essay about the apartheid

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”.

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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Apartheid (1948-1994).

Apartheid is the name of the racial institution that was established in 1948 by the National Party that governed South Africa until 1994. The term, which literally means “apartness,” reflected a violently repressive policy designed to ensure that whites, who comprised 20% of the nation’s population, would continue to dominate the country.

Although the policy began officially in 1948, the practice of racial discrimination has deep roots in South African society. As early as 1788, Dutch colonizers began establishing laws and regulations that separated white settlers and native Africans. These laws and regulations continued after the British occupation in 1795, and soon led to the channeling of Africans into specific areas that would later constitute their so-called homelands. By 1910, the year that all of the formerly separate Boer Republics united with the British colony to become the Union of South Africa, there were nearly 300 reserves for natives throughout the country.

By 1948, Dr. D.F. Malan, the prime architect of apartheid, led the National Party in the first campaign that centered on openly racist appeals to white unity. The Party promised that if elected it would make permanent these reserves under the joint fundamental principles of separation and trusteeship. The National Party swept into office, winning 80 seats (mainly from Afrikaner voters), compared to the United Party’s 64 seats.

Soon afterwards the new government instituted a number of policies in the name of apartheid which sought to “ensure the survival of the white race” and to keep the different races separate on every level of society and in every facet of life. One of the first acts passed was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, in 1949, which outlawed marriage between Europeans and non-Europeans. The following year new legislation banned sexual intercourse between Europeans and non-Europeans. Additionally, in 1950, the Malan government passed the Population Registration Act, which categorized every South African by race, and subsequently required people to carry with them at all times a card stating their racial identity. This Act was later modified in 1952, by issuing “reference books” instead of identification passes. Anyone caught without their “reference book” was fined or imprisoned.

The Group Areas Act of 1950, however, was the core of apartheid in South Africa. The act marked off areas of land for different racial groups, and made it illegal for people to live in any but their designated areas. Thousands of Africans were uprooted and moved into racially segregated neighborhoods in cities or to reserves which by the 1970s would be called homelands.

In conjunction with the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, even black workers who during the day worked in the now residentially white only cities were still required to use different public transportation, post offices, restaurants, schools, and even separate doors, benches, and counters. The Natives Urban Areas Act in 1952 and the Native Labor Act in 1953 placed more restrictions on the black majority in South Africa.

Three important movements challenged apartheid. The oldest was the African National Congress (ANC) which was founded in 1912. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) broke away from the ANC in 1958 and initiated its own campaign against apartheid. Both groups were eventually banned by the South African government and forced underground where they began violent campaigns of resistance. In the late 1960s, the South African Students’ Organization (SASO) was formed. Today it is known as the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in South Africa.

Apartheid formally ended in 1994 with the first election which allowed the participation of all adult voters. With that election Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa.

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Source of the author's information:.

Martin Meredith, In the Name of Apartheid (New York: Harper & Row Publishers,1988); Mokgethi Motlhabi, Challenge to Apartheid: Toward a Moral National Resistance (Grand Rapids: William B. Erdmann’s Publishing Company, 1988); L.E. Neame, T he History of Apartheid: The Story of the Colour War in South Africa (New York: London House & Maxwell, 1962); U.S. Department of State: Diplomacy in Action. “The end of apartheid.” http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/pcw/98678.htm .

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Table of contents:

Triumph of the National Party

• Science, God and Race

Many Nations

The passbook system, the defiance campaign, the freedom charter, women protest, the sharpeville massacre, the rivonia trial, shut down at home, organizing overseas.

The roots of apartheid can be found in the history of colonialism in South Africa and the complicated relationship among the Europeans that took up residence, but the elaborate system of racial laws was not formalized into a political vision until the late 1940s. That system, called apartheid (“apartness”), remained in place until the early 1990s and set the country apart, eventually making South Africa a pariah state shunned by much of the world.

Having aggressively promoted an ideology of Afrikaner nationalism for a decade, the National Party won South Africa’s 1948 election by promising to clamp down on non-white groups. Once in office, the National Party promptly began to institute racial laws and regulations it called  apartheid  (a word that means “apartness” in Afrikaans). Led by Daniel Malan, a former pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church turned politician, the National Party described apartheid in a pamphlet produced for the election as “a concept historically derived from the experience of the established White population of the country, and in harmony with such Christian principles as justice and equity. It is a policy which sets itself the task of preserving and safeguarding the racial identity of the White population of the country; of likewise preserving and safeguarding the identity of the indigenous peoples as separate racial groups.” 1

• 1 D. W. Kruger, ed., South African Parties and Policies 1910–1960 (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960), available at Politicsweb, accessed July 29, 2015.

Apartheid Era Sign

The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (passed in 1953) led to signs such as the one shown above. The Act prohibited people of different races from using the same public amenities.

By 1948, segregation of the races had long been the norm. But as journalist Allister Sparks noted, apartheid, drawing on racist anthropology and racist theology, “substituted enforcement for convention. What happened automatically before was now codified in law and intensified when possible. . . . [Racism] became a matter of doctrine, of ideology, of theologized faith infused with a special fanaticism, a religious zeal.” 1

Religion was an important aspect of Afrikaner identity. Most Afrikaners were members of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, a strict and conservative Calvinist church that promoted the belief that the Afrikaners were a new “chosen people” to whom God had given South Africa. Journalist Terry Bell explained the role of religion in the outlook of those who supported the National Party: “Afrikaners [saw themselves] as players in the unfolding of the Book of Revelations, upholding the light of Christian civilization against an advancing wall of darkness. . . . It was God’s will that the ‘Afrikaner nation’ . . . linked by language and a narrow Calvinism, had been placed on the southern tip of the African continent.” 2  As a result, they saw themselves as a select group whose right to the land was greater than any other group’s.

The new National Party administration offered a stark view of ethnic categories. As laid out in the Population Registration Act of 1950, these categories were as follows: “white” (“a person who in appearance obviously is, or who is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person”), “native” (“a person who in fact is or is generally accepted as a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa”), and “coloured” (“a person who is not a white person or a native”). 3  “Indian” was soon added as a fourth group. The groups were not only portrayed as distinct and fundamentally different; drawing on principles of Social Darwinism, they were ranked hierarchically in terms of supposed intellectual capacity and other attributes. The white population stood at the pinnacle of the South African racial hierarchy, with the National Party ideology claiming that they should dominate the other groups because of their natural superiority. Their control of the state guaranteed whites superior access to education, healthcare, employment, and housing. “Natives,” or black South Africans, stood at the very bottom of this steep hierarchy—a necessity in the eyes of Afrikaners, who believed not only that their livelihoods depended on depriving black South Africans of land, voting rights, the right to marry freely, and, above all, the right to participate freely in the labor market but also that Africans were not as deserving as whites of these privileges. Indian and “coloured” groups were “ranked” above black South Africans, allowing them some employment and mobility privileges denied to black South Africans yet still making them subservient to the white South African population.

Science, God, and Race

The triumph of the National Party pushed to the forefront of South African racism the ideas fostered by church leaders and scholars in Afrikaner institutions. During the 1930s, scientific books and articles, some written by scholars at Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria, lent credence to the idea that white populations were of superior intelligence to nonwhite groups. The Dutch Reformed Church, whose congregations had been segregated since 1857, also preached that, following the Tower of Babel, God had ordained that different cultures be distinct and sovereign. The church’s ideas combined with the pseudoscience of race to give rise to a secular theology of Christian nationalism. If groups were to develop as God intended, they needed to live separately.

Because they conceived of blacks and whites as fundamentally different, Afrikaners concluded that contact between the groups fostered conflict. Each group would prosper most if left to develop on its own; to impose segregation was to protect and promote black culture, they argued. The 1947 National Party campaign pamphlet explained:

The party holds that a positive application of apartheid between the white and non-white racial groups and the application of the policy of separation also in the case of the non-White racial groups is the only sound basis on which the identity and the survival of each race can be assured and by means of which each race can be stimulated to develop in accordance with its own character, potentialities and calling. Hence inter marriage between the two groups will be prohibited. Within their own areas the non-white communities will be afforded full opportunity to develop, implying the establishment of their own institutions and social services, which will enable progressive non-Whites to take an active part in the development of their own peoples. The policy of our country should envisage total apartheid as the ultimate goal of a natural process of separate development. 4

The reading  Apartheid Policies  offers a more extended explanation of the ideas behind apartheid, as publicly articulated by the party.

A contradiction arose, however, because if black South African labor had been subtracted from the white South African economy, the latter would have immediately collapsed. While the theory of apartheid argued that the races should be kept separate, the economy of the South African state depended heavily on black South African labor. Therefore, the apartheid state had to permit black South African laborers to come and go between white and black territories.

After the National Party took power, it implemented a series of laws designed both to separate each of the country’s racial groups and to divide and weaken the black South African population and allow for the easy exploitation of its labor. The Population Registration Act created a national system of racial classification that gave every citizen a single identification number and racial label that determined exactly what privileges this person would be able to enjoy. Where one could live, whether one had to carry a passbook to travel, and what sort of education one could receive depended on one’s racial classification. While white South Africans enjoyed every conceivable right, black South Africans could not vote for South African officials, and coloured South Africans could only vote for white representatives—they could not run for office themselves. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 banned interracial marriage, while the Immorality Act of 1950 “prohibited sex between whites and non-whites.”

The Group Areas Act of 1950 was the Malan government’s first attempt to increase the separation between white and black urban residential areas. The law was both a continuation of earlier laws of segregation and a realization of an apartheid ideal that cultures should be allowed to develop separately. The law declared many historically black urban areas officially white. The Native Resettlement Act of 1954 authorized the government to force out longtime residents and knock down buildings to make room for white-owned homes and businesses. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed under the authority of this act. For example, on February 9, 1955, Prime Minister Malan sent in 2,000 police officers to remove the 60,000 residents of Sophiatown, a vibrant African neighborhood in central Johannesburg. Black South African residents were forcibly resettled in the Meadowlands neighborhood of Soweto, where they were expected to move into houses without electricity, water, or toilets. In Durban, Indian neighborhoods faced a similar fate. City centers became enclaves for the white South African population, while black, coloured, and Indian South Africans were relegated to townships at the periphery of the urban areas, which were often far removed from centers of employment and resources such as hospitals and recreation spaces. Generally, the townships were intended to contain the black South African population by restricting movement through urban planning while ensuring that black South Africans had permission to leave these areas in order to work.

• 1 Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2006), 190.
• 2 Terry Bell, Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth (London: Verso, 2003), 23.
• 3 Population Registration Act (1950) , Wikisource entry, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 4 D. W. Kruger, ed., South African Parties and Policies 1910–1960 (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1960), available at Politicsweb, accessed July 29, 2015.

Bantustans in South Africa

With the passing of the Bantu Authorities Act in 1951, the apartheid set in motion the creation of ten bantustans in South Africa, illustrated in this map.

Apartheid laws treated black South Africans not as citizens of South Africa but rather as members of assigned ethnic communities. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) and the Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) created ten “homelands” for black South Africans, known as Bantustans, and established new authorities in the Bantustans. While the apartheid state portrayed the Bantustans as a system that offered black South Africans independence, giving the appearance of self-government, the leaders of the homelands were appointed by the apartheid state. Furthermore, black South Africans were assigned these ethnic identities and corresponding “homelands” even if they did not see this as a central aspect of their identity. Black South Africans were essentially stripped of their South African citizenship.

By making black South Africans citizens of Bantustans, the government deflected any possible criticisms of refusing them the right to vote in South Africa. But this arrangement also very deliberately created a system of migrant labor. Since the homeland areas, which were mostly rural and underdeveloped, offered inhabitants few employment opportunities, most had to search for work in cities and live temporarily in townships. Given the desperate situation in the homelands, the apartheid state was ensured of a regular source of cheap labor for white-owned businesses and homes.

Although they were said by apartheid authorities to bear a historical association with the different kingdoms, Bantustans were scattered around the fringes of the country without any consideration for the well-being of their residents. KwaZulu in Natal, for example, was divided into many pieces, separated by large areas designated as white. The apartheid government reserved urban areas, the most desirable farmland, and regions rich in natural resources for white South Africans, while it allocated the least arable land for the Bantustans. Although black South Africans constituted nearly 70% of the population, only 13% of South Africa’s territory was allocated to the Bantustans. The reading  A Wife’s Lament  offers a look at how the creation of the homelands affected black South African families.

Girl Walking to School, Mthatha

A child walks to school through the barren village of Qunu, South Africa, located just outside of the town of Mthatha.

Dividing the black South African population into Bantustans was in part intended to break the solidarity that had formed between groups of black South Africans in the face of white oppression. By cultivating a false sense of “tribal” belonging, the government sought to reduce the black South African population to many small, ineffective groups, channeling discontent from resistance to apartheid into internal bickering.

A decade after the rise of the National Party, many black South Africans found themselves effectively stateless. They could only enter white areas to work, and they needed documents authorizing them to do so.

By the middle of the twentieth century, vast numbers of black South Africans commuted daily from Bantustans and townships to the white areas where they worked. Various forms of internal passports had existed in South Africa since the early twentieth century, but the apartheid government expanded and formalized the pass system. Designed to satisfy both the need for black labor and the need to protect white advantages, “pass” laws required every black male over the age of 16 to carry a passbook, which contained a photograph, fingerprints, a racial classification, place of work, and the bearer’s police record.

Additionally, the passbook had to have a current signature from an employer and proof that the bearer had paid income taxes. The passbook bureaucracy was so convoluted that few people were able keep their records current, providing authorities with an excuse for detaining black South African men at will. Anyone living in a black township on the outskirts of a white city who did not possess appropriate papers was effectively treated as an illegal alien and subject to arrest. Those found in violation were sometimes imprisoned, often forced to pay fines, and sometimes sent back to their homelands. Eventually, black South African women were also required to carry passes, an act that had a tragic impact on the lives of tens of thousands of families who were not allowed to live together. Only a few of these women with formal salaried employment were able to secure the necessary passes and keep them current, thereby satisfying the authorities’ requirements to be legally living in the same house as their husbands. Most black South African women were forced to remain in the homelands, raising their children and eking out a living off the land while their husbands worked in the cities or on white-owned farms.

