments, and racially discriminatory legislation has been abrogated by most Member States. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a body of independent experts monitoring the implementation of the International Convention, has had some success in persuading Governments to take further action. The progress made by these efforts should not be minimized. Yet, the Durban Conference pointed out with grave concern that, despite all the efforts of the international community, countless human beings continued to be victims of racial discrimination. New developments worldwide, such as the greatly increased migration, have led to a resurgence of manifestations of racism. Xenophobia has also caused violent conflicts and even genocide. Why is it that the international community, which achieved remarkable success in dealing with apartheid in South Africa, has been as yet unsuccessful in eliminating racial discrimination from Earth? And are there any further lessons to be learned from the struggle against apartheid? It must be recognized at the outset that apartheid was a unique case of blatant racism. The National Party, which came to power in South Africa in 1948, made apartheid a State policy and espoused the vicious ideology that people of different racial origins could not live together in equality and harmony. Successive Governments reinforced the legacy of racist oppression against the non-white people-the indigenous Africans, people of Asian origin and of mixed descent -- who constitute over 80 per cent of the population. National liberation rather than human rights became the objective of the struggle against racist tyranny.Apartheid was an affront to the nations of Africa and Asia that were emerging into independence from colonial rule. They demanded that the United Nations consider the grave situation in South Africa as a threat to international peace and to take effective measures, including sanctions, for the liberation of the South African people. They received support from ever-increasing majorities in the United Nations. The liberation of South Africa from racist tyranny and the national reconciliation that followed were the result of the struggle of the South African people and the international action promoted by the United Nations for almost half a century. While the minority racist regime was replaced by a non-racial democratic Government, and the main racist laws abrogated in the process, the task of eliminating the vestiges of apartheid and its effects was left to the new Government. At present, no government espouses racism, and the problem is not the enactment of new racist laws. The victims of oppression and racial discrimination are generally minorities or non-citizens. Racial discrimination in individual countries is seen in terms of human rights rather than as a threat to the peace. While United Nations declarations and resolutions have been adopted with unanimous support, a number of Governments have not shown the political will to combat age-old prejudices, traditional or customary inequities, or even violence against oppressed communities. Politicians and political parties incite racial hostility, while public authorities and local officials ignore national legislation on racial equality. The oppressed communities continue to have little representation in police forces, the judiciary, the legislatures and other decision-making bodies. Governments are reluctant to complain about racial discrimination in other countries unless their own nationals are victimized. Hence, racist oppression in individual countries rarely appears on the agenda of major United Nations organs. In the 1960s, when there was a deadlock on sanctions against South Africa because of the opposition of its trading partners, the United Nations launched an international campaign against apartheid to encourage committed Governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals to implement a wide range of measures to isolate the South African regime and its supporters and assist the freedom movement. Writers, artists, musicians and athletes, among others, were mobilized in support of the freedom movement, whose representatives were given observer status in the United Nations and participated in decision-making. The campaign eventually helped to persuade the major trading partners to impose an arms embargo and take other measures. It may be that the experience of that campaign can be emulated in some ways in the struggle against racial discrimination. If the constraints of the United Nations as an organization of Governments prove a hurdle, the initiative may perhaps be taken by individual Governments that recognize the grave dangers of racial discrimination and related ills. With their support, NGOs could launch an effective campaign, set up structures to monitor constantly all developments concerning racial discrimination and violence, and expose those who profit from or incite racism. A worldwide campaign can help the United Nations to find ways to consider the situation in individual countries and take more effective actions than mere appeals. If complaints of violations of trade union rights can be considered by the ILO and the UN Economic and Social Council, there is no reason why the denial of rights of communities subjected to racial discrimination cannot be considered without any formal complaint by Member States.The Commission on Human Rights, responding to suggestions by African countries and other States, has taken the initiative to prepare studies on discrimination against people of African origin, which concerns a number of States. It is perhaps timely for African, Caribbean and other States to call for effective procedures for action, as in the case of apartheid. It may be recalled that meaningful action followed the establishment of the Special Committee against Apartheid, with a mandate to promote international action and report, with recommendations, to the General Assembly and the Security Council. The experience of the Ad Hoc Working Group of experts, set up by the Commission to investigate and report on human rights violations in southern Africa, may also be an example in considering action on the plight of Roma and immigrants. During the struggle against apartheid, the Special Committee found it essential to promote the establishment of funds and agencies outside the United Nations, with the assistance of committed Governments and NGOs, to supplement and support UN action, as they were able to do what UN organs could not. That experience may also have lessons for the present, as the following illustrate: the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, which provided legal assistance to political prisoners and maintenance for their families in need, resorting to secret channels when the South African Government banned the Fund; the World Campaign against Military and Nuclear Collaboration with South Africa, whose support was crucial in the implementation of the arms embargo against that country, as the Security Council Committee received no information from Governments on violations; and the Shipping Research Bureau (Shirebu), which helped greatly in monitoring the implementation of UN recommendations on the oil embargo. The Association of West European Parliamentarians against Apartheid and the NGO Sub-Committee against Colonialism, Apartheid and Racial Discrimination also made significant contributions. The elimination of racial discrimination, entrenched for centuries and reinforced by some recent developments, is not an easy task. It needs perseverance and determination, building on past achievements and developing new strategies as necessary. There must be a sense of urgency. The example of struggle against apartheid remains an inspiration for such an effort.

The UN Chronicle  is not an official record. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. Similarly, the boundaries and names shown, and the designations used, in maps or articles do not necessarily imply endorsement or acceptance by the United Nations.

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South Africa's successful struggle for freedom and democracy is one of the most dramatic stories of our time. The racial tyranny of apartheid ended with a negotiated transition to a non-racial democracy, but not without considerable personal cost to thousands of men, women, and young people who were involved.

South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy presents first-hand accounts of this important political movement. Interviews with South African activists, raw video footage documenting mass resistance and police repression, historical documents, rare photographs, and original narratives tell this remarkable story.

Watch three-minute preview video. Explore South Africa's history through unique Interviews , chronological Units , in-depth Essays , or collections of Media on key events in the struggle against apartheid. Curricular materials are in the For Educators section.

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Apartheid South Africa 1940s to 1960s Essay for Grade 11

On this page, we guide grade 11 student on how to write “Apartheid South Africa 1940s to 1960s Essay”.

Table of Contents

Apartheid in South Africa was a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination that existed from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. This period in South African history is marked by the enforcement of legal policies and practices aimed at separating the races and maintaining white dominance in all aspects of life. The years between the 1940s and the 1960s were critical in laying the foundations and entrenching the policies that would define this era. This essay will explore the implementation of apartheid laws , resistance movements , and international reactions to apartheid from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Implementation of Apartheid Laws

The formal introduction of apartheid can be traced back to the National Party’s victory in the 1948 elections . The party, which represented the Afrikaner nationalist interest, institutionalised apartheid as a means of securing white dominance. Key legislation enacted during this period included:

• The Population Registration Act (1950): This act classified all South Africans into racial groups – ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘coloured’, and ‘Indian’. This classification was a prerequisite for the implementation of other apartheid laws.
• The Group Areas Act (1950): This law geographically segregated South Africans by race , determining where different racial groups could live, work, and own property.
• The Suppression of Communism Act (1950): Though ostensibly aimed at combating communism , this act was frequently used to silence critics of apartheid, including non-communists.

Resistance Movements

Resistance against apartheid came from various quarters, including political parties, trade unions, and individual activists. The most prominent of these movements included:

• The African National Congress (ANC): Initially adopting a policy of peaceful protest, the ANC organised strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience campaigns. Following the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the ANC shifted to a strategy of armed struggle .
• The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC): A breakaway from the ANC, the PAC also played a significant role in organising protests against apartheid, notably the anti-Pass Laws protest that led to the Sharpeville Massacre.
• Sharpeville Massacre (1960): A turning point in the resistance against apartheid, where a peaceful protest against pass laws in Sharpeville turned deadly, with police opening fire on demonstrators, resulting in 69 deaths.

International Reactions to Apartheid

The international community’s response to apartheid was initially muted, but as the realities of apartheid became more widely known, international condemnation grew. Significant aspects of the international reaction included:

• United Nations Condemnation: The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 1962 calling for sanctions against South Africa, urging member states to cease military and economic relations with the apartheid regime.
• Isolation in Sports: South Africa was banned from the Olympic Games and other international sporting events, highlighting the growing international isolation of the apartheid government.

