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Nearly 1/2 of the world’s population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty — less than $1.25 a day.

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1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty.

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805 million people worldwide do not have enough food to eat. Food banks are especially important in providing food for people that can’t afford it themselves. Run a food drive outside your local grocery store so people in your community have enough to eat.

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More than 750 million people lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Diarrhea caused by inadequate drinking water, sanitation, and hand hygiene kills an estimated 842,000 people every year globally, or approximately 2,300 people per day.

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In 2011, 165 million children under the age 5 were stunted (reduced rate of growth and development) due to chronic malnutrition.

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Preventable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia take the lives of 2 million children a year who are too poor to afford proper treatment.

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As of 2013, 21.8 million children under 1 year of age worldwide had not received the three recommended doses of vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.

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1/4 of all humans live without electricity — approximately 1.6 billion people.

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80% of the world population lives on less than $10 a day.

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Oxfam estimates that it would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global poverty--that's less than 1/4 the income of the top 100 richest billionaires.

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The World Food Programme says, “The poor are hungry and their hunger traps them in poverty.” Hunger is the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.

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Alexandra township in Johannesburg has been under threat of demolition many times in its 90-year-old history. The marvel is that the township still exists. It should have been obliterated years ago, at the height of the apartheid period, when other "black spots" in the middle of white suburbs met their deaths under the bulldozers. But Alex alone survived. Because of a friendship.

A friendship between a church minister and a cabinet minister is what finally saved the township from demolition in 1979.

The church minister was the Reverend Sam Buti, who initiated and drove the Save Alex Campaign in the late 1970s, and Dr Piet Koornhof, Minister of Co-operation and Development in the apartheid government.

Their friendship came about because their fathers, both ministers in the Dutch Reformed Church in the Free State, were friends and their sons knew one another from those times. Buti spoke Afrikaans and when Koornhof was appointed minister, he approached him and said: "My mense praat van 'die erwe van ons vadere' en vra: Hoe moet ons verstaan?"

Translated, this refers to the land inherited from their fathers, meaning that the people of Alexandra failed to understand why this land was being taken away from them, a plea that Afrikaners could readily understand.

It was the key to solving the problem. Shortly afterwards, Buti got a call containing a simple message: "Alexandra gaan bly [Alexandra will remain]."

Buti recounts in Alexandra, I love you (Published for the Alexandra Liaison Committee, 1983) that he was told to remain quiet about this news until it was announced by government. People in the township were beginning to doubt him - by 9 o'clock that evening nothing had happened. But at 9pm the South African Press Association phoned and asked for comment on the saving of Alex.

He responded: "All I could say was: "Oh my God, I'm so happy.' There wasn't anything else I could say. We all hugged one another." He was later photographed wearing a t-shirt that announced: "Thank God, Alexandra is saved".

Sprawling ghetto township

Alexandra, described by Nelson Mandela as "exhilarating and precarious", is a sprawling ghetto township some 12km north-east of the city centre. Some 170 000 (2001 Census: 166 968) people live in this ghetto, in an area of approximately two square kilometres. It's surrounded by wealthy suburbs like Sandton, Kelvin and Wendywood.

Alex, similar in some ways to Sophiatown and other townships around the country, had freehold rights for blacks and like these other ghetto townships, was a nurturing womb for musicians and artists and notorious gangsters, but unlike these townships, Alex survived demolition and continues to be a lively but desperately poor township.

The township, for decades referred to as the "dark city" because it had no electricity (Buti's was the first house to get electricity in the early 1970s), has been one of the first stops for rural blacks entering the city, being neighbours with the semi-industrial suburbs of Kew and Wynberg, and hence jobs. For decades too it had no storm water drainage, resulting in potholes and dongas opening up. Water to homes was provided by communal taps, one tap serving several households.

It has several cemeteries, now full, and 25 schools. Several clinics serve the community, with numerous spaza shops and telephone kiosks supplying basic goods and services. There's one cinema, several soccer fields and a number of churches.