Most black South Africans were obliged to leave “white areas” by sunset. At the country’s many checkpoints and roadblocks, black South Africans were at the mercy of the police and could summarily be stopped, arrested, and deported to homelands. Thousands of black South Africans were forced to break the law on a daily basis as they searched for work or attempted to keep their families together.

Police carried out daily raids on black residences, bursting in at midnight, forcing residents to show their passes, and arresting those out who did not have them. Police brutality was rife; hundreds of thousands of black South Africans were arrested, thousands disappeared from their homes without a trace, and hundreds lost their lives to the guns and batons of law enforcement officials. The government recruited black South Africans to join the police force and serve as informants, torturers, and, in some cases, executioners, and for a variety of reasons (bribes, economic pressures, and scare tactics), some black South Africans helped the government enforce apartheid. The reading  Experiencing Apartheid  gives an account of how the draconian enforcement of apartheid laws could affect black South Africans.

As apartheid laws were implemented, South Africa’s black leaders looked for a way to protest the changes imposed by the minority white government. Denied the right to vote, they had to find other means of expressing opposition outside the formal political system. From 1950 to 1952, the African National Congress (ANC) organized mass actions, which included boycotts, civil disobedience, demonstrations, and strikes.

A group of resisters proudly pose after their release from prison in Durban during the Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws, 1952.

Launched in April 1952, on the 300th anniversary of the arrival of the first Dutch colonists, this Defiance Campaign became the largest campaign of civil disobedience in South Africa’s history up to that point. It was also the first multiracial mass-resistance campaign, and its unified leadership included representatives from the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, and the Coloured People’s Congress. Together with other groups, these organizations formed the Congress Alliance, which forged a multiracial front against the implementation of apartheid. 1 Following heavily attended demonstrations in a number of towns, defiance of the newly erected racial laws commenced on June 26, 1953. Ten thousand volunteers, organized by the leader of the ANC Youth League, 34-year-old Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, were instructed to enter forbidden areas without passes, use entrances designated “Europeans only,” and occupy “white only” counters and waiting rooms. 2  These violations were designed to flood the prison system, rendering law enforcement impossible.

• 1 For Nelson Mandela’s description of the first months of the campaign and the unity between the different groups, see “ We Defy—10,000 Volunteers Protest Against Unjust Laws ,” August 30, 1952, African National Congress website, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 2 Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: The Real Story , 3rd ed. (Cape Town: The Reader’s Digest Association Limited, 1994), 385.

Nelson Mandela, 1937

A young Nelson Mandela poses for a photograph in Umtata shortly before moving to Fort Beaufort to attend Healdtown Comprehensive School.

A decade later, Mandela reflected on the goals and strategies behind the Defiance Campaign:

Even after 1949, the ANC remained determined to avoid violence. At this time, however, there was a change from the strictly constitutional means of protest which had been employed in the past. The change was embodied in a decision which was taken to protest against apartheid legislation by peaceful, but unlawful, demonstrations against certain laws. Pursuant to this policy the ANC launched the Defiance Campaign, in which I was placed in charge of volunteers. This campaign was based on the principles of passive resistance. More than 8,500 people defied apartheid laws and went to jail. Yet there was not a single instance of violence in the course of this campaign on the part of any defier. I and nineteen colleagues were convicted for the role which we played in organising the campaign, but our sentences were suspended mainly because the judge found that discipline and non-violence had been stressed throughout. 1

The government lashed out, arresting over 8,000 South Africans and handing out stiff penalties and long prison sentences to those who had broken apartheid laws. It adopted the Public Safety Act (1953), which allowed the president to suspend all existing laws, stripping away basic civil liberties. “The government saw the campaign,” Mandela later recalled, “as a threat to its security and its policy of apartheid. They regarded civil disobedience not as a form of protest but as a crime, and were perturbed by the growing partnership between Africans and Indians. Apartheid was designed to divide racial groups, and we showed that different groups could work together. The prospect of a united front between Africans and Indians, between moderates and radicals, greatly worried them.” 2

While the Defiance Campaign lost momentum after a few months, and it did not achieve many concessions from the government, it was a turning point for South Africa. For the liberation movement, it was the first mass campaign, swelling the membership ranks of the ANC from just 7,000 to 100,000 and helping to transform the group from an elite organization into a mass movement. 3

In early 1955, the ANC organized a listening campaign, in which they sent out 50,000 volunteers to talk with people across the country about their political hopes for South Africa. In June 1955, the ANC, along with several other anti-apartheid political organizations—the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, the South African Congress of Trade Unions, and the Congress of Democrats—developed a set of political demands that drew on the results of these interviews. The “Freedom Charter,” as it became known, called for a nonracial South Africa, in which people of all races would have equal rights and would share in the country’s wealth.

The Freedom Charter became the political agenda for the ANC, shaping its actions over the next several decades. The charter called for rights for all South Africans, not just black South Africans, and this concept of nonracialism became an important principle behind the ANC’s approach to political change. The Freedom Charter served as the guiding document for the ANC in its struggle against apartheid and beyond, as its nonracialism ultimately became a basis for ANC policies after the fall of apartheid. The reading The  Freedom Charter  includes the text of this foundational document.

Although their role has often been overlooked in historical accounts of resistance to apartheid, black South African women played an important part in opposing the system of racial segregation. (White and “coloured” women were part of the resistance, but the vast majority were black South Africans.) In the early 1900s, black South African women successfully resisted proposed legislation that would require them to carry passbooks. After a setback in 1918, women organized again to end the practice altogether under the leadership of Charlotte Maxeke, a gifted singer, social worker, and activist—a hero of the early days of protest. She was called “the mother of African freedom in this country” by A. B. Xuma, who served as the president of the ANC in the 1940s. 4

• 1 Nelson Mandela, “ An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die ,” The Guardian , April 22, 2007, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 2 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 116.
• 3 For a full and vivid description of the campaign, see Monty Naicker, “The Defiance Campaign Recalled,” June 30, 1972, African National Congress website, accessed July 27, 2015.
• 4 Andile Mnyandu, “ Charlotte Maxeke ,” eThekwini Municipality website, accessed July 27, 2015.

Woman Showing Her Passbook

An unidentified black South African woman defiantly shows her passbook.

The multiracial Federation of South African Women was formed in the 1950s, representing hundreds of thousands of women. Together with the ANC Women’s League, the federation organized many local demonstrations against the pass laws, culminating in the March on Pretoria. On August 9, 1956, about 20,000 women peacefully gathered in front of the city’s Union Buildings. They stood in silence for 30 minutes and then, breaking the quiet, chanted a call to the prime minister: “Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo!” (Now that you have touched the women, you have struck a rock!) Alerted to the protest ahead of time, the prime minister, J. G. Strijdom, had slipped out of town. Before they concluded their protest, activists left on the prime minister’s door a petition bearing the signatures of 100,000 women. Their chant became the slogan for future women’s protests. The reading  Women Rise Up against Apartheid and Change the Movement  features a firsthand account of the 1956 women’s march.

By the late 1950s, a growing number of activists questioned the tactics of the African National Congress. The young founders of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), formed in 1959, believed that only an all-black African organization, in league with anti-colonial Africans throughout the continent, could adopt the forceful posture necessary to overcome apartheid. The time had come, these firebrands believed, to reclaim the land stolen by whites. In his inaugural speech, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, head of the PAC, outlined their approach:

[W]e reject both apartheid and so-called multi-racialism as solutions of our socio-economic problems. . . . To us the term “multi-racialism” implies that there are such basic insuperable differences between the various national groups here that the best course is to keep them permanently distinctive in a kind of democratic apartheid. That to us is racialism multiplied, which probably is what the term connotes. We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, everybody who owes his only loyalty to Afrika and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African. 1

Questioning the effectiveness of nonviolence against apartheid, the PAC set up a military wing, Poqo, that was feared by the white establishment.

The PAC announced to authorities that it would lead a peaceful demonstration against pass laws in the township of Sharpeville on March 21, 1960. Some 5,000 protesters gathered in the town center and then marched toward the police station to turn themselves in for defying pass laws. 2  Around midday, the police panicked and opened fire on the demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding another 180. Most were shot in the back as they fled.

Black South African leaders called for a day of mourning and a “stay-at-home” strike on March 28, 1960. Hundreds of thousands of black South Africans did not show up for work that day, making it the first successful national strike in the nation’s history. Marches took place in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town; the largest included a group of 30,000 who marched from Langa to Cape Town, led by 23-year-old Philip Kgosana. Fearing that black protests might spread, the government acted decisively in the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre. It declared a state of emergency and arrested more than 11,000 people, including the leaders of both the ANC and the PAC. On April 8, the government banned both organizations. This put an abrupt end to the protests and ushered in a period of harsh repression that lasted for more than a decade.

During the 1960s, the government intensified its policies against the anti-apartheid movement by severely restricting the ability of the movement’s leaders to speak in public and to mobilize the population. The government went on to scrap what few rights non-white workers had, including the rights to organize, bargain, and strike, and it also intensified efforts to shut down surviving black urban neighborhoods and move the black population to the townships and homelands.

Although officially banned, the ANC continued to function clandestinely. The young leadership of the ANC, having seen their hopes for change dashed so violently, began to discuss a new approach to resistance. Despite opposition from the old guard, in 1961 the young upstarts prevailed: while there would never be official ANC approval, the creation of an armed wing was tacitly accepted. Named Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation,” known as MK), the clandestine group had Nelson Mandela as its commander.

Such a group needed new skills and new partners. Mandela and the other militant ANC members formed an alliance with the South African Communist Party, a multiracial political organization with ties to the Soviet Union that had been banned in 1950 but remained active underground, working primarily to support the interests of workers. They based MK operations at a farm in Rivonia, not far from Johannesburg. Setting up a network of operatives committed to terror permitted MK, over a year and a half, to carry out approximately 200 attacks on government facilities. By January 1962, Mandela had traveled to Algeria, where he learned the basics of guerrilla warfare from members of that nation’s National Liberation Front. A fortnight after his return to South Africa, he was arrested on the charges of inciting workers to strike and leaving the country without a passport. A year later, Mandela’s MK comrades were arrested at their Rivonia training camp.

In 1963, three years after the terror of the Sharpeville massacre carried out by government forces, the Rivonia Trial began with the government seeking to accuse its opponents of fomenting violence. Ten defendants, including six black Africans, three white Jews, and the son of an Indian immigrant, were charged with sabotage and attempting to violently overthrow the government of South Africa.

During the trial, the defendants decided not to deny the charge of sabotage. They wanted the world to know what they had done and why. Their lawyers expressed misgivings about their decision, because it meant that they could be put to death for treason. But the revolutionaries felt that they had to take the risk, using the trial to make their positions known to every person in South Africa.

When he took the stand at the Pretoria Supreme Court, Mandela described his personal journey within the resistance movement, explaining the reasoning behind the adoption of a militant approach. (The reading  Mandela on Trial  includes the text of this testimony.) The prosecutor attempted to prove that the group, which he labeled communist, was plotting to overthrow the government of South Africa. He played on Afrikaner fears of Soviet revolutionary plots. The government had long presented itself as a true ally of the West, securing generous financial and military support—a position unusual among African states, many of which adopted socialism as a reaction against the colonial powers they had thrown off.

When the trial ended in June 1964, two men had been acquitted. Six of the remaining eight, including Mandela, were found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison.

In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre and the government crackdown that followed, the ANC leadership charged Oliver Tambo, the organization's deputy president, with the task of beginning to organize overseas. With protest nearly impossible within the country and so many top ANC leaders in prison, Tambo looked for new ways to fight against the apartheid regime. Making use of a home base in London, he lobbied international leaders to speak out against the brutality in his homeland. Almost immediately, Tambo and British anti-apartheid movement activists organized to have South Africa removed from the British Commonwealth, an intergovernmental organization made up of countries that were formerly part of the British Empire—a move that succeeded in 1961. At the same time, activists began to lobby against South Africa in the United Nations, winning a 1962 vote at the UN General Assembly for a trade ban on South Africa. A partial arms ban followed a year later. Further international pressure against South Africa’s discriminatory policies came from the International Olympic Committee, which first suspended South Africa from participating in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and then formally banned the country from the Olympics in 1970. The ANC, with Tambo’s leadership, eventually set up 27 overseas missions.

However, diplomacy was only one part of the strategy. In 1965, the countries of Tanzania and Zambia agreed to let the ANC’s unofficial armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), set up paramilitary training camps. Under the leadership of Abongz Mbede and Joe Slovo, a South African Jew whose family emigrated from Lithuania, the MK sought to bring what they called an “armed struggle” to South Africa. In the late 1960s, though, South Africa was surrounded by neighbors that were allies of the apartheid government, making it difficult for fighters to make it into the country. An official history of the ANC describes the situation:

The ANC consultative conference at Morogoro, Tanzania in 1969 looked for solutions to this problem. . . .The Morogoro Conference called for an all-round struggle. Both armed struggle and mass political struggle had to be used to defeat the enemy. But the armed struggle and the revival of mass struggle depended on building ANC underground structures within the country. A fourth aspect of the all-round struggle was the campaign for international support and assistance from the rest of the world. These four aspects were often called the four pillars of struggle. The non-racial character of the ANC was further consolidated by the opening up of the ANC membership to non-Africans. 3

• 1 “ Robert Sobukwe Inaugural Speech, April 1959 ,” African National Congress website, accessed June 2018.
• 2 David James Smith, Young Mandela: The Revolutionary Years (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010), 210.
• 3 “ A Brief History of the African National Congress ,” African National Congress website, accessed June 2018.

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, “ Introduction: Early Apartheid: 1948-1970 ”, last updated August 3, 2018.