Student Guide

When writing an essay on Apartheid in South Africa from the 1940s to the 1960s, focusing on clarity, depth, and evidence-based arguments is crucial. Here are some useful tips to enhance your essay writing:

• Start with a Strong Thesis Statement:
• Clearly state your essay’s main argument or analysis point at the end of your introduction. This sets the direction and tone of your essay. For example, “This essay argues that the apartheid laws enacted between the 1940s and 1960s not only institutionalised racial segregation but also laid the foundation for the resistance movements that eventually led to apartheid’s downfall.”
• Organise Your Essay Logically:
• Use subheadings to divide your essay into manageable sections, such as the implementation of apartheid laws, resistance movements, and international reactions. This helps readers follow your argument more easily.
• Use Evidence to Support Your Points:
• Incorporate specific examples and quotes from primary and secondary sources to back up your statements. For instance, reference the Population Registration Act when discussing racial classification or cite international condemnation from United Nations resolutions.
• Analyse, Don’t Just Describe:
• Go beyond simply describing events by analysing their impact and significance . For example, when discussing the Sharpeville Massacre, explore its effect on both the apartheid government’s policies and the tactics of resistance movements.
• Acknowledge Different Perspectives:
• While focusing on the factual history of apartheid, also acknowledge the various perspectives on apartheid policies and resistance efforts, including those of the government, opposition movements, and international bodies.
• Conclude Effectively:
• Summarise the main points of your essay and reiterate your thesis in the context of the information discussed. Offer a concluding thought that encourages further reflection, such as the legacy of apartheid in contemporary South Africa.
• Reference Accurately:
• Ensure all sources are accurately cited in your essay to avoid plagiarism and to lend credibility to your arguments. Follow the specific referencing style required by your teacher or educational institution.
• Proofread and Revise:
• Check your essay for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Also, ensure that your argument flows logically and that each section supports your thesis statement.
• Seek Feedback:
• Before final submission, consider getting feedback from teachers, peers, or tutors. Fresh eyes can offer valuable insights and identify areas for improvement.

By incorporating these tips, you can create a well-argued, informative, and engaging essay on Apartheid in South Africa that meets the expectations of a Grade 11 history assignment.

The period from the 1940s to the 1960s was pivotal in the establishment and consolidation of the apartheid system in South Africa. Through the enactment of draconian laws, the apartheid government institutionalised racial discrimination, which led to widespread resistance within the country and condemnation from the international community. This era laid the groundwork for the struggles and transformations that would eventually lead to the end of apartheid.

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Political History

Strategic actions, ensuing events, for more information, about this conflict summary.

This conflict summary was commissioned by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). We are an educational organization dedicated to developing and sharing knowledge related to nonviolent civil resistance movements for human rights, freedom, and justice around the world. Click here to access ICNC’s homepage.

The Anti-Apartheid Struggle in South Africa (1912-1992)

Download PDF Version By Lester Kurtz June 2010

The iconic struggle between the apartheid regime of South Africa and those who resisted it illustrates the complexity of some cases of civil resistance. Originally the use of civil resistance against apartheid was based on Gandhian ideas, which originated in South Africa in 1906 where Gandhi was a lawyer working for an Indian trading firm. Soon the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, became the major force opposing the apartheid system’s oppression of the 80% non-European population of the country. Using mostly legal tactics of protest during its first four decades, the ANC became more militant in the early 1950s and began using nonviolent direct action.

White South Africans (Afrikaners) monopolized control over the state and the economy, including rich natural resources such as a third of the world’s known gold reserves. The Afrikaners developed an explicit theology and philosophy of white racial superiority and a legal and economic system enforced by a modern military and police force that deliberately excluded nonwhites from economic and political power. Nevertheless, the system became increasingly reliant upon nonwhite labor and isolated from international diplomacy and trade.

Discouraged about the lack of results from their nonviolent campaign, Nelson Mandela and others called for an armed uprising, creating the Umkhonto We Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”) that paralleled the nonviolent resistance. That, too, failed to tear down the apartheid system, and in the end, a concerted grassroots nonviolent civil resistance movement in coalition with international support and sanctions forced the white government to negotiate.

On 17 March 1992 two-thirds of South Africa’s white voters approved a negotiated end of the minority regime and the apartheid system. Nelson Mandela was elected as the President of the new South Africa in the first free elections by the entire population.

The decades of struggle saw the ebb and flow of a wide variety of strategic actions within the anti-apartheid movement. American theologian Walter Wink (1987: 4) suggests the movement was “probably the largest grassroots eruption of diverse nonviolent strategies in a single struggle in human history.”

The timeline of this conflict begins with the founding of Cape Town in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company as a way station between the Netherlands and the East Indies. As it developed into a settlement, it was populated by the European ancestors of the Afrikaners, who eventually were the white minority comprising less than 20 percent of the population but who had nearly complete control of the nation’s government and economy. As resistance to the system increased, increasingly-restrictive legislation was passed; nonwhites were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to segregated neighborhoods, and any hint of dissidence was repressed, from the banning of individuals and organizations from public life to the imposition of martial law.

After decades of resistance to the explicitly-racist system, questions and even defections from the white power elite emerged in the 1980s as business leaders, aware of the need for a high-quality workforce and in an effort to build up a small sector of the black population, began to despair at the failure of modest reforms and increased repression. Questions even began to emerge within the Dutch-Reformed Church, which fashioned the apartheid theology that had legitimated the regime (see Kuperus 1999).

In the end, it was the paradox of the regime’s being both extraordinarily powerful and highly vulnerable that gave nonviolent resistance to its power (Zunes 1999). Despite its powerful security forces, mineral wealth and industrial capacity, apartheid South Africa was dependent on its nonwhite labor force, southern African neighbors, and international ties with the industrial West. As these pillars withdrew their support the regime became unsustainable.

The ANC, created in 1912, was the major institutional vehicle of the resistance, at first emphasizing legal forms of protest and shifting to a more militant nonviolent direct action campaign in the early 1950s and then advocating violent resistance, along with its revival Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), founded in 1959. The violent resistance was limited to occasional bombings of government facilities and avoidance of civilian deaths. As Zunes (1999) correctly observes, the armed struggle may have harmed the movement, weakening the nonviolent campaigns (successfully linked to the nonviolent movement) and justifying the repression of all resistance efforts. Armed resistance against the continent’s most powerful military and a highly armed white citizenry fearing a racial war was never a serious threat.

In the 1970s, increased labor militancy and community support for opposition forces, along with the successful 1973 strikes in Durban, demonstrated the regime’s vulnerability: brick and tile workers walked off the job one January morning, prompting first transport workers and then industrial and municipal labor to follow suit. By early February, 30,000 workers were on strike in Durban. The apartheid regime relied on black labor to keep the economy going and the strikes showed that widespread discontent could be mobilized to disrupt the work that kept the regime in power. Durban’s labor activism, in turn, helped to inspire strikes elsewhere and then a student uprising that included a 1976 Soweto march that the police responded to by shooting a thirteen-year-old boy. In what became known as the “Soweto Uprising”, young people escalated by smashing windows and setting fire to schools and government buildings, to which the police upped the ante by shooting at students everywhere, leading to more than sixty fatalities (with two white men killed).

In light of the apartheid regime’s military superiority, by the early 1980s, anti-apartheid forces were virtually united around a nonviolent resistance that could achieve maximum participation among nonwhites, divide the white community and move some toward acting on behalf of non-whites, and bring international pressures to bear on the government (Sharp 1980: 163).

Drawing upon the Black Consciousness Movement led by dissident Steve Biko (who died due to brutal police treatment while in custody), a mass democratic movement emerged in the 1980s with an informal alliance between the ANC, the United Democratic Front (UDF, launched in 1983)2 and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) calling for a multiracial democracy led by the ANC. One of the UDF’s most prominent leaders was Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and it gained considerable support in the white community including from the South African Council of Churches.

In 1985, nonviolent pressure continued to build, with 27-year-old Mkhuseli Jack organizing boycotts of white-owned businesses in the city of Port Elizabeth. The boycotters presented a series of demands: the integration of public facilities, the removal of troops from the black townships and an end to workplace discrimination (Ackerman and DuVall 2000). The boycotts were so powerful that the regime responded with the first declaration of a state of emergency in 23 years in an effort to stop the movement’s momentum, but with little effect. A three-day general strike in June 1988 mobilized more than three million workers and students, paralyzing industry, followed by an even larger general strike in August 1989.