Alex has sections where narrow alleyways separate overcrowded single-room shacks, and, in a reminder of its farm beginnings, unherded goats scratch for food in the piles of garbage on the streets. In other areas there are hostels of five or six storeys, or brightly-painted blocks of flats. In still other areas there're ordinary suburban streets and houses with the usual high walls and pretty pavement gardens that characterise South African suburbs.

But driving through Alex leaves one with the overall impression of squalor and desperate poverty witnessed in the polluted streets, the overcrowded shacklands, and the many unemployed people milling about the streets. The township has very few open, green spaces and aside from a few scattered trees, very little vegetation.

But despite this Alexandra has a pull on its residents. Linda Twala, grandson of the original settlers of Alex, was born there and wouldn't live anywhere else. He calls it "a wonderful place". Many others feel the same about the township.

Back in 1904

The story of Alex goes back to 1904 when it was very much part of Johannesburg's farmlands. A wealthy farmer by the name of S Papenfus bought a number of farms around present-day Alexandra, one of which, Zandfontein, eventually became the township.

Papenfus brought his cook Hey Nxele Mbanjwa and wife, Eva, along with him and they built themselves a mud hut in the heart of Alexandra. The hut acted as a donkey refreshment station for carts carrying Papenfus' milk from his farm in Midrand to Johannesburg.

The Mbanjwas brought their five-year-old daughter Annie with them when they moved. Annie married Phumuza Twala and they had 10 children. Phumuza was a thatcher and thatched roofs in the white suburbs of Johannesburg. He died in 1971. Annie lived to the age of 99, dying in February 2003, leaving a memorable philanthropic legacy taken over by her son, Linda Twala.

Annie Twala's original mud hut was in 2nd Avenue, and she lived in it until the late 1990s, when her son replaced it with a modern two-storey home, giving it to her as a birthday present. The school she attended in 3rd Avenue, a wood and iron structure, still stands.

People from the rural areas, drawn by the possibility of jobs on the burgeoning mines, settled near to the Mbanjwas, and by 1912 Papenfus started dividing Zandfontein into plots, selling them to black families and giving them an opportunity to own land just before the 1913 Land Act took that right away from them.

Papenfus placed a board, in three languages, on the farm which read:
ALEXANDRA TOWNSHIP
Freehold township for sale to natives and coloured persons only. Easy monthly payments for terms.
Apply to: S PAPENFUS, 35 Exploration Building, Commissioner Street, Johannesburg.
Papenfus needed a name for the new township. Twala recalls that Papenfus asked his grandparents what name was suitable. They replied: "Your wife, Alexandra, loves people." So it became Alexandra.

In 1912, Alex was proclaimed a "native township" and by 1916 the Alexandra Health Committee was established to manage Alexandra, a settlement that now accommodated around 30 000 people. The Committee was not given any funds by the city council for managing the township, and as it grew, with untarred roads, no rainwater drainage system, no street lighting, no sewerage system and haphazard shack settlement, it took on the appearance of a ghetto.

First removals

In 1948, the National Party was elected into government, and it brought into law a sweep of apartheid laws. It was decided that the influx of people into Alexandra had to be controlled, and in fact the population needed to be decreased, and finally, the provisions of the 1913 Land Act had to be implemented: freehold rights had to be taken away from those residents who owned their properties.

Despite the fact that Alexandrans had already proved themselves to be responsive to protest and resilient to hardship when in 1940 a bus boycott took place, repeated three more times, in the mid-1940s some 5 000 squatters were forcibly removed to Orlando in Soweto. But there were no homes for them in Soweto and they were dumped back in Alexandra, becoming the health committee's problem again, Alexandra being considered outside the jurisdiction of the Johannesburg City Council.

The exercise was repeated again in 1947 with 2 000 squatters. At this time Alex had a population of 60 000 residents, according to Alexandra, I love you.

Bus boycotts

The bus boycott took place because the city wanted to increase the four-penny fare to five pennies (one penny is around R1 in today's terms). The township came out in protest, and for six months residents walked to town, a distance of up to 15km, taking them up to two hours to walk the distance each way.

This persistence and resilience paid off - at the end of six months the penny increase was dropped. But the issue was raised again in 1942, 1943 and in 1957 in a movement called "Zikwelwa" ("we will not ride").