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Apartheid and reactions to it

In 1948, the National Party (NP), representing Afrikaners, won the national election on a platform of racism and segregation under the slogan of 'apartheid’. Apartheid built upon earlier laws, but made segregation more rigid and enforced it more aggressively.  All Government action and response was decided according to the policy of apartheid. In turn, apartheid failed to respond effectively and adequately to concerns that had led to intermittent labour and civic unrest that erupted in the aftermath of World War II. Consequently, throughout the 1950s unrest in African, Coloured and Indian communities escalated, becoming more frequent and determined. Labour unrest too was in evidence during this period.

After the 1948 elections, as the liberation movements intensified their efforts, the Government came down heavily on them.  It introduced the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950. However, in a determined reaction, the liberation movements had assumed a more combative posture. This was spelled out in the Programme of Action adopted by the ANC in 1949. Under this policy the first major action was the Defiance Campaign launched in 1952. . This Campaign brought Africans, Coloureds and Indians together against the common enemy and was a direct reaction by the liberation movements to the unjust laws passed by the government.  Some Whites also joined the struggle alongside Africans, Indians and Coloureds in different campaigns.

Other campaigns included the Western Areas Campaign from 1953 to 1957 and intended to undermine efforts to forcibly remove the community from Sophiatown to Soweto. The Bantu Education Campaign was a reaction to the introduction of Bantu Education in 1953. The Congress of the People gathrered in Kliptown in 1955 to adopt the Freedom Charter and the women’s anti pass march in 1956 expressed women’s abhorrence of the extension of pass laws to them was expressed.

There were other forms of unrest that were spontaneous, largely unorganized reactions to apartheid measures. Foremost among these were bus boycotts that were responses to increased transport costs, boycotts and attacks on municipal beerhalls that were intended to undermine African Women’s source of livelihood from proceeds of beer brewing and reactions to stricter enforcement of influx control regulations.

Institutionalising Apartheid

National Party leaders D. F. Malan and Hendrik F. Verwoerd were the architects of apartheid. Malan used the term "apartheid" from the 1930s as he distanced his party from British traditions of liberalism and the earlier policy of segregation, which he saw as too lenient towards Blacks. Verwoerd, educated in the Netherlands, the United States, and Germany, was the main ideologue of apartheid. He became Native Affairs Minister in the early 1950s and Prime Minister in 1958.

In principle, apartheid did not differ that much from the policy of segregation of the South African government existing before the Afrikaner Nationalist Party came to power in 1948. The main difference was that apartheid made segregation part of the law. Apartheid cruelly and forcibly separated people, and had a fearsome state apparatus to punish those who fought against it. Another reason why apartheid was seen as worse than segregation was that apartheid was introduced in a period when other countries were moving away from racist policies. Before World War Two, the Western world was not as critical of racial discrimination, during which period Africa was colonized. The Second World War highlighted the problems of racism, making the world turn away from such policies and encouraging demands for decolonization. It was during this period that South Africa introduced the more rigid racial policy of apartheid.

Various reasons can be advanced for the introduction of the policy of apartheid and support for it, which are all closely linked. Among the reasons, are those of racial superiority and fear. In South Africa the white people are in the minority, and many were worried that they would lose their jobs, culture and language which explains how people were thinking.

Apartheid Laws

Numerous laws were passed in the creation of the apartheid state in the 1950s; this decade can be described as the era of ' petty apartheid ,’ when the Nationalists passed many new racist laws to enforce a racially separate and unequal social order. The 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, for instance, imposed segregation on all public facilities, including post offices, beaches, stadiums, parks, toilets, and cemeteries, and buses and trains as well.

Here are a few of the pillars on which apartheid rested:

• Population Registration Act, 1950 - This Act demanded that people be registered according to their racial group. This meant that the Department of Home Affairs would have a record of people according to whether they were White, Coloured, Black, Indian or Asian. People would then be treated differently according to their population group, and so this law formed the basis of apartheid. It was however not always that easy to decide what racial group a person was part of, and this caused some problems.
• Group Areas Act, 1950 - This was the Act that started physical separation between races, especially in urban areas. The Act also called for the removal of some groups of people into areas set aside for their racial group. Well known removals were those in District Six , Sophiatown and Lady Selborne (also see Cato Manor , Fietas and Curries Fountain (Grey Street area) ). People from these areas were then placed in townships outside of the town. They could not own property here, only rent it, as land could only be white owned.
• Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, 1959 - This Act forced different racial groups to live in different areas. Only a small percentage of South Africa was left for black people (who comprised the vast majority) to form their 'homelands’. Like the Group Areas Act, this act also got rid of 'black spots’ inside white areas, by moving all black people out of the city. This Act caused much hardship and resentment. People lost their homes, were moved off land they had owned for many years and were moved to undeveloped areas far away from their place of work.
• Bantu Education Act, 1953 - established an inferior education system for Africans based upon a curriculum intended to produce manual laborers and obedient subjects. Similar discriminatory education laws were also imposed on Coloureds, who had lost the right to vote in 1956, and Indians. The government denied funding to mission schools that rejected Bantu Education, leading to the closure of many of the best schools for Africans. In the higher education sector, the Extension of University Education Act of 1959 prevented black students from attending "white" universities (except with government permission) and created separate and unequal institutions for Africans, Coloureds, and Indians respectively. The apartheid government also undermined intellectual and cultural life through intense censorship of books, movies, and radio and television programs.
• The Suppression of Communism Act, 1950 (originally introduced as the Unlawful Organisations Bill) - The Act was introduced in an attempt to curb the influence of the CPSA and other formations that opposed the government's apartheid policy. It sanctioned the banning/punishment of the CPSA or any group or individual intending to bring about political, economic, industrial and social change through the promotion of disorder or disturbance, using unlawful acts or encouraging feelings of hostility between the European and non-European races of the Union of South Africa. The Act was progressively tightened up in 1951, 1954, and yearly from 1962-1968.

Some other important laws were the:

• Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949
• Immorality Amendment Act, 1950
• Separate Representation of Voters Act, 1951
• Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, 1953

Resistance before 1959

*South Africa and the United Nations Organization *South Africa’s Foreign Policy

This period 1948-1959 was characterised by more militant forms of protest, including “immediate and active boycott, strike, civil disobedience, and non-co-operation,” (as stated in the ANC’s 1949 Programme of Action) and African workers were organised into unions. All of these protests were still non-violent, a policy that the ANC advocated (during the next era of the liberation struggle, forced underground, the ANC and its allies adopted new tactics. Most significantly, the movements launched a campaign of armed struggle).

Apart from those suffering the negative effects of discrimination, resistance to apartheid came from other quarters also, including from other countries, and some of these gave support to the South African freedom movements. The 1950s also saw resistance to Bantu Education and forced removals in many rural areas and in urban communities, as well as large-scale anti-pass campaigns.

The ANC’s Programme of Action 1949

On 17 December 1949 the ANC adopted a 'Programme of Action’ at their conference. This marked one of the most important turning points in the history of the organisation's existence up to that time. The adoption was precipitated by the victory of the National party and its determination to implement a policy of apartheid. The Programme of Action called on the ANC to embark on mass action, involving civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts and other forms of non-violent resistance, similar to the 1946 Passive resistance campaign mounted by the South African Indian Conference (SAIC). Therefore, inspired by the desire to achieve national freedom, the ANC was transformed in the 1950s; it now became a more militant liberation movement.

The Defiance Campaign

The Defiance Campaign in 1952 was the first large-scale, multi-racial political mobilization against apartheid laws under a common leadership – by the African National Congress, South African Indian Congress, and the Coloured People’s Congress. More than 8,000 trained volunteers went to jail for ' defying unjust laws. ’ Volunteers were jailed for failing to carry passes, violating curfew, and entering locations and public facilities designated for one race only.

In early 1953, the Government imposed stiff penalties for protesting against discriminatory laws, including heavy fines and prison sentences of up to five years. It then enacted the Public Safety Act, allowing for the declaration of a State of Emergency to override existing laws and oversight by courts. Although the Defiance Campaign did not achieve its goals, it demonstrated large-scale and growing opposition to apartheid. Furthermore, the use of non-violent civil disobedience was part of an important international tradition, from the passive resistance campaigns started by Gandhi in South Africa continuing to the independence movement in India two decades before, to sit-ins and other non-violent protests in the United States civil rights movement more than a decade later.

A change in ANC leadership, Chief Albert Luthuli 1898 - 1967

After the illness and the death of John L. Dube in 1946 Chief Albert Luthuli defeated Selby Msimang in a by-election for a successor to Dube on the Natives' Representative Council. With the backing of the Natal ANC Youth League and Jordan Ngubane in Inkundla ya Bantu, he advanced another step onto the national stage in early 1951 by narrowly defeating A.W.G. Champion for Natal provincial president of the ANC. His public support for the 1952 Defiance Campaign brought him finally into direct conflict with the South African Government, and on his refusal to resign from the ANC, he was dismissed from his post as Chief in November 1952. In response, Luthuli issued "The Road to Freedom is via the Cross," perhaps the most famous statement of his principles a belief in non-violence, a conviction that apartheid degrades all who are party to it, and an optimism that whites would sooner or later be compelled to change heart and accept a shared society. The notoriety gained by his dismissal, his eloquence, his unimpeachable character, and his demonstrated loyalty to the ANC, made Luthuli a natural candidate to succeed ANC President James Moroka. At the annual conference, in December 1952, Luthuli was elected ANC President-General by a large majority. He was re-elected President-General in 1955 and in 1958.

Although bans confined him to his rural home throughout his presidency, he nevertheless was able to write statements and speeches for presentation at ANC conferences and occasionally circumstances permitted him to attend a conference personally. In December 1956 he was included in the treason arrests, but was released. He enjoyed a period of relative freedom between his release at the end of 1957 and May 1959, when a new ban confined him to the Lower Tugela district for five years. During this lapse in restrictions, he made a number of highly publicized speeches to Whites and mixed audiences, climaxed by a tour of the Western Cape. Six days after the Sharpeville emergency in 1960, Luthuli sought to rally Africans to resistance by publicly burning his pass in Pretoria, in accordance with an ANC decision, and calling for a national day of mourning. On March 30 he was detained and held until August, when he was tried and sentenced to a £100 fine and a six-month suspended sentence. He was allowed to travel to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1961, an award that Die Transvaler labelled "an inexplicable pathological phenomenon." It was ironic, in fact, that within days after presentation of the award, on a day selected because it was an historic Afrikaner holiday, the ANC embarked on its first campaign of sabotage.

The formation of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW)

After the formation of the Women's League in 1943, women continued to pursue their struggle against apartheid in the 1950s. The formation of ANC Women League was followed by the establishment of another broader South African women's organisation called the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) on 17 April1954 in Johannesburg. The ANCWL, Coloured People's Organisation, and the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congress of Democrats came together to constitute this federation. The FEDSAW founding conference adopted the Women’s Charter. This organisation was the brainchild of Ray Simons, Helen Joseph, Lillian Ngoyi and Amina Chachalia, together formed the steering committee of FEDSAW.

The key activities or campaigns in which women became fully involved in the 1950s included the Defiance Campaign of 1952 and the Anti Pass Campaign of 1956 . In the 1952 Campaign women confronted the Verwoerd government with the Women's Charter. The Anti-Pass Campaign brought about 20 000 women of all races together in a mass demonstration. On 9 August 1956, women came from all over the country to converge at the Union Buildings in Pretoria to present anti-pass petitions to the Prime Minister, J.G. Strijdom. This demonstration took place after the pass law was extended to all women in the country.

There was also forceful removal of people from the western areas of Johannesburg, including Sophiatown; they were moved to black townships in Soweto.

The Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter

Another significant event in this decade was the Congress of the People . This was convened on 26 June 1955 at Kliptown where the ANC adopted the Freedom Charter in order to intensify the struggle. The Congress was a very representative gathering. It was attended by 3 000 delegates from different organizations and cut across racial lines. In 1956, 156 leaders of the Congress from around the country were arrested and charged with treason. Involved in the Treason Trial there were 104 Africans, 23 Whites, 21 Indians and 8 Coloureds. The trial became a major political event.

Labour struggles

The struggle was also extended to the labour community but the struggle in this section was crippled by a lack of unity among the working class, which was polarised along racial lines. Although it was initially difficult to organise workers into a multiracial trade union, this was finally achieved in the 1950s when the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) was formed in 1955. The formation of solid trade unions was influenced by the repressive industrial laws like the Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) Act of 1953 and Industrial Conciliation Act of 1956 passed by the government. In this period SACTU led two major strikes: the £1 a day campaign and the Amato Textile Mills strike.

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The Harsh Reality of Life Under Apartheid in South Africa

By: Erin Blakemore

Updated: August 1, 2023 | Original: April 26, 2019

From 1948 through the 1990s, a single word dominated life in South Africa. Apartheid —Afrikaans for “apartness”—kept the country’s majority Black population under the thumb of a small white minority. It would take decades of struggle to stop the policy, which affected every facet of life in a country locked in centuries-old patterns of discrimination and racism.

What Was Apartheid?

The segregation began in 1948 after the National Party came to power. The nationalist political party instituted policies of white supremacy, which empowered white South Africans who descended from both Dutch and British settlers in South Africa while further disenfranchising Black Africans.

The system was rooted in the country’s history of colonization and slavery. White settlers had historically viewed Black South Africans as a natural resource to be used to turn the country from a rural society to an industrialized one. Starting in the 17th century, Dutch settlers relied on slaves to build up South Africa. Around the time that slavery was abolished in the country in 1863, gold and diamonds were discovered in South Africa. 

That discovery represented a lucrative opportunity for white-owned mining companies that employed—and exploited—Black workers. Those companies all but enslaved Black miners while enjoying massive wealth from the diamonds and gold they mined. Like Dutch slaveholders, they relied on intimidation and discrimination to rule over their Black workers.

Apartheid Laws and Segregation

The mining companies borrowed a tactic that earlier slaveholders and British settlers had used to control Black workers: pass laws . As early as the 18th century, these laws had required members of the Black majority, and other people of color, to carry identification papers at all times and restricted their movement in certain areas. They were also used to control Black settlement, forcing Black people to reside in places where their labor would benefit white settlers.