In 1989, resisters also resurrected the 1950s Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign3 that involved engaging in the civil disobedience of intolerable apartheid legislation and practices such as banning dissidents (which restricted their travel and activities and required them to report to authorities periodically as well as prevented the press from quoting them). It encouraged noncooperation with the tricameral legislative system, which was meant to co-opt dissidents and to repair the apartheid government’s damaged reputation with the international community by giving non-whites token representation in the government.4

In addition to direct confrontation with the regime, resistors also created alternative community-based institutions—such as cooperatives, community clinics, legal resource centers, and other organizations—that increasingly marginalized and replaced official governmental institutions. Many black South Africans were hesitant to get politically active after the 1977 crackdown following the Soweto Uprising, but were attracted to the organization around community problems such as housing, escalating rents, sanitation, and other local issues (see Ackerman and DuVall 2000). The government responded with a ban on international funding of such organizations, but this did not have much impact on their activities. As the decade neared its end, the government had lost control in virtually every sphere of apartheid, with banned ANC flags flying, public facilities renamed, government officials confronted by school children, jailed activists holding hunger strikes, and clergy illegally marrying mixed-race couples (see Zunes 1999: 223).

The resistance culminated in the 1989 Defiance Campaign with multiracial peace marches in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, and throughout the country. Even business leaders and members of the white establishment such as the mayor of Cape Town joined the movement (Smuts and Westcott 1991). The struggle moved to the negotiating table, with anti-apartheid forces holding the upper hand but fashioning a democratic solution that also set the stage for a process of reconciliation.

In total, the number of tactics used during the anti-apartheid struggle was enormous, and included the following:

Protest and Persuasion

• Mass demonstrations, marches;
• Public declarations such as The Freedom Charter, adopted at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, on 26 June 1955;
• Funeral marches and orations as occasions for protesting apartheid and remembering victims of repression, especially when demonstrations were banned;
• Alternative press and advertising;
• Affidavits as a way of circumventing censorship (e.g., the South African Catholic Bishops Conference used affidavits for a book, Police Conduct During Township Protests in 1984);
• Memorials and anniversaries (e.g., church bells rung and vigils were held to commemorate 1960 Sharpeville protestors shot by police, and Soweto Day was declared to commemorate the 1976 uprising);
• Lighting candles every night during the Christmas season;
• Music was a major feature of the South African movement—singing, dancing, and chanting freedom slogans was common;
• UN General Assembly Resolutions;
• A register of Artists, Actors and Others who have performed in South Africa was created as part of an international cultural boycott;
• Symbolic clothing: Green, black and gold clothing symbolizing the banned ANC, and was worn even in court during trials; Wearing ANC t-shirts; A black armband worn in Parliament by Independent MP Jan van Eck mourning 40 years of National Party rule;
• Naked protest parade of 200 men and women against an exhibition of electronic weaponry in 1982;
• “Services of witness” called by Archbishop Tutu inviting “banned” resisters to participate;
• University students in 1987 used chairs to form a profane word large enough to be read by a circling police helicopter (a photograph appeared in the Weekly Mail);
• Flag burning, replacing the South African flag with the ANC flag;
• Graffiti: political slogans in public places to circumvent censorship;
• Humor: protestors wearing “Stop the Call-up” t-shirts to protest conscription were ordered to stop building a sand castle on the beach, leading to jokes about such activities as subversive
• Religious pilgrimages and worship services;
• “Keening”—public weeping and wailing by women outside the gates of parliament;
• Kneeling—marchers fell to their knees and begged the police to withdraw from their township; after negotiations, a woman leading the protest asked the crowd to turn back and the commanding officer withdrew his troops;
• Motorcades (e.g., buses, vans, and cars would drive into a city center during a boycott of white shops);
• Negotiations with political officials as pressure from international and domestic anti-apartheid forces reached its apex.

Noncooperation

• Strikes and “stay-aways” organized by labor groups, especially the Congress of South African Trade Unions;
• Economic boycotts such as those organized by Mkhuseli Jack and others in Port Elizabeth;
• School boycotts;
• International sanctions, divestment, and boycotts;
• Sports and cultural boycotts;
• Rent boycotts;
• Establishment of alternative institutions – e.g. The National Education Crisis Committee; Street committees and area committees; People’s courts; Alternative parks named after movement heroes (e.g., Nelson Mandela Park, Steve Biko Park);
• Inter-racial bridge-building, social visits as social disobedience;

Civil disobedience

• A South African Council of Churches resolution (July 1987) questioned the government’s legitimacy and laws such as the Group Areas Act, the Education Acts and the Separate Amenities Act
• Use of an alternative birth registration system advocated by the South African Council of Churches defying the Population Registration Act;
• The United States Chamber of Commerce proposed a civil disobedience program for businesses in South Africa;
• Hunger strikes by political prisoners (1989) resulting in the release of hundreds of detainees and increased caution in detention without trial;
• Refusal to serve in the South African military (leading to arrests of conscientious objectors);
• Informal “Unbanning” of themselves by resisters who had been banned by the regime (which restricted their travel and activities and required them to report to authorities periodically as well as prevented the press from quoting them);
• Clergy married couples forbidden to marry by the Prevention of Mixed Marriages Act
• School officials allowed non-white or mixed-race students to enroll in their all-white schools

Nonviolent Intervention

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu led a protest march to a whites-only beach in the Western Cape (1989);
• Non-whites showed up at white hospitals and medical stations for medical treatment;
• The National Union of Mineworkers promoted a lunchtime sit-in at an all-white canteen, and had black African workers use whites-only changing rooms and toilets, buses, as part of the 1989 Defiance Campaign;
• Marching without permits
• When “Run for Peace” joggers were ordered to disperse, they did so by running away from the police but along the planned route (1985)
• Picnicking at the whites-only Boksburg Lake in defiance of apartheid regulations

South Africa now has a democratic government and universal suffrage allowing all South African citizens to vote and hold political office. Nevertheless, a large proportion of its nonwhite population suffers grinding poverty and the hopelessness engendered by unmet high expectations, provoking widespread violence, crime, and civil unrest.

Although the nonwhite population gained what former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere called “flag independence” by gaining the vote and electing an ANC-dominated government, the country’s economy, civil service, and military remain largely dominated by the white minority, forcing continued compromise and power struggles. The difficult transition was facilitated in part by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which attempted to repair the gap between the races by getting the ugly truth of the apartheid regime out into the open, enacting sentences on the worst offenders, and then seeking to find ways of reconciling the conflicting parties.

1. For more details on the anti-apartheid movement’s strategies and tactics, see Smuts and Westcott (1991).

2. The UDF was a loose coalition of trade unions, church and youth groups, cultural organizations and civil society organizations created in part due to the government’s banning of the ANC and other hardline repressive measures (See A Diplomat’s Handbook). By 1983 the UDF had become the primary instrument for mobilizing the opposition to the apartheid regime.

3. The Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign of 1952 had resulted in the African National Congress mushrooming from a small organization of 7,000 to a mass movement with 100,000 members.

4. The tricameral legislature created parallel but unequal parliaments for the “coloured” and Indian populations (in addition to the existing white legislature) but excluded the black population altogether (see Zunes 1999).