The residents won the fourth bus boycott too, with the government passing a law that compelled employers to pick up part of the bill of increased transport, getting their workers to and from work.

Education

In 1957 the residents of Alex were in for another fight. In 1954 the government passed the Bantu Education Act, which stated that blacks now had to submit to an inferior system of education, preparing them for inferior status in South African society.

Mission and private schools, which had maintained high standards, had to now register with the Bantu Education Department, along with all public schools. Thousands of school children boycotted their schools in April 1954, in Alexandra and around the country. Sixteen teachers in Alex lost their jobs. Cultural clubs were formed and informal teaching took place in the open. This continued for two years in Alexandra, with numbers attending the classes slowly dwindling.

The government eventually ended the impasse with an ultimatum: no child would be allowed back into a classroom if they hadn't started attending school by the beginning of 1956. Parents, concerned for their children's education, relented, and their children and future generations were subjected for the next 40 years to the debasing and debilitating Bantu education.

Removals and the reverend

Alex had been threatened with removals on and off for decades. It started back in 1942 with the North Eastern Protection League, according to urban specialist Pauline Morris in her 2000 paper Alexandra township - A history, lessons for urban renewal and some challenges for planners.

The league pushed for the abolition of Alexandra. The city council, which didn't have jurisdiction over the township, approved of the idea but backed down when faced with the cost of relocation of the residents, proposing instead, the upgrading of Alex, and its incorporation into Johannesburg.

Alternative accommodation was offered to residents and some of them took up the offer, the first of many removals of people out of Alex.

From 1948, Alexandra was administered by the Peri-Urban Health Board, and through the issuing of permits and passes, further settlement of people in the township was controlled, at the same time as freehold property was expropriated.

Police raided homes, checking on passes, and residents not in possession of the relevant documents were systemically moved out of Alexandra.

Morris says that the Alexandra population in 1948 was estimated at between 80 000 and 100 000, with plans to ideally bring the population down to 30 000. Between 1958 and 1973, some 56 000 people were removed from Alex and resettled in Soweto, and 15 000 removed to Tembisa on the East Rand.

The board started buying homes, demolishing some and renovating others, with a view to the government owning all land and houses in the township. Owners were compensated an amount of around R1 770, with the government buying 2 539 properties for an amount of R4.5-million by 1972. Not everyone who was compensated was moved from Alex, in the broader plan of maintaining a labour pool in the northern suburbs.

After the Sharpeville killings of 1960, the government clamped down on opposition parties with a state of emergency and it was decided to remove Alexandra altogether and rebuild the area as a "hostel city". Twenty-five hostels were to be built, each housing 2 500 people, for single men and women, and blacks living on white properties throughout the northern suburbs were to be moved into these hostels.

There was widespread resistance to the move, including from the Johannesburg City Council. All parties felt the cost and social dislocation was not worth the enormous effort that would be needed.

But construction went ahead and Madala men's hostel went up in 1971 and Nobuhle hostel in 1972. A women's hostel was completed in 1981, even after it was acknowledged that it wasn't feasible, the destruction of family life being the major stumbling block.

And this is where the Reverend Sam Buti steps onto the stage to play a major role in the eventual reprieve of Alex. He established the Residents' Interim Committee in 1974.

Buti was originally a minister in the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk in Africa, a breakaway branch of the Dutch Reformed Church which was exclusively for whites. In 1974, a further breakaway group including the NG Mission Church (for coloureds) was formed by the amalgamation of the two groups, calling themselves the Uniting Reformed Church.

Buti was born in Brandfort in the Free State, and is a third-generation minister. He settled in Alex in 1959 and has lived there ever since, measurably assisting to improve the quality of lives of Alex residents.

The interim committee resisted removals and was concerned about the breakdown of family life that would come with the hostel proposal.

Buti recalls that officials would remove furniture onto the streets, in preparation for the removals. "We would take the furniture back inside." The same happened with windows and doors - they'd be removed from the houses, to be promptly put back by residents. "They didn't know how to arrest us."