Those laws persisted through the 20th century as South Africa became a self-governing dominion of the United Kingdom. Between 1899 and 1902, Britain and the Dutch-descended Afrikaners fought one another in the Boer War, a conflict that the Afrikaners eventually lost. Anti-British sentiment continued to foment among white South Africans, and Afrikaner nationalists developed an identity rooted in white supremacy. When they took control in 1948, they made the country’s already discriminatory laws even more draconian.

Racist fears and attitudes about “natives” colored white society. Though apartheid was supposedly designed to allow different races to develop on their own, it forced Black South Africans into poverty and hopelessness. “Grand” apartheid laws focused on keeping Black people in their own designated “homelands.” And “petty” apartheid laws focused on daily life and restricted almost every facet of Black life in South Africa. 

Pass laws and apartheid policies prohibited Black people from entering urban areas without immediately finding a job. It was illegal for a Black person not to carry a passbook. Black people could not marry white people. They could not set up businesses in white areas. Everywhere from hospitals to beaches was segregated. Education was restricted. And throughout the 1950s, the NP passed law after law regulating the movement and lives of Black people. 

Though they were disempowered, Black South Africans protested their treatment within apartheid. In the 1950s, the African National Congress, the country’s oldest Black political party, initiated a mass mobilization against the racist laws, called the Defiance Campaign . Black workers boycotted white businesses, went on strike, and staged non-violent protests.

These acts of defiance were met with police and state brutality. Protesters were beaten and tried en masse in unfair legal proceedings. But though the campaigns took a toll on Black protesters, they didn’t generate enough international pressure on the South African government to inspire reforms.

Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela and the Black Consciousness Movement

In 1960, South African police killed 69 peaceful protesters in Sharpeville, sparking nationwide dissent and a wave of strikes. A subgroup of protesters who were tired of what they saw as ineffective nonviolent protests began to embrace armed resistance instead. Among them was Nelson Mandela , who helped organize a paramilitary subgroup of the ANC in 1960. He was arrested for treason in 1961 and was sentenced to life in prison for charges of sabotage in 1964.

In response to the 1960 protests, the government declared a state of emergency. This tactic cleared the way for even more apartheid laws to be put in place. Despite the state of emergency, Black groups continued to organize and protest. But a crackdown on many movement leaders forced them into exile abroad.

Anti-apartheid protests continued as life for Black South Africans became more and more dire under apartheid. On June 16, 1976, up to 10,000 Black schoolchildren, inspired by new tenets of Black consciousness, marched to protest a new law that forced them to learn Afrikaans in schools. Steve Biko , anti-apartheid activist and co-founder of the South African Students' Organization, spearheaded the movement and was arrested multiple times for his activism before dying from injuries sustained while in police custody on September 12, 1977.

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Nelson Mandela’s Childhood and Education Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, into a royal family of the Xhosa‑speaking Thembu tribe in the South African village of Mvezo, where his father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa (c. 1880‑1928), served as chief. His mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third of Mphakanyiswa’s four wives, who together bore him […]

When Did Apartheid End?

During the 1980s, resistance became even more fierce. Peaceful and violent protests finally began to spark international attention. Nelson Mandela , the movement’s most powerful and well-known representative, had been imprisoned since 1964. But he inspired his followers to continue resisting and conducted secret negotiations to end apartheid.

By the end of the 1980s, discontentment was growing among white South Africans about what they saw as South Africa’s diminished international standing. By then, the country faced sanctions and economic ramifications as international businesses, celebrities, and other governments pressured the government to end discrimination. As the economy faltered, the government was locked in a stalemate with anti-apartheid activists.

But when South African president P.W. Botha resigned in 1989, the stalemate finally broke. Botha’s successor, F.W. de Klerk, decided it was time to negotiate to end apartheid in earnest. 

In February 1990, de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and other opposition groups and released Mandela, whose secret negotiations had thus far failed, from prison. Despite continued political violence, Mandela, de Klerk and their allies began intensive negotiations. 

In 1994, the NP was finally defeated and Mandela became president of South Africa. A constitutional assembly was convened and South Africa adopted a new constitution that allowed for a South Africa that was not ruled by racial discrimination. It took effect in 1997.

By then, South Africa had dismantled apartheid for good. Mandela and de Klerk won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for their cooperation, and a truth and reconciliation commission began investigating human rights abuses and memorializing those abuses. The transition was not entirely non-violent. But by its end, South Africa had forged a new reality: one that owed its existence to the continued resistance of an oppressed racial majority.

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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.

Former South African president and civil rights advocate Nelson Mandela dedicated his life to fighting for equality—and ultimately helped topple South Africa's racist system of apartheid. His accomplishments are now celebrated each year on July 18, Nelson Mandela International Day.

• HISTORY & CULTURE

How Nelson Mandela fought apartheid—and why his work is not complete

This activist dedicated his life to dismantling racism—and went from being the world’s most famous political prisoner to South Africa’s first Black president.

Nelson Mandela was born on July 18, 1918, in what was then known as the Union of South Africa, a dominion of the British Empire. Though the majority of its inhabitants were Black, they were dominated by a white minority that controlled the land, the wealth, and the government—a discriminatory social structure that would later be codified in the country’s legal system and called apartheid.

Over the next 95 years, Mandela would help topple South Africa’s brutal social order. During a lifetime of resistance, imprisonment, and leadership, Nelson Mandela led South Africa out of apartheid and into an era of reconciliation and majority rule.  

( Read with your kids about Nelson Mandela’s life. )

Mandela began his life under another name: Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Mandela. His father was a chief of the Thembu people, a subgroup of the Xhosa people, who make up South Africa’s second-largest cultural group. After defying a British magistrate, Mandela’s father had been stripped of his chieftainship, title, and land. On his first day in a segregated elementary school, Rolihlahla, too, was stripped of his identity when his schoolteacher gave every child an English name—a common practice in a society in which whites “were either unable or unwilling to pronounce an African name, and considered it uncivilized to have one,” he   wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom .

While Mandela’s skin relegated him to the lowest social order in segregated South Africa, his royal blood—and connections—gave him access to the country’s only university for Black people, the University of Fort Hare. There, he became an activist, and was expelled for protesting the student government’s lack of power. He returned home to his small village on the eastern Cape only to find that his family wanted him to enter an arranged marriage to punish him for leaving school. So he fled north to Soweto, South Africa’s largest Black city, in 1941.

Apartheid and activism

In Soweto, Mandela became a part-time law student at Wits University and began to practice law, starting the nation’s first Black law firm. He joined the   African National Congress , a group that agitated for the civil rights of Black South Africans. In 1948, the segregation that was already rampant in South Africa became state law when its ruling party formally adopted apartheid , or apartness. This policy required Black South Africans to carry identification with them at all times, which they needed to enter areas designated for whites. They were forced to live in all-Black zones and forbidden from entering into interracial relationships. Black people were even removed from the voter rolls and eventually fully disenfranchised.

At first, Mandela and his fellow members of the ANC used nonviolent tactics like strikes and demonstrations to protest apartheid. In 1952, Mandela helped escalate the struggle as a leader of the Defiance Campaign, which encouraged Black participants to actively violate laws. More than 8,000 people —including Mandela—were jailed for violating curfews, refusing to carry identification passes, and other offenses.  

( See pictures from the life and times of Mandela. )

Protesters gather in front of a courthouse in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the 1956 treason trial of anti-apartheid activists, among them Nelson Mandela. The defendants were found not guilty, but some—including Mandela—were later convicted on a separate charge in 1964.

The Defiance Campaign catapulted the ANC’s agenda, and Mandela, into the public eye as they continued to agitate for Black rights. After serving his sentence, Mandela continued to lead protests against the government and, in 1956, he, along with 155 others, was tried for treason . He was acquitted in 1961 and lived in hiding for 17 months after the trial.

Over time, Mandela came to believe that armed resistance was the only way to end apartheid. In 1962, he briefly left the country to receive military training and gain support for the cause but was arrested and convicted soon after his return for leaving the country without a permit. Then, while he was in prison, police discovered documents related to Mandela’s plan for guerrilla warfare. They charged him and his allies with sabotage.

Mandela and the other defendants in the ensuing   Rivonia Trial knew they were sure to be convicted and executed. So they turned their show trial into a statement, publicizing their anti-apartheid struggle and challenging the legal system that oppressed Black South Africans. When it was Mandela’s turn to speak for the defense, he delivered a   four-hour-long speech .

“The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy,” he said. “Our struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by our own suffering and our own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live.” Mandela was committed to the ideal of a free society, he said, and “if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

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Prison years.

Mandela wasn’t put to death—but, in 1964, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was   allowed only one 30-minute visit with a single person every year, and could send and receive two letters a year. Confined in austere conditions, he worked in a limestone quarry and over time, earned the   respect of his captors and fellow prisoners. He was given chances to leave prison in exchange for ensuring the ANC would give up violence but refused.

Over his 27 years of imprisonment, Mandela became the world’s best-known political prisoner. His words were banned in South Africa, but he was already the country’s most famous man. His supporters agitated for his release and news of his imprisonment galvanized anti-apartheid activists all over the world.

In the 1960s, some members of the United Nations began to call for sanctions against South Africa—calls that grew louder in the decades that followed. Eventually, South Africa became an international pariah. In 1990, in response to international pressure and the threat of civil war, South Africa’s new president, F.W. de Klerk, pledged to end apartheid and released Mandela from prison.

Nelson Mandela and wife, Winnie, raise their fists upon his release from Victor Verster prison in South Africa. Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years for his fight against apartheid. Upon his release, he negotiated an end to the racist policy and was elected president of South Africa.

Apartheid did not immediately end with Mandela’s release. Now 71, Mandela negotiated with de Klerk for a new constitution that would allow majority rule. Apartheid was repealed in 1991, and in 1994, the ANC, now a political party, won more than 62 percent of the popular vote in a peaceful, democratic election. Mandela—who now shares   a Nobel Peace Prize with de Klerk—became the president of a new nation, South Africa.  

( Here's how South Africa has changed since the end of apartheid. )

Post-apartheid leadership

Mandela served as president for five years. Among his accomplishments was South Africa’s   Truth and Reconciliation Commission , designed to document human rights violations and help victims and violators come to term with their past. Though its results are contested, the commission offered the beginnings of restorative justice—a process that focuses on repair rather than retribution— to a nation still smarting from centuries of scars.

Mandela’s legacy wasn’t unassailable: He was considered by some analysts a largely ineffective president and was criticized for his handling of violence and the economy while in office.

After leaving office in 1999, Mandela spent the remainder of his life working to end poverty and raise awareness of HIV/AIDS. He died in 2013 at age 95.

Every year on July 18, he is   remembered on Nelson Mandela International Day, a United Nations holiday that commemorates his service and sacrifice. It’s a reminder that Mandela’s work is not yet done—an opinion shared by Mandela himself.  

( Even in the U.S., Mandela is a symbol of hope. )

“To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others,” he   wrote in his autobiography. “The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.”

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Apartheid, Its Causes and the Process Essay

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The essay on Apartheid, its causes and the process itself is very limited in its explanations, has weak arguments and irrelevant evidence that does neither support nor explain the true reasons, process or the outcome of the struggle between the population and the government. The absence of thesis adds to the confusing structure of the essay, which does not have a clear tone and so, the reader is left with no factual information or true understanding of what really took place and how it happened.

The first point that is mentioned in the work is that the colonization by Europeans and their actions were characterized through the depletion of Gold and diamonds. This is used as a reason for colonization, which led to discrimination of people, based on their race and more specifically, visual color differences. This is not specific and does not explain the true reasons for the colonization. In reality, the white man was spreading the influence of the civilized world and the search for new territories to colonize was in place.

The developed nations were spreading their rule over the parts of the world where people lived more basic and independent lives. The primary causes for colonization were demands for power, greed and more territory (Ellis 90). The fact that people of Africa were of different race or color had nothing to do with the fact that they were oppressed and colonized. If they were of different race or color, the same thing would have happened.

The examples can be seen all over the world, from Asia to North and South America. Another real reason for the overtake of African native population was the fact that the colonizers had a better technology and more advanced weapons. The simple fact that they had the ability and tools to overtake a great amount of people with relative ease, gave them enough power to force their demands and rule over African people.

The work mentions that people were divided into whites, colored, Indians and Blacks. This point is completely irrelevant and has no value. The reality is that people who were colored, Indian and Black were separated from white people and whites were the ones who did the separating of themselves from the rest of the native population. Also, this separation does not show what it has led to. It is mentioned for no reason and is placed in the essay to support no real claim or other point, which could be valid and proved.

The major argument of the essay that Nelson Mandela and his movement were the ones that stopped the Apartheid, is not explained and is not at all clear (Shone 75). How it was done and through what forces is undetermined and unseen. The resistance of people against the white rule is mentioned but this fact is weak, as resistance is obvious at any time when one nation or people are taking over another.

It is stated that “Hundred of black men were sent to jail specifically Robin Island where all forms of abuse were exercised” (Buntman 33). This fact is weak in the following explanation of bonds between prisoners. It is not elaborated on—how did this abuse reflect in the further retaliation of the native population and what were the specific actions, strategies and resistance on the Roben Island.

The manifestation of the bonds is a very significant point historically, but the essay must show evidence that proves and compares how these strengths were used by the people. The same is true when the essay mentions the resistance by Nelson Mandela. It states that he organized a movement and that he was sent to jail.

How he organized the movement and what were the strong points is not explained at all. The mere fact that he was sent to jail does not show how this influenced the change in the resistance and what were the turning and considerable moments of the resistance that had their force over the colonizers is not produced as evidence. Also, Nelson Mandela is said to have been a great leader and supporter of African people.

In which ways he supported them, what were his actions and how specifically he used his authority, as well as understanding of the issue and reasoning in his support, is not clear. This adds to the total confusion and lack of facts throughout the essay. The second last paragraph of the essay mentions that women played an important role in the movement and resistance against the oppression and Apartheid. There are no examples or techniques given that display how women have used their resources to resist the colonization.