Watch a 25 minute film on the 1984 Port Elizabeth consumer boycott during the anti-Apartheid movement, from the critically-acclaimed film  A Force More Powerful :

For further reading:

• Ackerman, Peter, and Jack DuVall. “South Africa: Campaign against Apartheid.” In A Force More Powerful , 335-368. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2000.
• Adam, Heribert, and Kogila Moodley. The Opening of the Apartheid Mind: Options for the New South Africa . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
• Adler, Glenn, and Eddie Webster. “Challenging Transition Theory: The Labor Movement, Radical Reform, and Transition to Democracy in South Africa.” Politics Society 23 (1995): 75-106.
• Bond, Patrick. Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa . Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000.
• Council for a Community of Democracies. The Diplomat’s Handbook . Washington, DC. Council for a Community of Democracies. Available online at http://www.diplomatshandbook.org/ .
• Bozzoli, Belinda. Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid . Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004.
• Geisler, Gisela. “’Parliament is Another Terrain of Struggle’: Women, Men and Politics in South Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 38 (December 2000): 605-630.
• Guelke, Adrian. Rethinking the Rise and Fall of Apartheid: South Africa and World Politics . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
• Hanlon, Joseph, ed. South Africa: The Sanctions Report; Documents and Statistics . A report from the Independent Expert Study Group on the Evaluation of the Application and Impact of Sanctions against South Africa prepared for the Commonwealth Committee of Foreign Ministers on Southern Africa. London: Heinemann, 2005.
• Harvey, Robert. The Fall of Apartheid: The Inside Story from Smuts to Mbeki . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
• Klotz, Audie. “Norms Reconstituting Interests: Global Racial Equality and U.S. Sanctions Against South Africa.” International Organization 49 (Summer 1995): 451-478.
• Klotz, Audie. Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
• Kuperus, Tracy. State, Civil Society and Apartheid in South Africa: An Examination of Dutch Reformed Church-State Relations . Houndsmilles: Macmillan Press, 1999.
• Lowenberg, Anton D., and William H. Kaempfer. The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid: A Public Choice Analysis . Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998.
• Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela . Boston; Little, Brown and Co, 1994.
• Marais, Hein. South Africa: Limits to Change ; The Political Economy of Transition . London: Zed, 1998.
• Paulson, Joshua. “School Boycotts in South Africa – 1984-1987.” In Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential , by Gene Sharp, 233-238. Boston: Porter Sargent Extending Horizon Books, 2005.
• Sharp, Gene. The Politics of Nonviolent Action . 3 vols. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973.
• Sharp, Gene. Social Power and Political Freedom . Boston: Porter Sargent, 1980.
• Smuts, Dene, and Shauna Westcott, eds. The Purple Shall Govern: A South African A to Z of Nonviolent Action . Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report . 2003. Accessed online 8 June 2010 at http://www.info.gov.za/otherdocs/2003/trc/ .
• Tutu, Desmond. Rainbow People of God: The Making of a Peaceful Revolution . John Allen, ed. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
• Wilson, Richard A. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Wink, Walter. Jesus’ Third Way: The Relevance of Nonviolence in South Africa Today . Cape Town: Citadel Press, 1987.
• Worden, Nigel. T he Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation, and Apartheid . 3rd edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
• Zunes, Stephen. 1999. “The Role of Nonviolence in the Downfall of Apartheid.” In Nonviolent Social Movements , ed. S. Zunes, L. R. Kurtz, and S. B. Asher, 203-230. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

This conflict summary was commissioned by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). We are an educational organization dedicated to developing and sharing knowledge related to nonviolent civil resistance movements for human rights, freedom, and justice around the world. Learn more about our work here .

Hundreds of past and present cases of nonviolent civil resistance exist. To make these cases more accessible, ICNC compiled summaries of some of them between the years 2009-2011. You can find these summaries here . Each summary aims to provide a clear perspective on the role that nonviolent civil resistance has played or is playing in a particular case. They are authored by people who have expertise in a particular region of the world and/or expertise in the field of civil resistance. Each author speaks with his/her own voice, and conflict summaries do not necessarily reflect the views of ICNC.

For a wide range of resources on civil resistance, visit ICNC’s Resource Library , which features resources on civil resistance in English and over 65 other languages .

To support scholars and educators who are designing curricula and teaching this subject, we also offer an Academic Online Curriculum (AOC), which is a free, extensive, and regularly updated online resource with over 40 different modules on civil resistance topics and case studies.

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South Africa’s History of Colonialism and Apartheid

• First Online: 12 May 2024

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• Fatima Mukaddam   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0008-3720-7861 4  

Part of the book series: Gender, Justice and Legal Feminism ((GJLF,volume 4))

This chapter meticulously traces the pluri-legal evolution through colonialism, segregation, apartheid, and democratic transition. It illuminates the complex interplay of legal systems and societal norms, offering a foundation for understanding South Africa’s legal landscape. It is a discussion of South Africa’s rich historical tapestry, woven over centuries, which serves as the backdrop to its legal evolution. The catalyst emerged in the mid-seventeenth century with the Dutch East India Company’s establishment at the Cape of Good Hope. This marked the genesis of colonisation, intertwining with indigenous communities. The ensuing centuries witnessed conflict, enslavement, and the arrival of diverse populations, including Muslims. The Boer War solidified South Africa as a white settler state, with racial distinctions deeply ingrained. Customary Law emerged, allowing the black population autonomy under their own systems, albeit subservient to overarching Roman-Dutch and English common law. The dark era of apartheid entrenched racial divisions and Bantustans exemplified the intention to segregate based on ethnicity, solidifying the pluri-legal nature of the state. The transition to democracy was volatile and bloody, shaping the post-apartheid landscape. While the Constitution upholds universal rights, racial classifications endure for restorative justice, perpetuating historical tensions. In democratic South Africa, a pluri-legal system thrives. The constitution coexists with informal dispute resolution, notably in Muslim Personal Law. Organisations resist integration, shaping a legal landscape where autonomy and tradition intersect. This nuanced exploration lays the foundation for forthcoming chapters, promising a deeper dive into the complexities of Muslim Personal Law in South Africa.

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A shaykh is a spiritual mentor/leader, assumed to be more religious, knowledgeable, and wiser than ordinary folk in Islam and their prayers are believed to be holier.

The Boer Republics were independent self-governed states created by the Dutch speaking inhabitants of Cape Colony after the Second Anglo-Boer War which will be discussed below (Le Roux 2016). An example is the Zuid Afrikaanse Republic mentioned above.

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The History of Apartheid in South Africa Essay

At the dawn of colonial rule in South Africa, Apartheid was established as a system of racial segregation and discrimination that would govern the country for many decades. Under Apartheid, South Africans were divided into two main groups: whites and non-whites. Whites enjoyed political power, economic privileges, and social status, while non-whites were subject to harsh restrictions on their freedom, rights, and opportunities.

Despite decades of opposition from civil rights activists and organizations, Apartheid remained largely intact until the early 1990s. In 1994, with the election of Nelson Mandela as president, Apartheid officially came to an end. While much progress has been made toward equality and justice in South Africa since this time, there is still work to be done in addressing the legacy of Apartheid.

South Africa is endowed with a plethora of natural resources, including fertile farmland and valuable mineral deposits. Diamonds and gold are produced in South African mines, as well as critical metals like platinum. The weather is mild; it is said to resemble the San Francisco bay area climate more than any other place on Earth.

The country also has a well-developed infrastructure. Despite all of these natural gifts, South Africa is a country with a very troubled past.

The word apartheid means “separateness” in Afrikaans, the language spoken by many of the Dutch descendants who settled in South Africa in the seventeenth century. Apartheid was originally entrenched as state policy in 1948 when the National Party came to power and began implementing its racial segregation policies. The system of apartheid created different racial classifications for South Africans and limited the rights of nonwhite groups, specifically black Africans.

During apartheid, black Africans were denied citizenship and forced to live in segregated areas called townships or bantustans. They were not allowed to vote or hold office and were subject to curfews and pass laws that restricted their movement. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation that violated the human rights of the majority black population in South Africa.

The apartheid regime ended in the early 1990s, but the effects of apartheid continue to be felt in South Africa today. Apartheid was an institutionalized system of racial segregation and discrimination that existed in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. Apartheid was characterized by an authoritarian political culture based on baasskap, or white supremacy, which encouraged state repression of Black African, Coloured, and Asian South Africans for the benefit of the nation’s minority white population.

The economic effects of apartheid continue to impact South Africa today. The legacy of apartheid has left the country with high rates of poverty, unemployment, and inequality. Apartheid also had a lasting impact on South African society, where segregation and racism continue to be issues that affect the nation as it works to overcome its troubled past.

Despite these challenges, South Africa has made tremendous progress since the end of apartheid. Today, South Africans from all backgrounds are working together to build a more inclusive and just society for all citizens. And while there is still much work to be done in healing the scars of Apartheid, South Africans remain committed to moving their nation forward and creating a brighter future for all.