Meanwhile, freehold property rights were still being taken away from residents, and they were ordered to pay rent for their properties.

The committee swung into action, shooting off letters to the West Rand Administration Board (which then administered the township), a succession of cabinet ministers, among them Connie Mulder and Willie Vosloo.

Of Vosloo, Buti remarks in Alexandra, I love you: "He was a verkrampte [arch conservative] . . . but there were times when he shed tears at the facts - and the faces - we brought to his attention. I always had the feeling that he would have welcomed some form of change, but the forces around him didn't allow him to accept our point of view."

But still nothing happened. Then Koornhof was appointed Minister of Co-operation and Development. Buti could speak Koornhof's language, Afrikaans.

"He told the Minister what his flock were coming to him with . . . and he did it in the language of the church that both he and Dr Koornhof held dear," according to Alexandra, I love you.

Buti says it was a "tough time". The board tried to bribe Buti. "They offered me a big plot in Diepkloof and said they'd build me a house on one condition: I was not to interfere with what they were doing."

But Buti was not going to fall for that trick: "I said no. I was not a traitor to my people."

Buti says it took him and his committee two years to persuade Koornhof. What he eventually gave them was the answer the community had hoped for - that Alexandra was to be saved.

Buti's story subsequently takes on a sad irony. He got further involved in municipal politics. After fighting for Alex to be an independent municipality, he was voted on to the Alex council, and was eventually elected mayor of Alex. But Alexandrans felt he was siding with the apartheid government and betraying their interests. His house was bombed and razed to the ground. He was forced to give up his mayorship, and got more involved in church matters.

Today his reputation is fully restored, but the 1980s were a difficult time for him and his family.

The Master Plan

The reprieve didn't mean that Alexandrans' worries were over. The next year, in 1980, Koornhof announced the "Master Plan", which was to see the township divided into seven new suburbs with a central business area with shops, offices and light industry. New schools, sports complexes, parks and a dam were to be built.

Alexandra was to become a "garden city". An amount of R25-million was to be set aside for the development, which would take five years.

The catch to the whole grand scheme was that all properties were to be bought by the government and all houses were to be demolished. Residents were to be moved into temporary houses and refurbished buses while waiting for new houses to be built.

Alexandrans appeared tolerant of the temporary inconvenience. Between 1981 and 1984 around 260 houses were built in an area known as the East Bank, over the Jukskei River. Another 2 200 houses were still to be built, but by 1985 the plan and its implementation had dried up, mainly because of cost considerations. The cost of the new houses had become unaffordable for residents, and they had resisted being moved from their homes in the first place - they were to spend years in temporary accommodation instead of months, waiting for their new homes.

But there was another factor - the '80s were a very turbulent time nationwide, with the apartheid government beginning to come off the rails under the pressure of international sanctions, disobedience campaigns, the astronomical costs of apartheid, and growing violence. In 1986, a state of emergency was declared, the government's attempt to regain some semblance of control of the situation.

The master plan for Alexandra was modified and became the Urban Renewal Plan in 1986, to be divided into three phases. Still the object was to move to private ownership as soon as possible, but what was needed was to define the borders of each person's stand clearly, mostly done from aerial surveys, conventional surveys being impossible, given the rate of overcrowding in the township.

By the end of 1987, over 6 000 stands had been surveyed and demarcated. But because of the squeeze on space, each stand was to accommodate between three and seven families, with both original stand owners and tenants - many of whom had been issued permits to be in Alex in the 1950s - feeling that they should both have rights to the property.

The first phase of the plan consisted of clearing passageways for service lanes, often obstructed by uncontrolled squatter housing. Part of this process was to classify dwellings as either permanent or temporary, depending on the building material used - bricks and blocks, or tin and other temporary material.

Residents were classified as either "qualified or disqualified", in terms of their original link to Alexandra.

Into this messy situation was introduced the abolition of influx control in 1986, the apartheid government's means of controlling the movement of blacks from rural to urban areas. Shacks started going up everywhere.

Morris says that shack numbers increased from 7 352 in 1987 to 20 000 in 1991. "Of this total some 6 000 to 7 000 were in backyards and the rest, at 12 000, were in freestanding areas."