The general atmosphere and the reaction of the white men is stated: “Conditions were set to deny women access to urban areas as they were seen as a threat” (Lee 7). This actually, negates the explanation how women were important to the resistance and the role. It shows weakness of women, instead of their strength in helping the resistance.

Overall, it is clear that the essay does not have many facts in support of causes, process of the resistance and the outcome. The actions of the native population are mentioned very briefly and do not serve as clear explanations. Nelson Mandela’s presence in the essay is not specific enough and no points about his actions and influence are given.

Works Cited

Buntman, Fran Lisa. Robben Island and prisoner resistance to apartheid. New York, United States: Campbridge University Press, 2003. Print.

Ellis, Stephen. Comrades Against Apartheid: The Anc & the South African Communist Party in Exile . Bloomington, United States: Indiana University Press, 1992. Print.

Lee, Rebekah. African women and Apartheid: migration and settlement in urban South Africa. New York, United States: Tauris Academic Studies, 1974. Print.

Shone, Rob. Nelson Mandela: The Life of an African Statesman . New York, United States: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2006. Print.

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Article contents

Women and apartheid.

• Meghan Healy-Clancy Meghan Healy-Clancy Department of History, Bridgewater State University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.184
• Published online: 28 June 2017

Apartheid, the system of racial and ethnic separation introduced in South Africa in 1948, was a gendered project. The immediate goal of the white Afrikaner men who led the apartheid state was to control black men: to turn black men from perceived political and criminal threats into compliant workers. Under apartheid, African men would travel to work for whites in towns and on mines, but their homes would be in rural ethnic “reserves,” known as “homelands” or “Bantustans.” This vision depended on the labors of African women: while their men migrated to work, women were to maintain their families in the increasingly overcrowded and desolate countryside, reproducing the workforce cheaply while instilling a sense of ethnic difference in their children. “Coloured” (mixed-race) and Indian women were similarly charged with social reproduction on a shoestring, in segregated rural and urban areas. White women uniquely had the franchise and freedom of movement, but they were also constrained by sexually repressive laws.

Apartheid’s gendered vision of production and social reproduction faced continual resistance, and it ultimately failed. First, it failed because African women increasingly moved from rural areas to urban centers, despite laws limiting their mobility. Second, it failed because some women organized across ethnic and racial lines. They often organized as mothers, demanding a better world for a new generation. Both their nationally and internationally resonant campaigns—against pass laws, educational and health care inequities, police brutality, and military conscription—and the fact of their collective organization gradually undermined apartheid. Officials generally underestimated the power of women, and their contributions have continued to be under-appreciated since apartheid ended in 1994, because women’s political style emphasized personal and familial concerns. But because apartheid was premised on transforming how families lived, actions of women in fact undermined the system from its core.

• South Africa

State interventions into the formation and lives of families were central to apartheid: the legal regime of racial and ethnic division that ruled South Africa between the election of Daniel Malan in 1948 and the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994 , with legacies enduring through the present. From the regime’s inception under the leadership of Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) minister Malan, ideas of racial purity, sexual restraint, and patriarchy were intertwined. Apartheid’s immediate goal was to control black men—turning them from political threats into compliant workers, to ensure South Africa’s development into an industrialized state in which whites would enjoy growing wealth and political hegemony. But apartheid could only work by also controlling women. Apartheid leaders were concerned with black women (a category that includes women classified as African, Indian, or “Coloured”), as well as with white women (both Afrikaners like apartheid leaders, and women from British and other European backgrounds). Officials saw women as central to creating properly ethnicized and racialized subjects, who would fill their prescribed niches in an economy and polity controlled by white men.

Black women undermined the visions of apartheid from its onset. First, many black women refused to be held in place. African women were supposed to remain confined to rural ethnic “reserves” (known as “homelands” or “Bantustans”), cheaply raising compliant workers and ethnic subjects there while their husbands labored for low wages for whites in towns and on the mines. But from apartheid’s start, women increasingly went to town. African women who stayed on the reserves did not all submit quietly to apartheid’s demands, either. Rural women’s organized resistance—in both political organizations and religious groups—was formidable, attracting both state oppression and gradual reforms. As key urban women activists were forced to the countryside in line with apartheid’s strategies of banning activists, the liveliness of rural resistance only grew.

Across South Africa, across lines of race and class, activist women came together to resist apartheid. While they also worked with men, women particularly organized as mothers—a fitting riposte to a regime rooted in restructuring families. Even as their campaigns attracted national and international support, apartheid officials underestimated their impact, generally seeing women as less threatening political actors than men. Since apartheid ended in 1994 , women’s contributions to the regime’s collapse have continued to attract less popular and scholarly attention than men’s contributions. Yet controlling personal lives and transforming families were core objectives of apartheid policies. Through both individual and collective action, the gendered life choices of many diverse women therefore undermined apartheid from within.

Male-Led Nationalist Movements and the Roots of Apartheid

In May 1948 , the National Party (NP) won the South African general election, inaugurating the era of apartheid: “apartness” in Afrikaans, the Dutch-derived language of the NP’s Afrikaner leaders. The National Party heightened the segregationist policies that had ruled the Union of South Africa since its 1910 formation as a British dominion, ruled by an alliance of British and Afrikaner men. Apartheid added an ideological emphasis on the development of Afrikaners and South Africa’s other ethnic groups, each as a separate volk (people) with distinct racial destinies. 1 Very few black men, and no black women, had the franchise in 1948 . Whites, who then made up about a quarter of South Africa’s population, therefore determined this election: they included both men and women, as white women had the franchise since 1930 , as part of a state strategy to diminish the influence of the small number of black men with the vote. 2

Women as well as men generated the ideas that animated Afrikaner nationalism. They highlighted the historical role of Afrikaners—mostly descendants of 17th-century Dutch settlers in the Cape—in bringing Christianity and European civilization to southern Africa. They mourned Afrikaners’ history of oppression on the frontiers of a growing British Empire, particularly Britain’s brutal treatment of women and children in the South African War a half century before. They called for the urgent uplift of poor Afrikaners, to advance their “race”—against the threat posed by the British-descended South Africans who had for the past century and a half exercised influence in politics and the economy on one hand, and against the increasing threats from politically assertive black South Africans on the other. 3

The black South Africans who so alarmed Afrikaner nationalists included men and women in the African National Congress (ANC) and similar organizations advocating rights for indigenous Africans, as well as other black people known as “Coloureds” (mixed-race) and Indians (descended from the indentured workers and immigrants who came to Natal from the 19th century ). Women played key ideological roles in these groups, stressing their history of protecting their families against the depravities of colonialism and calling for black people to end white domination. But women also struggled against dismissal of their voices by the activist men who led these groups. Women, both black and white, similarly asserted themselves in the male-led Communist Party (CP), which increasingly supported movements for racial equality in South Africa from the mid-1920s through its banning in 1950 . 4

It was important to the formation of apartheid policies that, despite the role of women at the grassroots of both Afrikaner and black movements, the leaders of the NP and its rivals in 1948 were all men. 5 The specter of black men unwilling to submit to white authority, and the inability of the ruling United Party (UP) to make them submit, loomed large in the NP’s 1948 campaign. While the NP achieved its narrow victory with strong support from rural whites, it appealed to white fears of black men in cities. In South Africa, as across the continent in the wake of the Second World War, urban black men were at the helm of organizations that launched boycotts and strikes demanding their rights against white male leaders. The NP particularly feared the potential of activists to spread communism, destroying what they saw as Afrikaner Christian civilization. 6 The NP’s solution was to develop a “white man’s country,” headed by Afrikaner patriarchs. 7

Legislating Sex and Family: The Foundations of Apartheid

Foundational pieces of apartheid legislation tellingly targeted love and sex—demonstrating how control over sex was critical to the production and maintenance of racial difference. 8 In 1949 , the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act barred marriage between “Europeans” (white South Africans, including Afrikaners, British, and other immigrants from Europe) and “non-Europeans” (African, Coloured, and Indian South Africans). 9 It was followed by the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950 , which prohibited sex between whites and all blacks. This extended the 1927 Immorality Act, which had already restricted sex outside of marriage between whites and Africans: the word “native” in the original act was replaced by the more encompassing “non-European” here. 10 These broadening and hardening restrictions on intimacy revealed officials’ sense that “European civilization” in southern Africa was under siege, and the first place to shore it up was the family home. Interracial sex and marriage would remain illegal until 1985 . 11

Controlling intimacy entailed categorizing people. In the Immorality Amendment Act, the terms “European” and “non-European” were defined culturally: “‘European’ means a person who in appearance obviously is, or who by general acceptance and repute is a European,” and vice versa. 12 Soon after, the Population Registration Act of 1950 established a national register, to categorize each South African more bindingly by race and ethnicity. 13 The accompanying Group Areas Act established the country’s firm segregation along racial and ethnic lines, with specific “groups” restricted to specific regions and neighborhoods; black married women’s ethnicity followed that of their husbands. 14 This legislation displaced black families from their homes and communities, as mixed neighborhoods such as Johannesburg’s Sophiatown and Cape Town’s District Six were declared “white areas.” Ultimately, some 3.5 million black South Africans would be forced to move under apartheid. 15 Families could also be separated when the race of their children fell into doubt. 16

The apartheid state’s struggle for control over racial reproduction manifested in family-planning policies that urged white women to have children while encouraging black women to limit family size. Puritanical, DRC-influenced ideas of women’s chastity discouraged the pursuit of sexual pleasure and agency for all women. While abortion was illegal for all South African women, spectacular court cases concerned white rather than black women. Intrusive policies, supported by many employers and the state, required black women to have contraceptive injections to keep their jobs; doctors employed sterilization far more readily for black women than for whites throughout the apartheid years. Black women’s primary modes of employment—domestic service, farm labor, factory work, teaching, nursing, and clerical work—were not conductive to pregnancy, forcing many mothers to send their children to live with distant relatives. Due to black men’s low wages, black women were much more likely to need to work than white women, connecting reproductive rights to labor issues. 17

Gendered labor policies were at the heart of apartheid, in intersection with marriage and housing policies. To secure the labor of black men while limiting their presence in towns and cities declared to be predominantly white areas, an existing system of male migrant labor was further entrenched. This system had emerged with the development of diamond and gold mining over the latter half of the 19th century : labor recruiters, chiefs, and rural African families sent young men to work in distant towns, while African women were to support rural families, leading to growing domestic tensions. 18 From 1952 , African men aged sixteen or older legally had to carry identity documents called passes with them, to justify their presence outside of the rural ethnic “reserves” to which officials consigned Africans. 19 As the land in these reserves was insufficient in size and quality, men needed to work in urban areas to support themselves and their families, and to pay taxes. They could generally only reside in urban areas as long as their passes attested to employment by whites, staying in hostels intended for temporary sojourns in segregated areas called “townships.” Exceptions were those who had been born in the urban area where they lived, who had lived in that area legally for fifteen years, or who had worked for the same employer in that area for a decade: such men and their dependents had “Section Ten” rights to live in urban townships as a family, as long as they were not deemed “idle” or “undesirable.” 20 Most urban housing was deliberately unwelcoming to families, who were supposed to remain in the countryside, eking out a living by women’s farming, to supplement the low wages received by migrant men. 21

In rural areas filled increasingly with African women and children, the authority of male chiefs—both hereditary and appointed—reigned supreme. The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 entrenched chiefly authority to administer “customary law,” a patriarchal system under which African women remained legal minors throughout their lives. Legal minor status meant that African women could not enter into contracts or own homes or other property in their own right; children legally belonged to their fathers or male kin. Customary law collapsed and distorted diverse precolonial African legal systems in which women had generally held more authority, especially as they aged. 22 The distorted power of “traditional” chiefs deepened in the 1960s. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 provided the legal basis for the “gradual development of self-governing Bantu national units” out of the ethnic reserves to which Africans were consigned. 23 Ten rural ethnic reserves formed: officials called them “homelands” or “Bantustans,” and in 1970 , the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act declared Africans “citizens” of their homelands, not of South Africa. 24 Reforms in the 1980s allowed for African women’s growing emancipation from customary law: for instance, in 1981 the KwaZulu Bantustan introduced reforms so that adult women, married or unmarried, could legally own property and make other legal decisions, following popular pressure. 25 But African women continued to struggle against chiefly authority that privileged men.

As wives, women were generally subject to their husband’s authority. This was true not only for African women, but also for other black and white women; unless they secured a prenuptial contract, the default through most of apartheid was that even privileged white women lost power to make legal decisions upon marriage. 26 As mothers, however, women were charged with the critical responsibility of raising a new generation of workers and ethnic patriots. For Africans, this new generation was supposed to see their political futures not in “white South Africa” but in their rural ethnic reserves. African mothers were to send their children to new state schools, in an ethnically differentiated system called Bantu Education, while Indian, Coloured, and white women were to send their children to distinct schools. 27

At the crux of apartheid production and social reproduction therefore stood women, whom officials intended to be compliant wives and mothers in a segregated society. But increasing numbers of women refused to stand in their imposed places.

Black Women’s Urban Mobility Challenges Apartheid

Black women had lived in towns and cities long before apartheid, attracted to urban life both by a desire to escape rural familial tensions and by economic necessity. African access to land had been severely restricted since the Natives Land Act of 1913 , with clearly declining land productivity by the 1920s, and the rural reserves grew more stressed with apartheid’s forced relocations. Women’s options for formal urban employment were limited, with most consigned to domestic service. But women had long been developing a vibrant informal urban sector: they brewed and sold beer and other foods to male migrant workers and operated bars called “shebeens,” among other jobs. By the early 1950s, more than a fifth of African women were urban, and many of these women lived in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. 28

While black women’s urbanity concerned officials before apartheid—especially when they worked as prostitutes—officials had never been sure what to do about it. African men in major cities had been required to carry individual passes before apartheid, although laws varied by municipality. 29 But officials had rarely imposed individual passes on women. This was, first, because attempts to do so had engendered resistance, as seen in Bloemfontein in 1913 , when hundreds marched against pass laws for black women. 30 At a deeper level, officials expected African women to be governed through their men. When laws referred to “natives,” they usually meant African men; African women were seldom singled out as political subjects, as they were legal minors under customary law and thus not proper “persons” in their own rights. 31 The language of 1952 pass-law legislation was characteristically vague—first stating that pass laws would apply to “every native” aged sixteen or older, but then shifting to masculine pronouns. 32

Officials prevaricated about when and how pass laws would be extended to African women under the terms of the 1952 legislation, facing public outrage about this intrusion into family life. 33 Then, in 1955 , officials announced that individual passes would soon be issued to African women; women’s organized resistance, discussed in the next section, delayed full implementation of this requirement until 1963 .