The English and Dutch colonized South Africa in the 1600s. The Dutch descendents (known as Boers or Afrikaners) were conquered by the English, resulting in the creation of the new colonies of Orange Free State and Transvaal. The discovery of diamonds in these regions around 1900 prompted a British invasion that sparked the Boer War. Following independence from England, an uneasy power-sharing agreement between the two groups prevailed until World War II, when the Afrikaner National Party was able to secure a commanding majority.

Under Apartheid, the Apartheid government instituted a series of severe laws and policies that systematically segregated and disenfranchised black South Africans. This included denying blacks equal access to healthcare, education, housing, and other essential services. In addition to these institutional injustices, Apartheid also fostered an environment of extreme racial tension and violence in which both the Apartheid government forces as well as anti-Apartheid groups engaged in brutal attacks on opposing sides.

Despite decades of protests and international condemnation against Apartheid, South Africa remained under Apartheid rule until 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected president in the country’s first free elections. While significant progress has been made toward healing the wounds of Apartheid over the past two decades, many challenges still remain in terms of addressing the economic disparities and social tensions that continue to exist in South Africa.

The National Party’s strategists saw apartheid as a method for strengthening their grasp on the economic and social system. The purpose of apartheid was to preserve white dominion while increasing racial segregation from its inception. In the 1960s, there was a ”Grand Apartheid” strategy that emphasized territorial separation and law enforcement oppression.

Apartheid was implemented in a number of ways, including the enacting of laws that segregated races, restrictions on political organizations and public gatherings, and the establishment of black ”homelands” meant to isolate blacks in small areas.

Despite its oppressive nature and widespread global condemnation, Apartheid remained in place until it was finally dismantled following years of protests and international pressure. Today, South Africa has made great strides towards racial reconciliation and equality, though there is still much work to be done. Ultimately, Apartheid serves as a powerful reminder of the dangers of intolerance and segregation.

The South African government’s institutionalization of racial prejudice began with the passage of apartheid legislation in 1948. Racial discrimination was entrenched throughout society, as marriage between non-whites and whites was prohibited, and white-only employment was authorized. In 1950, the Population Registration Act established three categories forracial classification: white, black (African), or colored (of mixed descent). The term “colored” referred to a significant number of Indian and Asian people.

Despite the institutionalization of racial segregation, resistance to apartheid remained strong. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, various groups fought against apartheid laws through peaceful protests and non-violent demonstrations. In 1976, thousands of black students in Soweto township rose up against a government plan that would have forced them to learn Afrikaans, a language traditionally associated with white South Africans. The student-led movement became known as the Soweto Uprising, and marked one of the most dramatic moments in South Africa’s long history of anti-apartheid activism.

While these struggles were ongoing into the 1980s and 1990s, international pressure on South Africa also grew. In 1985, an historic global boycott campaign was launched aimed at isolating South Africa and pressuring the country to end apartheid. Over time, this movement gained significant momentum, with many nations around the world banning trade with South Africa and cutting diplomatic ties.

Despite these efforts, however, it would take several more years before apartheid was officially dismantled in South Africa. In 1994, after decades of intense struggle, a new democratic government led by Nelson Mandela was elected, signaling an end to white minority rule. Today, South Africa remains a young democracy that continues to grapple with the legacy of its Apartheid history. But while much work remains to be done, the country’s transition from Apartheid represents a crucial step towards racial equality and justice for all people in South Africa.

The English settlers of colonial America, who were primarily from Northern Europe and the British Isles, believed that one’s race was determined by physical characteristics (such as skin color or facial features) and social acceptance. For example, a white person was defined as “in appearance clearly a white person or generally accepted as a white person.”

A person can’t be classified as white if one of his or her parents is non-white. The term “obviously white” refers to “his habits, education, and speech and behavior.” A black individual is referred to as an African tribe member or race native, while a colored individual is someone who isn’t black or white.

The Population Registration Act was the first major Apartheid legislation. It required that every resident of South Africa be classified into one of these three racial categories. The act also forbid marriage or sexual relations between persons of different race. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation that divided South Africans into white, black, and colored groups. The white minority held all the political power, and the black majority was denied basic rights and forced to live in poverty. Apartheid laws were designed to keep the races separate and to give the white minority complete control over the country.

During Apartheid, blacks were forced to carry passes that limited their movement and restricted their access to jobs, schools, and other public services. They were also segregated into separate neighborhoods and forced to use separate public facilities. Apartheid laws were designed to keep the races separate and to give the white minority complete control over the country.

Apartheid ended in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected as South Africa’s first black president. Mandela had been imprisoned for 27 years because of his opposition to Apartheid. After he was released from prison, he led the African National Congress (ANC) in its fight against Apartheid. The ANC is a political party that represents the interests of black South Africans. In 1990, Apartheid laws were repealed and blacks were given the right to vote. The following year, negotiations between the ANC and the ruling National Party began, which resulted in Mandela’s election as president in 1994.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Apartheid — The Way Apartheid Affected South Africa

The Way Apartheid Affected South Africa

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South Africa marks ‘Freedom Day,’ 30 years since apartheid ended, amid discontent with the ANC

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South Africans celebrated their “Freedom Day” on Saturday, commemorating their country’s pivotal first democratic election on April 27, 1994, that announced the official end of the racial segregation and oppression of apartheid.

South Africa marked the 30th anniversary with 21-gun salutes and remembrances of that momentous vote, when millions of Black South Africans decided their own futures for the first time, a fundamental right they had been denied by a racist white minority government.

The first all-race election saw the previously banned African National Congress party win overwhelmingly and made its leader, Nelson Mandela, the country’s first Black president four years after he was released after decades in prison.

But Saturday’s celebrations of the momentous anniversary were set against a growing discontent with the current government.

From the Archives: Nelson Mandela: Anti-apartheid icon reconciled a nation

Nelson Mandela, who emerged from more than a quarter of a century in prison to steer a troubled African nation to its first multiracial democracy, uniting the country by reaching out to fearful whites and becoming a revered symbol of racial reconciliation around the world, died Thursday.

Dec. 5, 2013

Here’s what you need to know about that iconic moment and a South Africa that’s changing again 30 years on:

A turning point

The 1994 election was the culmination of a process that began four years earlier when F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, shocked the world and his country by announcing that the ANC and other anti-apartheid parties would be unbanned.

Mandela, the face of the anti-apartheid movement, was released from prison nine days later, setting him on the road to becoming South Africa’s first Black leader.

South Africa needed years to prepare and was still on a knife-edge in the months and weeks before the election because of ongoing political violence, but the vote — held over four days between April 26 and April 29 to accommodate the large numbers who turned out — went ahead successfully.

A country that had been shunned and sanctioned by the international community for decades because of apartheid emerged as a full-fledged democracy.

Nearly 20 million South Africans of all races voted, compared with just 3 million white people in the last general election under apartheid in 1989.

Associated Press photographer Denis Farrell’s iconic aerial photograph of people waiting patiently for hours in long, snaking queues in fields next to a school in the famed Johannesburg township of Soweto captured the determination of millions of Black South Africans to finally be counted. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

“South Africa’s heroes are legend across the generations,” Mandela said as he proclaimed victory. “But it is you, the people, who are our true heroes.”

Apartheid falls

The ANC’s election victory ensured that apartheid was finally dismantled and a new constitution was drawn up and became South Africa’s highest law, guaranteeing equality for everyone no matter their race, religion or sexuality.

Apartheid, which began in 1948 and lasted for nearly half a century, had oppressed Black and other nonwhite people through a series of race-based laws. Not only did the laws deny them a vote, they controlled where Black people lived, where they were allowed to go on any given day, what jobs they were allowed to hold and whom they were allowed to marry.

30 years on

Current South African President Cyril Ramaphosa — a protege of Mandela — presided over the celebrations at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the seat of government.

“Few days in the life of our nation can compare to that day, when freedom was born,” Ramaphosa said in a speech. “South Africa changed forever. It signaled a new chapter in the history of our nation, a moment that resonated across Africa and across the world.”

“On that day, the dignity of all the people of South Africa was restored,” Ramaphosa said.

The ANC has been in government ever since 1994 and while it is still recognized for its central role in freeing South Africans, it is no longer celebrated in the same way as it was in the hope-filled aftermath of that election.

South Africa in 2024 has deep socioeconomic problems, with severe poverty that still overwhelmingly affects the Black majority. The official unemployment rate is 32%, the highest in the world; it’s more than 60% for people ages 15-24.