It was impossible to control the situation. "So desperate was the search for land and living space that shacks were erected overnight on roads being prepared for paving."

This and the fact that residents felt they hadn't been consulted, together with funds running dry, led to the abandonment of the renewal plan.

Morris has this to say regarding the impact of the progressive upgrades: ". . . the only conclusion that can be drawn [is] that all the attempts to upgrade Alexandra had been a dismal failure and had incurred massive financial, economic and social costs to the country and to Alexandra's residents".

In the early 1990s the township was wracked by violence in the run-up to the first democratic elections in 1994. Violence broke out between residents in the men's hostels and residents just south of the hostels, an area that became known as "Beirut". In early 1992 some 60 people were killed and nearly 600 people were injured and around 10 000 people were displaced from their homes, according to Morris.

More development plans

In 1998 another development plan was drawn up, and like its predecessors, planned to reduce Alex's population and divide the township into development zones. "Superblocks", three-storey blocks, were to be built to house 3 000 people. Total cost was to be R3-billion.

The plan fizzled out. Meanwhile, an athletes village was constructed in 1999 for the All Africa Games on the Far East Bank. Called "Tsutsumani", it consisted of 1 700 freestanding, semi-detached and simplex units. These are now occupied by Alexandrans who have been on the housing waiting list and qualify in terms of certain criteria.

In February 2001 President Thabo Mbeki announced the Alexandra Renewal Project, a presidential project that is to lift the township onto its feet. An amount of R1.3-billion has been made available and over a period of seven years the township is to be upgraded.

The project's aims are far-reaching: To reduce unemployment by 20 percent (believed to be 60 percent at present) through skills development and supporting SMEs in Alex; upgrade existing housing and create new housing; improve service delivery and payment levels; create a clean living environment by upgrading parks, rivers and air quality (coal is still used for cooking and heating); improve access to effective health and social services; establish a safe and secure environment with improved policing and community involvement; and finally, establish civic pride and a respect for Alex's heritage.

Work on the ambitious project has started: 7 000 people have been moved from the dangerous river banks, and those banks have been reinforced and grassed; around 2 400 houses have been built, and a further 11 500 houses are to be built in the next three years; a greening strategy is in place, in which 3 000 trees have been planted; a water-borne sanitation system is being put in place, together with sewers; in March this year a spanking new police station was opened in the township, and reportedly crime has dropped in Alex; and, to relieve the pollution and health problems, 46 000 bins have been distributed around the township.

After two years of intense planning, the project moves into the second phase with developments along London Road moving ahead

Hopeful investment

In the last decade there have been flickers of hopeful private/public sector investment in Alex, in the quest to uplift Alexandrans' quality of life. In 1995, a lifeline counselling office was opened. And in 2000 the Bombani Shelter for Abused Women was opened, run by three volunteers from the community.

In April this year the Alexandra People's Centre opened, providing an information centre, a help and complaints desk, as well as a centre for the payment of local rates, electricity and water.

After the World Summit on Sustainable Development, a resource centre used at the summit was donated to Alex. It consists of 16 computers, a call centre for five operators, an audio-visual centre with two TVs, two video machines, and a screen and cameras, and a conference/education room.

There are other private initiatives: the Alexandra Chamber of Commerce announced in May that it would be building a state-of-the-art shopping centre. Buti has just had his business plan for an environmental theme park approved by the city council, a R70-million investment initiative that involves a waterfront development, a recreational area and a community centre. He expects the first brick to be laid early in 2004.

In an effort to bring tourists and their money into the township, tours of Alex are now conducted. The township now boasts several restaurants and B&B establishments.

It seems fair to say that Alex is finally finding its feet.
Source: City of Johannesburg website

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Alexandra township in Johannesburg has been under threat of demolition many times in its 90-year-old history. The marvel is that the township still exists. It should have been obliterated years ago, at the height of the apartheid period, when other "black spots" in the middle of white suburbs met their deaths under the bulldozers.