Yet women kept moving to cities, whether or not they could claim Section Ten rights or passes testifying to their legal right to be there temporarily. Many lived covertly in “informal settlements” of shacks, or with men in migrant labor hostels. They faced frequent prosecution for breaking the law and forced deportations to Bantustans: this risk was especially pronounced for Africans in Cape Town, where most working-class jobs were reserved for “Coloured” men, and where African women had access to few formal jobs outside of low-paid domestic service. 34 But women often turned right around after their deportations to catch the next bus into town, despite feeling “like a hare being chased around, hunted.” 35 The everyday presence of black families—in urban spaces legally defined as white, where black people were only supposed to appear as necessary to meet white labor needs—powerfully challenged core tenets of apartheid. 36 Ultimately, the expense of combatting this unstoppable movement of black families to cities forced apartheid officials to end pass laws in 1986 . 37 African women’s migration then accelerated, with continually rising numbers of female-headed households. 38 Black women’s defiant mobility thus worked to renegotiate relationships between genders and generations.

Amidst this insistent mobility, growing numbers of women in rural reserves were also not fulfilling the roles that officials envisioned. Resistance to the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 surged quickly, and women played key roles in rejecting the cooption of chiefly authority and implementation of new agricultural policies, with organized protests in places including the Western Transvaal area of Zeerust ( 1957 ) and the Natal countryside ( 1959 ). The latter protests significantly linked urban and rural issues, as women protested both apartheid removals from the interracial urban community of Cato Manor in Durban and intrusive “betterment schemes” and taxes in the rural reserves surrounding the city. 39 While the ANC did not initiate these protests, its members were involved in them, and ANC membership increased in their aftermath. Rural women’s engagement in religious groups such as mothers’ prayer unions ( manyano ), which also boasted linked urban branches, provided another font for growing anti-apartheid organization. Cyclical migration—driven by forced removals and by women’s decisions to return to rural areas after periods of work in cities—kept urban and rural communities linked. 40

Anti-apartheid linkages between towns and countryside would only accelerate as apartheid officials increasingly “banned” political leaders to remote districts, to try to eliminate them as national leaders amidst surging protests from the 1950s. This strategy could backfire, as banned leaders connected with people in these rural districts whom they would not otherwise have met. Women often made these connections by engaging in social-welfare work, which seemed less objectionable to officials than overt political organizing. Most famously, during their bannings in the 1970s and 1980s, the Black Consciousness movement activist Mamphela Ramphele and the ANC activist Winnie Mandela organized health clinics, which became centers for spreading anti-apartheid ideas. 41 The politicizing role of health care speaks to women’s broader sociocultural style of anti-apartheid organization.

Women’s Collective Organization Challenges Apartheid

The pattern of male leadership of political movements, and women’s influence at movements’ grassroots, persisted through the apartheid years, with women tending to play influential roles in sociocultural wings of the anti-apartheid movement. In the 1950s, women first organized against apartheid as mothers, uniting across lines of race and class. Both the achievements and limits of their foundational strategies set a pattern, which would emerge vividly in the 1960s and 1970s. The pattern was that women would organize most effectively by using discourses of family. But when women raised sensitive issues pertaining to their own family lives that did not fit within activist campaigns, men often dismissed these issues as ancillary to immediate political struggles. Many women would come to share male leaders’ emphasis on family as a strategic political discourse more than an immediate site of political struggle. This was so especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when major liberation movements were forced into exile and key male and female leaders banned, heightening the stakes of eliminating anything deemed a “distraction.” Finally, in the 1980s and during the transition to democracy in the 1990s, women increasingly challenged activists’ sublimation of personal issues in political arenas, using indigenous and international forms of feminist critique.

The Congress Alliance and Federation of South African Women in the 1950s: The Foundational Period

In the 1950s, opposition to apartheid centered in the Congress Alliance: a front of anti-apartheid movements in which the ANC played a predominant role, in partnership with the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Congress, and the white leftist Congress of Democrats. The Congress Alliance was a “multiracial” organization because it comprised those racially distinct affiliate organizations. In the mid-1950s, two major nonracial member organizations—comprising both black and white members—joined the Congress Alliance: the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW). Women played important roles in the SACTU, as unions provided a distinctive forum in which women could unite as workers across racial lines. 42 And female trade unionists played central roles in the 1954 launching of FEDSAW—as did women from the ANC.

FEDSAW’s first president was Ida Mtwana, former president of the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL); her better-known successor as FEDSAW’s leader, Lilian Ngoyi, also served as president of the ANCWL. Both women worked in the garment industry, and their activism characteristically emphasized issues of work and family. On one hand, the women often spoke of women’s commitment to anti-apartheid struggle as necessitating that they move away from domestic responsibilities. For instance, Mtwana declared at FEDSAW’s founding meeting, “Gone are the days when the place of women was in the kitchen and looking after the children. Today, they are marching side by side with men in the road to freedom,” in political meetings and in trade unions. But Mtwana went on to stress that women’s public activism was rooted in their responsibilities as mothers: “We cannot sit down and fold our arms when attempts are being made to hold our progress and that of our children . . . If we do not fight now, it will be too late, and our children will curse us for our callousness.” 43

Such invocations of familial responsibilities should not be taken narrowly as statements about individual women’s lives, but broadly as skillful public discourse. Several key FEDSAW leaders—including Miss Ida Mtwana—were unmarried or childless themselves. Black women drew upon the public leadership they exercised as mothers in their communities to forge ties across racial lines, appealing to white women through appeals to a shared moral economy of motherhood. Discourses of motherhood therefore demonstrated black women’s rejection of apartheid ideas of white women as “empire builders” and black mothers as social problems, and reflected black women’s bold political imagination of a shared community of mothers with a responsibility for creating an anti-racist world. 44

Unifying maternal discourses were an achievement, because divisions between black and white women ran deep. After all, the major space of interracial encounter was domestic service, where black women tended intimately to the needs of white “madams” and their children for low pay, often living away from their own children to stay in the backyards of their employers. 45 Moreover, white women had won suffrage in 1930 at the expense of black men’s loss of their limited franchise, something that black activists did not forget. 46 Making connections across racial lines—including among African, Coloured, and Indian women, who increasingly lived in separate communities—was a great challenge.

Despite tensions, FEDSAW succeeded in uniting women as mothers against apartheid policies that divided black families and communities: centrally, against pass laws and Bantu Education. In June 1955 , FEDSAW participated in the Congress Alliance’s Congress of the People in Kliptown, Johannesburg, where FEDSAW issued a list of “What Women Demand,” beginning with claims to rights such as paid maternity leave, child care, and contraception “FOR ALL MOTHERS OF ALL RACES.” 47 Famously, FEDSAW then organized multiracial delegations of women to march on the seat of the apartheid government, the Union Buildings in Pretoria. FEDSAW and COD member Helen Joseph was inspired by a liberal white women’s organization, Black Sash, which had been “haunting” apartheid officials by surrounding them with groups of women wearing the eponymous black sashes, signs of mourning against apartheid policies. 48 With her comrades in FEDSAW, Joseph incited more powerful, multiracial activism.

On October 27, 1955 , two thousand women followed the symbolic quartet of Joseph, ANCWL president Lilian Ngoyi, Coloured People’s Congress activist Sophie Williams, and the heavily pregnant South African Indian Congress activist Rahima Moosa, bearing petitions to leave for cabinet ministers. On August 9, 1956 , a day now celebrated as Women’s Day, twenty thousand women marched with FEDSAW on the Union Buildings, coming from as far away as Cape Town, and leaving thick stacks of individual petitions protesting the extension of passes to women on the doorstep of the prime minister’s office. 49 The women, many with children, sang the ANC’s anthem and taunting anti-apartheid songs, then gathered for a half hour of stunning silence, richly documented by journalists and photographers. Such iconic activism delayed implementation of pass laws for women until 1963 , but it also led to deepening state repression against FEDSAW activists that made the organization effectively moribund by the early 1960s.

FEDSAW members struggled not only with divisions among anti-apartheid women but also with struggles between these women and officials. They also confronted tensions with anti-apartheid men—tensions amplified by the ANC’s dominance in the Congress Alliance. Men had consistently served as ANC presidents from its 1912 founding, even though women had been full members of the ANC and leaders of the ANCWL since 1943 . Significantly, as scholar Shireen Hassim has described, the early ANC “was a political family and it replicated the hierarchical form of a patriarchal institution.” 50 The ANCWL’s founding president, Madie Hall Xuma, was the wife of the ANC’s president, Dr. A. B. Xuma. The National Executive Committee (NEC) was all male prior to Lilian Ngoyi’s election to it in late 1956 , recognizing her impressive work in FEDSAW. The NEC mediated between the party’s membership and the state, while the ANCWL focused on the everyday social and economic needs of its membership; both oversaw the ANC Youth League, which pushed party elders leftward. Women in both the Youth League and Women’s League often chafed against the restrictions of male party leaders, who encouraged women to engage in educational campaigns rather than confronting authorities with further protests after 1956 . 51 Men’s attitudes reflected both a protective impulse, and patriarchal assumptions that women should remain marginal to politics. 52 Above all, Congress Alliance men often failed to see women’s discussions of family issues that did not fit into the central activist platform as matters of politics. For instance, they responded to FEDSAW women’s discussions of family planning with what scholar Cherryl Walker has characterized as “jocular dismissal.” 53

Anti-apartheid men’s dismissal of women’s discussions of family planning was profoundly ironic, for two reasons. First, intimate issues of family were actually central to issues of apartheid governance, which hinged on control of racialized bodies and homes. Second, activist men relied upon women’s deft public rhetoric of motherhood to bring more activists into the anti-apartheid movement; they acknowledged anti-pass issues as central to the movement. 54 Yet most activists were no more ready for open discussions about real tensions of sexuality and family than were puritanical apartheid officials. Other matters of oppression loomed too large. Reticence about public discussion of sexuality applied to both male and female activists. Most had been raised in religiously conservative homes and schools where intimate matters were treated delicately, were Communists who saw gender issues as subordinate to class issues, or were both Communists and Christians. Anti-apartheid activists’ reliance on rallying familial discourses, but discomfort talking about family tensions that did not fit within the central anti-apartheid platform, would deepen with state repression in the 1960s and 1970s, as the need for activist discipline (already significant in the 1950s) grew.

Navigating the Personal and the Political, at the Height of the Anti-apartheid Movement

In April 1960 , officials banned the ANC and a rival organization, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), after women and men’s rising anti-pass activism and escalating police violence against protestors. From this point until February 1990 , the major liberation movements went underground, with key leaders in exile, imprisoned, repeatedly detained, or personally banned. All of these assaults on leaders were profoundly disruptive to family life. 55 Women lost organizational autonomy in the interest of streamlining underground operations: in 1969 , the ANCWL was replaced by the ANC Women’s Section, which Hassim describes as turning into “the movement’s social worker.” 56

Iconography of women and families played an integral role in an increasingly global anti-apartheid movement. This movement was shaped both by new armed wings of the ANC and PAC launched in 1961 , and by a transnational civil-societal campaign encouraging boycotts and diplomatic pressure on the apartheid regime that grew stronger after South Africa left the British Commonwealth in 1961 . Within South Africa, women’s social and cultural work fueled a new movement called Black Consciousness, rooted among students and workers across the country from the late 1960s. Black Consciousness activism would explode in a wave of student protests against Bantu Education in 1976 , which began in the Johannesburg township of Soweto but turned into a national schools boycott after police massacred student protestors. After 1976 , new waves of activists—especially youth—fled South Africa, and the country’s international pariah status worsened.

Women were a minority of armed combatants plotting sabotage from across South Africa’s borders, but both the iconography and presence of women has attracted attention—particularly from scholars of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, or Spear of the Nation). Conspicuous in MK’s propaganda were images of what scholar Kim Miller has called “moms with guns”: women with babies on their backs, weapons in hand, and fury in their eyes. 57 Female MK members could experience a thrilling sense of equality with men, particularly in cases where women held rank, and women performed critical roles smuggling weapons into South Africa. But women were also confronted with sexism and harassment from their comrades, the product of the very male-dominated atmosphere of MK camps.

Most troubling for many MK women were the ANC’s policies on pregnancy and childrearing, which reflect the essential contradictions between discourses and realities of family in the anti-apartheid struggle. Pregnancy was supposed to be forbidden for MK women, with some forcibly fitted with IUDs. MK women did inevitably become pregnant, however, especially after new waves of young activists flocked into MK camps from 1976 , and as the camps faced prolonged periods of minimal activity, plotting and training for many military expeditions that never occurred. Pregnant women would be sent to the ANC’s Charlotte Maxeke Mother and Child Centre in Morogoro, Tanzania—which they understood as a punishment, as this remote exile-within-exile took them away from camps in the frontline states. By the late 1980s, the Women’s Section complained to the party officials of years of demanding day-care facilities near MK camps so that women could be mothers while preparing as soldiers, without result: “We seem to travel in a dead end street with marriage and babies being at the end of the street. There is not and can never be a contradiction between marriage and having babies on one hand and fighting on the other.” 58 Yet MK women could only be “moms with guns” in propaganda.