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Millions of Black South Africans still live in neglected, impoverished townships and informal settlements on the fringes of cities in what many see as a betrayal of the heroes Mandela referred to. South Africa is still rated as one of the most unequal countries in the world.

The ANC is now largely being blamed for the lack of progress, even if the damage of decades of apartheid wasn’t going to be easy to undo.

Another pivotal election?

The 30th anniversary of 1994 fell with another possibly pivotal election as a backdrop. South Africa will hold its seventh national vote since the end of apartheid on May 29.

Analysts and polls predict that the ANC will lose its parliamentary majority for the first time as a new generation of South Africans make their voices heard. The ANC will likely have to enter into complicated coalitions with smaller parties to remain part of the government.

South Africans still cherish the memory of Mandela and the elusive freedom and prosperity he spoke about in 1994. But the majority of them now appear ready to look beyond the ANC to attain it.

Imray writes for the Associated Press.

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Missouri and Kansas protests over Israel-Hamas war echo demonstrations from decades past

In the 1970s and '80s, students at the universities of Kansas and Missouri protested on-campus to demand their institutions divest from a racist government in South Africa. Now, they’re asking schools to withdraw funds that support Israel's war in the Gaza Strip.

At the University of Missouri-Columbia, 41 students were arrested and jailed.

They let their bodies go limp, putting civil disobedience training to use by making it difficult to be hauled off by sheriff’s deputies. The students were strip searched. They sat overnight in the Boone County jail.

The next day, several students chose to remain in jail. They began a hunger strike.

All were charged with trespassing — on their own college campus.

The Mizzou students had refused the administration’s orders to vacate the plywood and cardboard shacks of the shantytown that they’d erected months before on the iconic Francis Quadrangle.

They had held their ground there for five months, rebuilding when campus officials tore the encampments down.

Determined, the students wanted the university to divest its investment holdings, to take a moral stand with its endowments.

Sound familiar?

Those MU arrests happened in February 1987.

Campus protests then and now

In the mid-1980s, normally bucolic Midwestern campuses played a role in forcing universities to divest millions of dollars from supporting the racist apartheid government of South Africa .

They did so in more sustained ways than what has been allowed for by area student protesters in 2024, at least so far.

Tuesday afternoon, Lawrence police came to the University of Kansas campus and confiscated the tents that students had erected as part of their peaceful protest. They’re asking for the divestment of university funds from supporting Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

Later, police returned and took water, food and other supplies the students had set up for the “Solidarity Encampment.”

“Disclose. Divest. We will not stop. We will not rest,” the students chanted as the police loaded the items. Students filmed the scene on cell phones.

Kathryn Benson was one of the MU students arrested in 1987. Like her former peers, she’s keenly interested in how students today are being treated by campus officials, and how they are perceived by the general public.

On Monday, 13 conversative federal judges issued a statement that they won’t hire law students or undergraduates from Columbia University, the recent scene of pitched protests against the war in Gaza, saying that the institution had become “an incubator of bigotry.”

Last fall, several CEOs issued similar threats.

“It’s truly disturbing that people are seeking to stifle our right to protest and giving repercussions,” said Benson, now a public defender in Fulton, Missouri .

Benson faced no long-term backlash for her anti-apartheid activism, she said. The worst that she endured was racist hate mail.

In fact, the Mizzou students were able to turn their arrests into an advantage.

“We were hoping to have enough people arrested that it would overwhelm the county jail and cause them to have to house other inmates elsewhere,” said Benson. “It was to put pressure on the university to not arrest people.”

Benson’s father is J. Kenneth Benson , a now retired, professor emeritus in the MU sociology department.

In 1970s, he had also gotten crosswise with the university for cancelling classes so students-then could protest the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam War , students began to have friends and relatives who were killed overseas, sparking activism. Protests flared after the Ohio National Guard fired into student protesters at Kent State University , killing four students and injuring nine more.

Benson, like others who took part in the 1980s, sees the similarities and differences between student activism movements through the decades.

In the past, it wasn’t as if U.S. campuses were filled with South African students who could speak from experience about the issue. It was largely white, often middle-class students who merely learned about the plight of Black South Africans and were mortified. Other efforts were led by Black college students , seeking to help Black South Africans gain equal treatment.

In contrast, today’s university student populations are much more diverse. Protesting students can often speak from their firsthand experiences of living in the Middle East. Many have family abroad or hold an affinity due to their Muslim faith.

They expect the values of the universities where they are enrolled to respect their backgrounds, and to show it through socially conscious investments.

In some ways, the issues today feel more complicated for students and administrations to navigate, said several former student activists.

“Obviously, there are issues on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and things that can be done on both sides to fix it.,” Benson said. “But apartheid was just clearly wrong.”

Students at MU, the University of Kansas , the University of Missouri-Kansas City are demanding transparency of university investments, divestment, cutting links to the U.S. military and in general, separation from support that could be viewed as detrimental to the human rights of Palestinians.

Both Missouri and Kansas have passed laws in recent years prohibiting boycotts, divestment or sanctions against Israel, a fact that is cited by university officials in both states.

At KU, final exams are being given this week.

Last Friday evening, students had left the encampment set up outside Fraser Hall, packing up for the weekend.

At UMKC, recent rains have started to rinse away the long lists of names of Palestinians who have died, painstakingly written in colorful chalk by protesting students on sidewalks.

On Tuesday, Israeli forces seized control of the Rafah border crossing linking Gaza with Egypt, a key humanitarian route.

Israeli Defense Forces began retaliating for the killing that Hamas orchestrated of Israelis on Oct. 7 . Then, 1,200 Israelis and foreigners were killed, and more than 240 hostages were captured.

Since then, nearly 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry , many of them women and children.

Nationwide and locally, campus organizing began soon after.

Students say they are girded for the long haul.

UMKC Students for Justice in Palestine was founded by Yara Salamed, a law school student.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by UMKC Students for Justice in Palestine (@umkcsjp)

She’s lived in the West Bank with her family and experienced the feeling of being constantly assumed to be antisemitic and a lesser person.

“The Palestinians in Gaza, and in the West Bank, under the Israeli government, they have absolutely no rights at all,” she said. “Even the Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship are like second-class citizens.”

A key motto of the UMKC group: “We will not stop. We will not rest.”

Mortar board toppers that UMKC students can wear at their upcoming graduation ceremonies are being made available now, as they were at the fall commencement.

“Roos For Palestine,” is displayed in the red, black and green of the Palestinian flag.

The more recent campus sit-ins, while widely covered by local media, are merely the group’s latest actions.

At UMKC, the student group began leading teach-ins last fall, participating on panels and holding readings on social media from books like “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017” by Rashid Khalidi.

An outdoor protest in late April at UMKC drew several hundred students and the attention of administrators. At one point, campus security tried to rip down tents.

Of the many speakers that day, one summed up a key stand: “Within in our lifetime, we will see a free Palestine.”

College activism sparks a career

Patience and perseverance are key lessons linking protests now with those of the past.

The college students who began the anti-apartheid efforts in the late 1970s were no longer enrolled when their demands were met.

They had long since graduated and moved on to their careers by the time the state of Missouri divested from South Africa in 1987 and asked universities to do the same, a request that was completed by January 1993.

By then, the minority-white government of South African apartheid had also fallen, famously dismantled by negotiations between Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk. The men were jointly awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize .

Former students who took part in those earlier protests remember their activism as key to paths that they later chose.

Benson was the MU student chosen to represent the group at trial, months after the arrests. She remembers being impressed with the pro bono legal representation that she had through the American Civil Liberties Union.

She was found not guilty in a bench trial.

“It very much had a lot to do with not only going to law school, but becoming a public defender,” she said. “I was in private practice too, and I was involved most heavily with criminal defense.”

Several other former protesters are university professors. Another is a technology executive. And another, initially a journalist, later became a spokesperson for the Kansas American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.

Mark McCormick was a KU student in the late 1980s, protesting apartheid and other issues on campus.

“I remember thinking afterwards that I had a voice that I didn’t know that I had,” said the former deputy director for strategic initiatives at the Kansas ACLU .

There were times when word got out that police were coming to clear protests on campus. And McCormick remembers being vigilant that no one would get hurt, taking the microphone to ask for calm.

Other instances had him in meetings with the then-chancellor, trying to negotiate.