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Eight narrative units arranged chronologically form the backbone of this site. Units 3 through 7 contain the greatest wealth of material, focusing on apartheid (Unit 3), the struggle against apartheid (Units 4 and 5), negotiations (Unit 6), and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Unit 7). All resources can be accessed from these units. Also, a full list of Units, Essays, and Multimedia Pages appears in Contents.

Unit 1. Introduction

Apartheid describes a system of racist laws and policies of total segregation in South Africa that began in 1948, when the National Party came to power, and ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected President in the first democratic elections. This unit briefly summarizes the region's pre-colonial past and its connections to world history. It describes South Africa's diversity and highlights how African societies underwent important transformations before the arrival of European colonizers in 1652.

Unit 2. Colonialism and Segregation: The Origins of Apartheid

This unit explores the history of South Africa from the colonial occupation of the Cape in 1652 through the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the segregation period (1910-1948). The emphasis is on patterns of economic and political transformation and how racism and segregation increasingly restricted the lives of black South Africans. Topics include: slavery at the Cape; the mineral revolution caused by the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1886); loss of African independence and the South African War (1899-1902); the creation of the Union of South Africa (1910) which enforced racial separation in economy and society and promulgated an ideology of white supremacy before the advent of apartheid.

Unit 3. The Rise of Apartheid

This unit examines the rise of apartheid and its subsequent development. In 1948 the Afrikaner ethnic nationalist Reunited National Party (renamed National Party in 1951) won a national election on a racist platform of total segregation under the slogan of "apartheid" - or "apartness" in the Afrikaans language. Apartheid built upon earlier laws, but made segregation more rigid enforced it far more aggressively. With the support of big business and other white interest groups, the state signifcantly extended its power and control. Apartheid led to a systematic and profound deterioration of the position of black people in South Africa for the next four decades.

Unit 4. Protest and Resistance through the Rivonia Trial (1964)

This section investigates the activities of twentieth-century political movements and individuals who fought for freedom, democracy, and equal rights in a racist South Africa. It charts the rise of the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress, and the Communist Party of South Africa and their adoption of polite constitutional protest tactics before the 1940s. After 1948, the liberation struggle gained mass support at home and abroad; a powerful leadership propelled the movement's growth as tactics changed from polite protest to direct challenges to apartheid guided by the principle of "one person, one vote." Brutal government repression resulted in the banning of the main liberation organizations and to the arrest of Nelson Mandela and many other leaders; others fled into exile. A decade of relative quiescence followed.

Unit 5. Reigniting the Struggle - The 1970s through the Release of Nelson Mandela

After a decade of relative quiescence due to the government crackdown on liberation movements in the early 1960s, black workers and students reignited resistance against apartheid in the 1970s. The apartheid regime responded with a mix of harsh repression and modest reforms inside South Africa and violent attacks on the liberation movements and their allies outside the country. Yet a combination of growing protest, international support, and significant changes in the political context of the region changed the balance of power by 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and negotiations for a new democratic South Africa began in earnest.

Unit 6. The End of Apartheid and the Birth of Democracy

The final stage of apartheid's demise happened so quickly as to have taken many people in South Africa and throughout the world by surprise. As the Cold War ended, Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 and the ban of the African National Congress (ANC) and other liberation movements was lifted, thus leading to political negotiations out of which emerged a democratic constitution and the first free election in the country's history. The final transfer of power was remarkably peaceful; it is often is described as a "miracle" because many thought that South Africa would erupt into violent civil war. But democracy did not emerge spontaneously; it had to be built laboriously, brick by brick.

Unit 7. Exploring the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was almost certainly the most extensive investigation into past human rights abuses the world has known. It was more successful than other truth commissions, for example in Chile or Guatemala, and often is seen as a model of effective conflict resolution. A product of political compromise and of South Africa's need for political stability, the TRC helped reveal the worst excesses of apartheid and its lessons to the world for conflict resolution were profound. Despite its shortcomings, the TRC process had a cathartic effect that enabled the country to transcend the violence and acrimony of the apartheid years.