Women had more space in the cultural wings of the global anti-apartheid movement, as ANC president O. R. Tambo particularly supported the deployment of eloquent and engaging women in exile: women were central to the Mayibuye Cultural Ensemble in London, and Barbara Masekela led the ANC’s Arts and Culture wing in the 1980s, for instance. South Africa’s most prolific, globally influential anti-apartheid novelist was a middle-class white woman in suburban Johannesburg, Nadine Gordimer. Black woman artists in exile, like Miriam Makeba and Lauretta Ngcobo, generated support for the anti-apartheid movement in the United States and Europe.

Within South Africa, educational institutions became important sites for young women’s anti-apartheid thought and organizing. Inanda Seminary, a high school drawing some of the brightest African girls from around the country to its campus near Durban, was an especially lively site during the 1970s. There young women met visiting activists like Steve Biko, a radical medical student at the nearby University of Natal, and Fatima Meer, an Indian academic-activist based at that university. While black women remained severely underrepresented in higher education compared to black men or whites, black girls’ high school attendance was rising dramatically during the apartheid years, such that by the early 1980s more black girls than black boys would be in high school. This was an outcome of apartheid policies promoting the education of black female teachers and nurses to work in new Bantustan schools and clinics, as officials saw women as both cheaper to employ and more politically tractable. 59 As the cases of banned activists setting up politically vibrant rural clinics make clear, women’s work in social professions could give them an entrée to anti-apartheid organizing. Such work could be particularly politicizing as women were confronted directly with apartheid’s violence, especially in clinics and social work. 60

The Black Consciousness (BC) movement, while helmed by men like Steve Biko, was undergirded by the work of young women in clinics, schools, and journalism, working to unite black women and men—African, Indian, and Coloured—to end apartheid. 61 Yet women in BC, like women in the liberation movements in exile, ran up against frustrating gendered limitations. As Mamphela Ramphele notes of her time as a leader in the South African Students’ Organisation, the key BC group until its 1977 banning: “I became quite an aggressive debater and was known for not suffering fools gladly. Moreover, I intimidated men who did not expect aggression from women. Soon a group of similarly inclined women, Vuyelwa Mashalaba, Nomsisi Kraai, Deborah Matshoba and Thenjiwe Mthintso, became a force to be reckoned with at annual SASO meetings. Ours was not a feminist cause at that time—feminism was a later development in my political consciousness—but an insistence on being taken seriously as activists in our own right amongst our peers.” 62 Attempts at organizing BC women, such as Fatima Meer and Winnie Mandela’s Black Women’s Federation in 1975 , similarly attempted to develop women’s self-assertion while shying away from the label “feminism.” 63

Hassim’s Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa has most vividly shown how often anti-apartheid activists—particularly women of color—resisted calling themselves feminists, or discussing issues of gender inequity within their movements in public from the 1970s. It was not only that feminism was often rejected as an imported, “white” ideology without indigenous roots. That critique reflected the overrepresentation of white academics in South Africa’s second-wave feminist groups, the dramatic differences between the conditions of white and black women’s lives, and global moves of African American and “Third World” women toward less individualistic ideologies like “womanism.” As state oppression grew more pervasive in the 1980s—with prolonged “states of emergency” of military rule by mid-decade—feminism could seem a divisive distraction that activists should not indulge.

Yet Hassim has also shown how individual women’s connections of their experiences with those of other women could lead them, like Mamphele, to feminist consciousness. This happened as women grew involved in a resurgent wave of grassroots organizations—called township “civics”—as part of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a new, aboveground coalition of anti-apartheid groups stressing non-racialism and democracy from 1983 . Three major regional women’s groups formed: the United Women’s Organisation in the Western Cape (UWO), the Federation of Transvaal Women (FEDTRAW), and the Natal Organisation of Women (NOW). These groups were inspired by FEDSAW, which ANC activists were then trying to reestablish within South Africa. An emerging challenge facing women in these movements was how to connect personal issues with the political system that shaped them and that they shaped—against many activist men and women’s tendencies to sublimate intimate issues. Activist Phumelele Ntombela-Nzimande recalled, “NOW comrades were asking, ‘Why write about rape all the time?’ These were seen as weird issues to focus on. They said people should speak about the state of emergency, not about wife battering . . . Even I don’t remember once challenging a NOW meeting to speak about these issues. I just felt overwhelmed by the fact that it wasn’t appropriate.” 64 In Natal in particular, the brewing civil war between UDF activists and the Zulu nationalist group Inkatha (sponsored by the apartheid government) put discussion of such issues on the backburner for many activists in the 1980s. But growing sexual violence was a significant part of Natal’s political violence, laying the groundwork for the province’s high rates of HIV/AIDS after the democratic transition.

Throughout the anti-apartheid struggle, women were routinely underestimated and ignored as political actors. Officials’ underestimation of women could open up valuable political space. Women running politically lively clinics and schools, for instance, were not seen as threatening, while male-led political groups attracted more censure. 65 Yet the neglect of core issues of gendered inequality as apolitical—by many male and female activists—left lingering contradictions after apartheid’s end. The democratic transition in 1994 was in some respects remarkably progressive on gender and sexuality, with a constitution enshrining equality and unprecedented rights for LGBTQ citizens; but ANC leaders’ compromises with chiefs meant that women living under customary law could not realize this equality. Moreover, everyday gendered inequities—in issues from employment, to pervasive sexual violence—plague post-apartheid society. While South African women undermined apartheid from its gendered core, they have yet to realize core rights of gendered citizenship.

Discussion of the Literature

Work in this field began to emerge in the 1980s. Scholars, many of whom were also activists, began to develop an anti-apartheid feminism that acknowledged the harm done by a national liberation movement that could not fully grapple with gendered oppression during its long struggle. Marxism was influential in this early work. Scholars working during the late apartheid years were therefore concerned with (1) how gendered oppression had been integral to the racial capitalism that anti-apartheid activists were fighting, and (2) how feminism and nationalism were linked. The second theme will be explored in detail here, as it has recently been attracting more attention from a new wave of scholars.

On the first point, Belinda Bozzoli’s 1983 essay, “Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies,” examined the “patchwork quilt of patriarchies” through which the migrant labor system foundational to apartheid had developed. 66 Probing gendered histories of domestic service, factory work, nursing, and mining followed. 67

Walker’s Women and Resistance in South Africa , first published in 1982 with a second edition in 1991 , was the germinal study connecting the gendered foundations of apartheid rule with women’s development of strategies of collective resistance. The book emerged from Walker’s University of Cape Town thesis, drawing upon archives, activist memoirs, and interviews about the Federation of South African Women. But it also offers a deeper history of women’s urban migration, rural struggles, and links with male-led organizations, extending far beyond FEDSAW. Walker raised two central questions that shaped subsequent scholarship. First was the question of how apartheid-era South African women’s organizing was both emboldened and constrained by the movement for national liberation out of which it emerged. Second was the question of how, why, and to what consequences motherhood has united South African women.

In the first edition, Walker contended that both FEDSAW women’s lack of organizational autonomy and tendency to unite as mothers limited their feminism, seeing women as bound to both patriarchal politics and patriarchal homes. In the preface to the second edition, she backed away from seeing maternal appeals as primarily conservative, following pointed critiques of this approach as reductive and predicated on Western understandings of family life as a refuge from the public sphere. Hassim’s 2006 Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority pursued the question of women’s organizational autonomy more fully, extending her examination to the ANC in exile, women’s grassroots organizations in the 1980s, and the democratic transition. Like Walker, Hassim adjudged that the subordination of South African women’s organizations to the increasingly pressing needs of its national liberation movement ultimately constrained the gender-transformational potential of the democratic transition.

Nomboniso Gasa’s essay on 1950s women’s organizing in her 2007 edited volume, Women in South African History , challenged the theoretical premises of both of Walker’s central questions, as well as Julia Wells’s maintenance of the position that the “motherist” politics driving anti-pass protests were fundamentally conservative. 68 “At the heart of the earlier struggles is the fact that African women were homeless by state design,” Gasa argued. “Their struggle against the pass laws, which were a tangible way of infringing their rights, was, in fact a struggle to be in the public domain at the same time as a struggle for free movement.” 69 Building on Gasa’s intervention—and on the questions about motherhood Walker posited in her own auto-critique—scholars have begun to address the histories of motherhood in southern Africa that gave maternal politics very different meanings for black and white women, and to examine how family tensions played out politically during the liberation struggle. 70

The most important counterpoint to Walker’s and Hassim’s argument that female activists’ lack of autonomy from that national liberation movement limited their feminism remains Zine Magubane’s extensive 2010 essay, “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990 : A Theoretical Re-interpretation,” in the Road to Democracy series. Revisiting Walker’s and Hassim’s sources and examining additional interviews, activist memoirs, and archives of FEDSAW and the ANC, Magubane argues that autonomy was not a viable option: groups like FEDSAW derived strength from their roots in political groups and trade unions. 71 Further, she contends that black women’s emphasis on motherhood did not entrench patriarchy, but rather asserted black women’s moral leadership over white women in a growing popular struggle. Drawing on women’s own conceptions of their activism, she shows how political motherhood in FEDSAW, and in subsequent movements influenced by FEDSAW, was an ideology rooted in black women’s experiences of not only caring for their own children, but also taking community leadership roles on the basis of their maternal authority. 72 New scholarship is only beginning to grapple with the challenges and opportunities that transformations in the political meanings and everyday experiences of family brought to women, and to men, during apartheid and in the transition to democracy. 73

Primary Sources

National and provincial archives, with a searchable online database , contain information on both foundational gendered legislation and protests against key policies such as pass laws. The most revealing archives document anti-apartheid resistance, however. Compared to anti-apartheid men, relatively few women have extensive personal archives. The University of the Witwatersrand’s Historical Papers do contain some (such as those of Helen Joseph, Lilian Ngoyi, and Hilda Bernstein of FEDSAW) and FEDSAW’s organizational archives; key sources, including the FEDSAW papers, have been digitized . Other major collections include the ANCWL papers housed at the Mayibuye Archive , at the University of the Western Cape, and the central ANC Archives at the University of Fort Hare; both of these collections regrettably lack complete, searchable online databases at the time of writing. Campbell Collections at the University of KwaZulu-Natal contains archives for women’s organizations such as the Natal Organization of Women. Many women have published memoirs of their anti-apartheid activism and imprisonment, 74 and extensive oral histories have been collected on women’s experiences of exile. 75 Prominent women have also authored collections of essays and creative writing reflecting critically on the apartheid years. 76 Other published primary sources include Shula Marks’ collection of letters between a troubled schoolgirl and her benefactors in apartheid’s early years, and an anthology of regional writing. 77 Key feminist anti-apartheid periodicals may be found in JSTOR’s Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa collection.

Further Reading

• Berger, Iris . Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900–1980 . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
• Bernstein, Hilda . For Their Triumphs and Their Tears: Women in Apartheid South Africa . London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1978.
• Bozzoli, Belinda . “Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies.” Journal of Southern African Studies 9.2 (April 1983): 139–171.
• Bozzoli, Belinda , and Mmantho Nkotsoe . Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migration in South Africa, 1900–1983 . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991.
• Cock, Jacklyn . Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation . Johannesburg: Ravan, 1980.
• Gasa, Nomboniso , ed. Women in South African History: Basus’iimbokodo, bawel’imilambo/They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers . Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2007.
• Hassim, Shireen . Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
• Hassim, Shireen . The ANC Women’s League: Sex, Gender and Politics . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015.
• Healy-Clancy, Meghan . A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.
• Hunter, Mark . Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa . Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010.
• Joseph, Helen . Tomorrow’s Sun: A Smuggled Journal from South Africa . London: Hutchinson, 1966.
• Klausen, Susanne M. Abortion under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa . New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Kuzwayo, Ellen . Call Me Woman . London: The Women’s Press, 1985.
• Lee, Rebekah . African Women and Apartheid: Migration and Settlement in Urban South Africa . New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009.
• Mager, Anne . Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945–1959 . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999.
• Magubane, Zine . “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990: A Theoretical Re-interpretation.” In The Road to Democracy in South Africa , vol. 4. Edited by South African Democracy Education Trust , 975–1036. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2010.
• Mandela, Winnie . 91 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013.
• Marks, Shula . Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
• Marks, Shula . Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class, and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession . Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994.
• Mashinini, Emma . Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life . New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Ngcobo, Lauretta , ed. Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile . Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012.
• Ramphele, Mamphela . A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town . Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993.
• Ramphele, Mamphela . Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader . New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1996.
• Walker, Cherryl . Women and Resistance in South Africa . Cape Town: David Philip, 1982.
• Wells, Julia C. We Now Demand! The History of Women’s Resistance to Pass Laws in South Africa . Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993.

1. Saul Dubow , Apartheid, 1948–1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 10–13.

2. Cherryl Walker , Women and Resistance in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991), 23.

3. Marijke Du Toit , “The Domesticity of Afrikaner Nationalism: Volksmoeders and the ACVV, 1904–1929,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29.1 (2003): 155–176.

4. Meghan Healy-Clancy , “Women and the Problem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography,” South African Historical Journal 64.3 (2012): 450–471.

5. Natasha Erlank , “Gender and Masculinity in South African Nationalist Discourse, 1912–1950,” Feminist Studies 29.3 (2003): 653–671.

6. Dubow, Apartheid , 7–8.

7. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds , Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 354.

8. See also Ann Laura Stoler , Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; 2010).

9. Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act , Act No. 55 of 1949. An amendment in 1968 further prohibited marriages between South African men and foreign women of other races.

10. Immorality Amendment Act , Act No. 21 of 1950.

11. Immorality and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Amendment Act , Act No. 72 of 1985.

12. Immorality Amendment Act , Act No. 21 of 1950, Section 3.

13. Population Registration Act , Act No. 30 of 1950.

14. Group Areas Act , Act No. 41 of 1950, Section 2 (b) (ii).

15. Laurine Platsky and Cherryl Walker , The Surplus People: Forced Removals in South Africa (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985).

16. As in the famous case of Sandra Laing in the 1960s: Judith Stone , When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race (New York: Hyperion, 2007).