“I just feel like I was lucky that I had that experience,” he said of his time protesting university investments that had supported South African apartheid, and other civil rights issues. “You get to explore who you are going to be, what you believe in.”

As a KU student, McCormick took a class on South African history.

He been reading “ Kaffir Boy , An Autobiography, the True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa.”

But in class, he learned more.

He studied how South Africans had to carry identity papers and that tests were used, such as seeing if a comb would stick in a person’s hair — the offensive implication being that someone considered Black would have curlier, thicker hair.

The KU students formed their own group, Black Men of Today, believing that the Black Student Union was too averse to conflict.

Issues included standing up for a student who was allegedly sexually assaulted at a fraternity, challenging the administration for how it handled the case.

They didn’t erect shantytowns like at Mizzou. Instead, they targeted the university’s contracts with Coca-Cola, which did business in South Africa.

“The real thing is a real shame,” was the slogan the Black students used.

The students were adept at calling local media from Lawrence and Kansas City to cover their protests. At one point, that drew the attention of three Black executives from Coke who came to campus and tried to dissuade the students.

They weren’t successful.

By then, 1989-90, anti-apartheid movements were seeing an impact with corporations. Pepsi had left South Africa.

Coke had sold its factory to Black South Africans, which McCormick said the executives spoke about it as if it was a noble action.

But the students had done further research.

They had flyers ready, showing a tall glass of Coke, with dead bodies drawn at the bottom of the glass.

“They sold the syrup company to white South Africans just so they could take over the market because their competitors honored the boycott and left,” he said. “So even if you owned the Coke company, you couldn’t do anything without the whites. It was just a plan so that they could dominate the market when everyone else left.”

He doesn’t believe that their efforts influenced the administration to divest.

But the attention did affect other students.

After he graduated, a member of the Black Men of Today was elected student body president.

Teaching moments

A double-digit tuition hike sparked the anti-apartheid student activism at Mizzou.

Student government leaders were alarmed. They felt that the rising fees were too large of a burden on many students, said Doug Liljegren who was the Missouri Student Association President in 1978.

The curators had been working with the legislature, which was trying to balance state budgets.

“We were concerned that our students were not being heard,” said Liljegren, now of Leawood.

The students began researching the university’s investments, trying to find out where the money was being placed.

“We also found that they were heavily invested in tobacco and other companies that had a negative health impact on students,” he said. “So, it was a surprise of where they were invested.”

Liljegren signed the letter to the curators asking for change.

The letter reported that the university had investments in 54 companies doing business in South Africa.

“We presented an alternate budget to the board, suggesting that they could raise the funds in other ways,” he said.

The students suggested real estate investments.

Their plan wasn’t adopted, but the tuition hike was eventually trimmed back, he said.

Much of this information is contained in the papers of Carla Weitzel , covering student activism at MU between 1970 and 1999.

Weitzel was a leader of the student-led anti-apartheid movement years later, in the late 1980s, when Benson was also student.

Weitzel is remembered as a brave, vocal opponent of apartheid.

She died in 2000. And her husband later donated her archives to the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Liljegren donated his archives to another collection, the African Activist Archive , which is based at Michigan State University.

By the late 1980s, protests had spread to campuses nationwide, much like what is occurring now.

Some of the former student activists said that university officials seem far less tolerant, less willing to make deals with students now, especially about allowing encampments to be constructed.

Barbara G. Brents is a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In the 1980s, she was a Park Hill High School graduate and among the students arrested at MU for refusing to leave the anti-apartheid tents.

“At Missouri, we didn’t have all that many tents until the police started threatening to remove them,” Brents said. “And then, more people started occupying.”

Rallies could draw several hundred students and supportive faculty.

At one point, 17 students were arrested, charged with trespassing. The charges were later dropped.

The largest group of arrests happened later, when a deal that had been made with then-Chancellor Barbara Uehling expired. Uehling had agreed to let the students keep the structures in place until January 1987.

By February, an interim chancellor was in place. Duane Stuckey ordered the tents removed.

The students rebuilt them.

That’s when the arrests of the 41 students, Brents and Benson included, began.

Although the latest calls for divestment from Israel feel similar, the issue in the past was less controversial.

“Nobody thought apartheid in South Africa was a good thing,” Brents said. “It was really just a debate over what’s the best way to change things and should you be involved in another country, that sort of thing.”

The pushback on campuses today includes charges of antisemitism against some of the student protesters.

The chanting of slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is viewed by some as a call for the total elimination of Israel .

Jewish students have joined some of the protests, wanting peace in the region. But others say they feel targeted, made to feel unsafe on campus.

Brents recently went to see the student protest of Israel’s war against Hamas on her campus.

Walking away, she saw an Israeli flag, folded up, on the ground. She picked it up, assuming it had been dropped. Then she gave it back to a Jewish group that a table set up near the demonstration.

She told them that she’d been at the other protest but supports Israel’s right to exist. The Jewish students enthusiastically agreed, and they enveloped her in a hug.

“I walked away in tears,” Brents said. “It made me realize how difficult this is for so many people and also that violence is so wrong, just so wrong.”

Brents also countered a narrative being pushed by some conservative politicians, that the students protesting now are “a bunch of losers.”

Sustained protests do tend to draw some people who want to simply agitate, Brents said.

“But for the most part, these are responsible citizens who are going to do something to make the world a better place.”

This story was originally published by  Flatland , a fellow member of the  KC Media Collective .

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Guest Essay

Elite Colleges Walked Into the Israel Divestment Trap

By Gary Sernovitz

Mr. Sernovitz is a managing director of Lime Rock Management, a private equity firm that invests in oil and gas and clean energy companies and whose investors include colleges and universities.

“ Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest ” is a frequent chant ringing through pro-Palestinian college protests. Of all the actions one could advocate in the war between Israel and Hamas, protesters at Columbia listed, as their first demand, that it divest from companies and institutions that, in their view, “profit from Israeli apartheid.”

Israeli companies aren’t the only target. A proposal Columbia students put forward in December calls for divestment from Microsoft, Airbnb, Amazon and Alphabet, among others. Microsoft is tagged for supplying cloud software services to Israel; Airbnb is targeted for posting rentals in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, listings the platform said it would remove in 2018 . The company reversed this policy months later to settle lawsuits.

Administrators at some universities, including Brown and Northwestern , have agreed to talks with students about divestment as part of agreements to end campus encampments. Other schools have said point blank that they will not accede. The University of Michigan Regents, for one, in March reaffirmed “its longstanding policy to shield the endowment from political pressures and base investment decisions on financial factors such as risk and return.”

“Longstanding” is a debatable term, as it was only three years ago that the regents decided the endowment should stop investing in funds focused on certain fossil fuels (which affected the firm I work at). Before the war in Gaza, it had been pretty easy for universities to make compromises around divestment demands, but those expedient choices are haunting them now. Every investment in elite schools’ endowments is up for debate.

College endowment managers no doubt feel beleaguered that pressing moral questions regularly end up on their desks. For that desk is already covered with spreadsheets on another question: how to generate returns for universities that are nonprofits, unfathomably expensive, and desperate to not be just finishing schools for the rich. Last fiscal year, endowments over $5 billion provided 17.7 percent of their university’s budgets . This school year, Williams College charged $81,200 in tuition and fees . But spending per student was $135,600. The endowment helps make up the difference.

Yet activists view endowments with a sense of ownership. They are part of a community that owns this money. They also go after endowments because they lack better targets. It says something about the authority of ideas in our age that students lobby institutions dedicated to the advancement and propagation of knowledge mainly over what they do with their excess cash.

The mother to all divestment movements was the one that aimed at apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and ’80s. (In 1981, Barack Obama g ave his first public speech at a divestment rally at Occidental College.) It largely worked: Over 100 colleges in the U.S. eventually agreed to at least partly divest from companies that did business in the country. Years later, many believe divestment played some role in ending apartheid in South Africa.

From 2020 to 2022, as evidence of climate change grew increasingly unavoidable, student demands for divestment from fossil fuels claimed more victories, especially at the Ivy League and other colleges with large endowments — and not coincidentally large groups of activist students telling them what to do with them. Schools’ exposure to oil and gas investments was often less than 5 percent of their endowment, so finding a way to wind down investing, in some form, in the sector was easy to do.