17. Barbara B. Brown , “Facing the ‘Black Peril’: The Politics of Population Control in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 13.2 (1987): 256–273; Zine Magubane , “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990: A Theoretical Re-interpretation,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa , vol. 4, ed. South African Democracy Education Trust (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2010), 975–1036, 1025–1026; and Susanne M. Klausen , Abortion under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

18. Belinda Bozzoli , “Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies,” Journal of Southern African Studies 9.2 (April 1983): 139–171.

19. Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act , Act of No. 67 of 1952.

20. These were known as “Section Ten” rights, because the Native Laws Amendment Act modified Section Ten of the Natives (Urban Areas) Consolidation Act of 1945. See Native Laws Amendment Act , Act No. 54 of 1952, Section 27.

21. Harold Wolpe , “Capitalism and Cheap Labour-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid,” Economy and Society 1.4 (1972): 425–456; and T. Dunbar Moodie and Vivienne Ndatshe , Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

22. Bantu Authorities Act , Act No. 68 of 1951; Harold Jack Simons , African Women: Their Legal Status in South Africa (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); and Hilda Bernstein , For Their Triumphs and Their Tears: Women in Apartheid South Africa (London: International Defense and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1985), 28–30.

23. Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act , Act No. 46 of 1959.

24. Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act , Act No. 26 of 1970.

25. KwaZulu Act on the Code of Zulu Law , 1981, Section 16.

26. Matrimonial Property Act , Act No. 88 of 1984.

27. Bantu Education Act , Act No. 47 of 1953.

28. Walker, Women and Resistance , 128.

29. Thus the Orwellian name for the 1952 Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act: it sought to extend uniform laws about identity documents across the country.

30. Julia C. Wells , We Now Demand! The History of Women’s Resistance to Pass Laws in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993); and Nomboniso Gasa , ‘‘Let Them Build More Gaols,’’ in Women in South African History , ed. Gasa (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2007), 129–152.

31. Linzi Manicom , “Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History,” Journal of African History 33.3 (1992): 441–465.

32. Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act , Section 2.

33. Walker, Women and Resistance , 126–130.

34. Rebekah Lee , African Women and Apartheid: Migration and Settlement in Urban South Africa (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009).

35. Zodwa from Cape Town, quoted in Mamphela Ramphele , A Bed Called Home: Life in the Migrant Labour Hostels of Cape Town (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), 18.

36. Anne-Maria Makhulu , Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

37. Abolition of Influx Control Act , Act No. 68 of 1986.

38. Mark Hunter , Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010), 84–102.

39. Walker, Women and Resistance , 230–235.

40. Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe , Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migration in South Africa, 1900–1983 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991); and Luli Callinicos , “Testimonies and Transitions: Women Negotiating the Rural and Urban in the Mid-20th Century,” in Women in South African History , ed. Gasa , 153–184.

41. Saleem Badat , The Forgotten People: Political Banishment under Apartheid (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 204–215.

42. Iris Berger , Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900–1980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 153–169.

43. “ Report of the First National Congress of Women, Held in the Trades Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa, April 17th 1954 ,” Federation of South African Women Papers, Historical Papers, Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, File AD1137-Ac1.6.2.

44. Magubane, “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990,” 1020.

45. Jacklyn Cock , Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1980).

46. Magubane, “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990,” 984–985.

47. “ What Women Demand ,” Federation of South African Women Papers, Historical Papers, Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, File AD1137-Ea2-001.

48. Mary Ingouville Burton , The Black Sash: Women for Justice and Peace (Auckland Park: Jacana, 2015). White women would later organize influentially as mothers fighting their sons’ forced conscription into the apartheid military: Jacklyn Cock , “‘Another Mother for Peace’: Women and Peace Building in South Africa, 1983–2003,” in Women in South African History , ed. Gasa , 257–280.

49. Helen Joseph , Tomorrow’s Sun: A Smuggled Journal from South Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1966), 63–85. The multiracial delegation was captured in an iconic photograph by Jurgen Schadeberg.

50. Shireen Hassim , The ANC Women’s League: Sex, Gender and Politics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015), 29.

51. Shireen Hassim , Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 26–27; and Wells, We Now Demand! 117.

52. Nomboniso Gasa , “Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies and Women’s Voices in the 1950s,” in Women in South African History , ed. Gasa , 207–229.

53. Walker, Women and Resistance , 260.

54. Magubane, “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990,” 999–1000.

55. Hilda Bernstein , ed., The Rift: The Exile Experience of South Africans (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994); and Lauretta Ngcobo , ed., Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South African Women in Exile (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012).

56. Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa , 87.

57. Kim Miller , “Moms with Guns: Political Agency in Anti-apartheid Visual Culture,” African Arts (Summer 2009): 68–75.

58. Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy , 90; Raymond Suttner , “Women in the ANC-Led Underground,” in Women in South African History , ed. Gasa , 233–255; and Rachel Sandwell , “‘Love I Cannot Begin to Explain’: The Politics of Reproduction in the ANC in Exile, 1976–1990,” Journal of Southern African Studies 41.1 (2015): 63–81.

59. Anne Mager , Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945–1959 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999); and Meghan Healy-Clancy , A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 120–190.

60. Shula Marks , Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class, and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994); Simonne Horwitz , Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto: A History of Medical Care, 1941–1990 (Wits University Press, 2013); and Ellen Kuzwayo , Call Me Woman (Johannesburg: Picador, 1985).

61. Leslie Hadfield , Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016).

62. Mamphela Ramphele , Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1996).

63. Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa , 61.

64. Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa , 58.

65. Healy-Clancy, A World of Their Own .

66. Bozzoli, “Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies.” This was developed further in Women of Phokeng .

67. Cock, Maids and Madams ; Berger, Threads of Solidarity ; Marks, Divided Sisterhood ; and Moodie and Ndatshe, Going for Gold .

68. Wells, We Now Demand!

69. Gasa, “Feminism, Motherisms, Patriarchies,” 214.

70. Cherryl Walker , “Conceptualising Motherhood in Twentieth Century South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21.3 (September 1995): 417–437; Judith Stevenson , “‘The Mamas Were Ripe’: Ideologies of Motherhood and Resistance in a South African Township,” Feminist Formations 23.2 (2011): 132–163; Healy-Clancy, “Women and the Problem of Family”; Arianna Lissoni and Maria Suriano , “Married to the ANC: Tanzanian Women’s Entanglement in South Africa’s Liberation Struggle,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40.1 (2014): 129–150; and Sandwell, “‘Love I Cannot Begin to Explain.’”

71. Magubane, “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990,” 979–1004.

72. Magubane, “Attitudes Towards Feminism among Women in the ANC, 1950–1990,” 1009–1036.

73. Mark Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS .

74. Including Joseph, Tomorrow’s Sun ; Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman ; Ramphele, Across Boundaries ; Emma Mashinini , Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Winnie Mandela , 91 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013).

75. Bernstein, ed., The Rift ; Ngcobo, ed., Prodigal Daughters .

76. See, for instance, Nadine Gordimer , Living in Hope and History (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999).

77. Shula Marks , Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

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apartheid summary

apartheid , (Afrikaans: “apartness” or “separateness”) Policy of racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-European groups in South Africa. The term was first used as the name of the official policy of the National Party in 1948, though racial segregation, sanctioned by law, was already widely practiced. The Group Areas Act of 1950 established residential and business sectors in urban areas for each “race” and strengthened the existing “pass” laws, which required nonwhites to carry identification papers. Other laws forbade most social contacts between those of European descent and others, authorized segregated public facilities, established separate educational standards, restricted each group to certain types of jobs, curtailed nonwhite labour unions, denied nonwhite participation in the national government, and established various black African “homelands,” partly self-governing units that were nevertheless politically and economically dependent on South Africa. These so-called homelands were not recognized by international governments. Apartheid was always subject to internal criticism and led to many violent protests, strikes, and acts of sabotage; it also received international censure. In 1990–91 most apartheid legislation was repealed, but segregation continued on a de facto basis. In 1993 a new constitution enfranchised blacks and other racial groups, and all-race national elections in 1994 produced a coalition government with a black majority. These developments marked the end of legislated apartheid, though not of its entrenched social and economic effects. See also African National Congress ; racism .

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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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Athol Fugard

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Tsotsi represents South African apartheid (a system of legally enforced segregation and discrimination) as a racist structure that destroys Black South Africans’ lives—even when they aren’t experiencing direct, interpersonal racism. Many of the Black characters’ lives are destroyed by racist apartheid laws despite having little direct contact with racist white people. For example, the Black South African protagonist, Tsotsi , lost his mother in childhood because white police rounded up Black people, including her, whom they suspected of living or working in white areas without the required pass. While one of the policemen did display clear racist attitudes—he called Tsotsi’s mother “kaffir,” a South African racial slur—it was the law, not his individual beliefs, that empowered him to destroy Tsotsi’s family. Tsotsi’s mother’s abduction propelled Tsotsi into homelessness and gang membership. In this sense, though Tsotsi rarely interacts with white people, the racist and white supremacist structure of apartheid changed the direction of his whole life.

Other Black characters similarly suffer from the racist economic and legal structures of apartheid, whether or not they come into regular contact with racist white people: the beggar Morris Tshabalala is crippled in a mining accident as a Black worker in an industry where the profits and gold go to white people. The young mother Miriam Ngidi experiences the disappearance of her husband during his participation in a bus boycott—and although the novel does not explicitly state this fact, major bus boycotts in apartheid South Africa were often protests by the Black population against segregation and economic exploitation of Black workers, which exposed protesters like Miriam’s husband to retaliatory racial violence. And Tsotsi’s fellow gang member Boston becomes a criminal after he forges an employment history for an acquaintance who will go to jail due to racist apartheid laws unless he can prove he has a previous employer. Thus, Tsotsi represents how a racist legal and economic structure like apartheid can harm oppressed people independent of and in addition to the interpersonal prejudice they experience. 

Apartheid and Racism ThemeTracker

Apartheid and Racism Quotes in Tsotsi

The knife was not only his weapon, but also a fetish, a talisman that conjured away bad spirits and established him securely in his life.

He didn’t see the man, he saw the type.

Gumboot had been allocated a plot near the centre. He was buried by the Reverend Henry Ransome of the Church of Christ the Redeemer in the township. The minister went through the ritual with uncertainty. He was disturbed, and he knew it and that made it worse. If only he had known the name of the man he was burying. This man, O Lord! What man? This one, fashioned in your likeness.

[Morris] looked at the street and the big cars with their white passengers warm inside like wonderful presents in bright boxes, and the carefree, ugly crowds of the pavement, seeing them all with baleful feelings.

It is for your gold that I had to dig. That is what destroyed me. You are walking on stolen legs. All of you.

Even in this there was no satisfaction. As if knowing his thoughts, they stretched their thin, unsightly lips into bigger smiles while the crude sounds of their language and laughter seemed even louder. A few of them, after buying a newspaper, dropped pennies in front of him. He looked the other way when he pocketed them.

Are his hands soft? he would ask himself, and then shake his head in anger and desperation at the futility of the question. But no sooner did he stop asking it than another would occur. Has he got a mother? This question was persistent. Hasn’t he got a mother? Didn’t she love him? Didn’t she sing him songs? He was really asking how do men come to be what they become. For all he knew others might have asked the same question about himself. There were times when he didn’t feel human. He knew he didn’t look it.

So she carried on, outwardly adjusting the pattern of her life as best she could, like taking in washing, doing odd cleaning jobs in the nearby white suburb. Inwardly she had fallen into something like a possessive sleep where the same dream is dreamt over and over again. She seldom smiled now, kept to herself and her baby, asked no favours and gave none, hoarding as it were the moments and things in her life.

On she came, until a foot or so away the chain stopped her, and although she pulled at this with her teeth until her breathing was tense and rattled she could go no further, so she lay down there, twisting her body so that the hindquarters fell apart and, like that, fighting all the time, her ribs heaving, she gave birth to the stillborn litter, and then died beside them.

Petah turned to David. ‘Willie no good. You not Willie. What is your name? Talk! Trust me, man. I help you.’

David’s eyes grew round and vacant, stared at the darkness. A tiny sound, a thin squeaking voice, struggled out: ‘David…’ it said, ‘David! But no more! He dead! He dead too, like Willie, like Joji.’

So he went out with them the next day and scavenged. The same day an Indian chased him away from his shop door, shouting and calling him a tsotsi. When they went back to the river that night, they started again, trying names on him: Sam, Willie, and now Simon, until he stopped them.

‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Tsotsi.’

The baby and David, himself that is, at first confused, had now merged into one and the same person. The police raid, the river, and Petah, the spider spinning his web, the grey day and the smell of damp newspapers were a future awaiting the baby. It was outside itself. He could sympathize with it in its defencelessness against the terrible events awaiting it.

‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘Keep him.’

He threw back his head, and she saw the shine of desperation on his forehead as he struggled with that mighty word. Why, why was he? No more revenge. No more hate. The riddle of the yellow bitch was solved—all of this in a few days and in as short a time the hold on his life by the blind, black, minute hands had grown tighter. Why?

‘Because I must find out,’ he said.

To an incredible extent a peaceful existence was dependent upon knowing just when to say no or yes to the white man.

It was a new day and what he had thought out last night was still there, inside him. Only one thing was important to him now. ‘Come back,’ the woman had said. ‘Come back, Tsotsi.’

I must correct her, he thought. ‘My name is David Madondo.’

He said it aloud in the almost empty street, and laughed. The man delivering milk heard him, and looking up said, ‘Peace my brother.’

‘Peace be with you’, David Madondo replied and carried on his way.

The slum clearance had entered a second and decisive stage. The white township had grown impatient. The ruins, they said, were being built up again and as many were still coming in as they carried off in lorries to the new locations or in vans to the jails. So they had sent in the bulldozers to raze the buildings completely to the ground.

They unearthed him minutes later. All agreed that his smile was beautiful, and strange for a tsotsi, and that when he lay there on his back in the sun, before someone had fetched a blanket, they agreed that it was hard to believe what the back of his head looked like when you saw the smile.

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