Every divesting institution found its own path, some more logically consistent and sincere than others. I watched some of this unfold firsthand as some schools stopped investing in our oil and gas funds while others invested in our clean energy funds. But almost all the schools succeeded in minimizing real disruption to the endowment and inducing student activists to move on.

Unlike the effects of the South Africa movement, the early impact of oil and gas divestment by colleges and others has been negligible, or even counterproductive: Oil and gas companies have needed little external financial capital , and hostility to the divestment movement has led Republican-led states such as Florida to restrict E.S.G. investing , which focuses on environmental, social and governance factors. (Note that Florida’s State Board of Administration manages almost exactly the same amount of money as the 10 largest private college endowments combined.)

What the fossil fuel divestiture did establish, however, was that university leaders can be made to concede that their endowments will, in certain circumstances, be guided by the school’s collective values, and that current students can shape those values. And by getting endowments to not invest in the sector in some way , the protesters hardened an abstract moral judgment: that the oil and gas business, and the faceless bureaucrats who work for it, are wrong . Divestment champions hope the symbolic removal of an industry’s “social license” can take on its own power, emboldening government policymakers to regulate that industry or dissuading students from seeking jobs in it.

Now the reason for divestment is Israel rather than oil. For many students it’s part of the same conversation , as I saw in a scrawled word salad sign on display at Tulane’s pro-Palestinian encampment: “From the Gulf to the sea, no genocide for oil greed.”

University leaders could follow the same playbook as they did on fossil fuels and find ways to symbolically divest without disrupting their endowments in any notable way. Based on the size of G.D.P., not investing is Israel directly would be like not investing in Colorado. And despite the chants that charge otherwise, many endowments appear to have little to no direct exposure to Israel or to many of the American companies protesters want to blacklist.

But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic. This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license? How many years must pass since what some believe to be a country’s settler colonialist period or messy wars that kill innocent civilians to make it investable?

And if divestment against Israel is carried out, when should it end? Oil and gas divesting is meant never to end; oil and gas consumption is meant to end. Divestment from South Africa ended with apartheid. So university leaders will be forced to ask an often heterogeneous group of students what would earn Israel its social license back. A cease-fire? A new Israeli government? A two-state solution? The end of Israel as a Jewish state?

The effort to identify every investment with ties to Israel is also fraught. Columbia activists could find information only on pocket-change-size ownership of certain companies, such as $69,000 of Microsoft stock. So protesters are also demanding that colleges disclose all their investments, presumably so students can research the morality of each one. However, some firms that manage parts of an endowment’s money, particularly hedge funds, don’t report individual holdings to investors: asking them for it is like asking for the secret recipe for Coke.

But even if an endowment could provide a list of every underlying investment, it would likely then be inundated for more calls to divest, for more discovered connections — however small — to Israel, and for reasons related to other offenses discoverable with an online search. Why would there not be a Taiwanese student group demanding divestment from China, to dissuade an invasion? Other students demanding divestment from Big Tech, citing students’ mental health? Others demanding divestment from all of it, the hedge funds and private equity funds whose asset managers are not exactly healing American income inequality?

The answer, of course, is that endowments can’t be in the moral adjudication business — and they should never have headed this way. This does not mean that investing should be a returns-at-any-cost exercise. But it does mean that the real world does not always provide objective answers to how to balance benefits and consequences of companies providing products and services: Carbon emissions are bad, but energy consumption is necessary. Microsoft software for the Israeli government may displease you, but Microsoft saying it won’t sell software to Israel would displease others — and probably get itself banned from working with New York State agencies .

Listen to the protesters on divestment. They will not stop. They will not rest.

But neither will the markets. They open every morning, Monday through Friday, and university budgets’ demands on endowments never go away. Tuitions are rising . Costs always go up . Colleges should debate deep moral issues and discuss the hard compromises to solve the world’s ills. But we should move those efforts to the lecture halls, away from the investment offices. Divesting is an easy chant. Investing is hard enough as it is.

Gary Sernovitz is a managing director of Lime Rock Management, a private equity firm that invests in oil and gas and clean energy companies and whose investors include colleges and universities. He is also the author of “The Counting House,” a novel about the travails of a university chief investment officer.

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Why do college students protest? They know truth about Israel's genocide in Gaza | Opinion

Students believe it is actually patriotic and ethical to be concerned about our taxes being used to support governments that oppress people and ethnically cleanse an indigenous population.

Why are students at countless universities around the country creating peaceful encampments to demand their universities disclose and divest from companies that invest in Israel’s oppression of the indigenous Palestinian population? (And it is important to note that students are leading this rapidly growing movement.)

Students are keenly aware of the information divide between them and their parents and grandparents. A socially conscious generation with global access at their fingertips, they watch a genocide take place in real time. They participate in a global discussion and movement. That’s why they protest.

Students know the Israeli-imposed genocide in Gaza has killed nearly 40,000 civilians per the official count. They know an additional 10,000 dead Palestinians lie under the rubble and close to 100,000 are injured. They know thousands more may soon die due to forced starvation and dehydration.

Mainstream media often have biased coverage of Palestinians

In contrast, their parents and grandparents grew up getting their news from the same mainstream sources, often with biased coverage that leads to group think. The older generations regard questioning our government’s foreign policies, or even discussing how those policies affect people around the world, call one’s patriotism into question.

Students, on the other hand, believe it is actually patriotic and ethical to be concerned about our taxes being used to support governments that oppress people and ethnically cleanse an indigenous population of a country.

A new antisemitism takes root. Hatred of Jews led to 6 million deaths in Holocaust.

As these students helplessly watch every university and school in Gaza be bombed to the ground, hundreds of beloved professors massacred and thousands of their peers killed or starved by Israel simply for being Palestinian, they draw upon lessons they were taught growing up. Ingrained in this generation is the knowledge that we live on native lands that once belonged to many thriving tribes with a rich culture, people who were ethnically cleansed to make room for European “settlers.”

They learned about the injustices of slavery that wreaked havoc on a continent, with the impact reverberating on our Black community to this day. They learned about the horrors of the Holocaust reading the Diary of Anne Frank. They watched films about the civil rights movement and memorized quotes by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They wrote research papers on McCarthyism and tactics of political repression, silencing and persecution. They were taught about racism practiced in apartheid South Africa and the global movement to end it. Many of their classrooms had posters with personalities like the late President Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, leaders once branded as terrorists as they fought for justice.

Most important, this generation had the First Amendment rights of free speech ingrained in their education. They learned silence is complicity. They were often asked, “What would you have done if you were alive then?” Now we are asking them to forget all of those lessons. We are telling them that a bunch of tents on college campuses is more problematic than the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, including more than 70% of whom are women and children, done with our tax dollars and military support. We are telling them any means can be used to silence you if you try to bring attention to the complicity of our government and our universities in supporting a settler-colonialism state created 76 years ago in the middle of the Arab world by Europeans wanting to get rid of their “Jewish problem.”

We are telling our students that unless you obediently accept our unethical policies, we will brand you as troublemakers or worse; we will suspend you from your universities; we will make sure no one will hire you; and we will bring law enforcement to brutally attack you because everything we taught you is actually a lie.

Jewish supporters refuse to conflate beautiful faith with genocide

We will call you “antisemitic” as a way to silence you in spite of the fact that young, justice-oriented Jews are at the forefront of the movement for Palestinian rights and liberation. These Jews refuse to have their beautiful faith conflated with the genocidal actions of a racist apartheid government and are actively speaking out against Israel. These young Jews believe “never again” means never again for everyone, not just Jews.

These young Jewish activists are increasingly repulsed by the Jewish Federations, the ADL and other institutions that are PR machines for another government at the expense of upholding the true tenants of Judaism, particularly Tikkun Olam, or the requirement to mend the world. These are justice minded, confident, outspoken Jews who refuse to employ perpetual victimhood tactics as a method of silencing criticism of Israel’s horrific treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population.

What has become incredibly clear is that the world is a new place. In spite of the horror in Gaza, it will never be business as usual again. This amazingly diverse and committed movement of young people is holding university leaders and elected officials accountable. They are demanding investments and policies that prioritize human rights, dignity and justice for all people. They are willing to risk so much to demand ethical and responsible decisions, and they are not swayed by donors, funders, special interests or threats.

They are the leaders we have been waiting for. They learned their lessons well.

Janan Najeeb is Founder and Executive Director of the Milwaukee Muslim Women's Coalition .