Unit 8. Building Democracy After Apartheid

After almost two decades of freedom, South Africa's democracy is a work-in-progress. Economic growth, a stable currency, and the respect of international financial institutions has come at the cost of jobs and wealth redistribution. While the government has built many houses, it has been unable to meet demand. Land redistribution stands at less than 5 percent, well short of the ANC's targets. The government made some serious mistakes, as in the case of HIV-AIDS policy. Also, corruption is an increasingly serious concern. On the other hand, South Africa has achieved impressive gains in a relatively short time. Basic services now reach millions of people previously denied access to them, and the government has established a progressive constitutional democracy, maintained peace, and fostered unity and reconciliation in a divided society.

﻿

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Eight narrative units arranged chronologically form the backbone of this site. Units 3 through 7 contain the greatest wealth of material, focusing on apartheid (Unit 3), the struggle against apartheid (Units 4 and 5), negotiations (Unit 6), and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Unit 7). All resources can be accessed from these units.

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﻿

There is no place for him [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor. Within his own community, however, all doors are open. For that reason it is to no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community, where he cannot be absorbed.
Hendrik F. Verwoerd (1954)

In 1948, the Reunited National Party, representing ethnic nationalist Afrikaners, won the national election on a platform of racism and segregation under the slogan of " apartheid"- or "apartness" in the Afrikaans language. Apartheid built upon earlier laws, but made segregation more rigid and enforced it more aggressively. It significantly extended the reach of the racist state and led to a systematic and fundamental deterioration of the position of black people in South Africa for the next four decades.

The rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s was a critical factor in the electoral victory of the National Party (as it was renamed in 1951). Afrikaners constituted a numerical majority of the white electorate in South Africa, but they were divided along class, regional, and other fault lines. This began to change with the founding of the National Party in 1914 and the Broederbond (Afrikaner Brotherhood, a secret society) in 1918. Afrikaner ethnic nationalism grew out of a foundation of Calvinist religious thought that Afrikaners were God's "chosen people," united by a common language: Afrikaans. In 1934, extremist Afrikaner politicians and intellectuals broke away from the original party, which had merged with the South African Party to form the United Party, and established the Purified National Party (HNP) under the leadership of Daniel F. Malan. The Purified National Party and the Broederbond mobilized ordinary Afrikaners around the centenary of the Great Trek - a celebration reenacting the migration of Afrikaners in the 1830s to the northern and northeastern parts of South Africa. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa provided a theological justification for apartheid. Alongside cultural and political mobilization, Afrikaner economic power also developed significantly in the 1930s. Afrikaner capital expanded through the insurance giant Sanlam and the Volkskas bank (now ABSA), while Afrikaner workers formed their own ethnic unions, such as Spoorbond in the railways.

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.

﻿

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﻿ There is no place for him [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor. Within his own community, however, all doors are open. For that reason it is to no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community, where he cannot be absorbed.

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Sunday Nation, Nairobi, 22 February 1976

"Half measures are no good in this wilderness any more than a leaking boat is any good in an ocean. One needs certainty, a sense of security, something solid to hold on to in the dangerous void - and it has to be absolutely solid." - Alan Moorehead

The savage massacre of African patriots at Sharpeville and other places in South Africa on March 21, 1960, is of paramount significance in the struggle against apartheid and needs to be understood in its historical scope.

Sharpeville marked unquestionably a turning point in the struggle for liberation in Azania. As a respected African church leader, Canon Burgess Carr of Liberia said it was the watershed which spurred the outpou of revolutionary struggle against white minority rule and colonialism throughout southern Africa.

The fatal gunning down of some eight score peaceful African demonstrators and the maiming of several hundred others, in a callous and live re-enactment of the "Wild West," rightfully brought international public opinion against apartheid South Africa to a boil. So far the massacres at Sharpeville, Langa, Nyanga and Vanderbijl Park stand out prominently in the minds of people all over the world as the sanguinary examples of apartheid barbarism. Within Azania these massacres which form the darkest cloud in a long nightmare of brutal repression, are revered as a source of inspiration and rededication.

The militant black students` movement, the South African Students` Organisation (SASO), had one of its early brushes with the South African political police, the Special Branch, after declaring March 21 "Liberation Day" and arranging a meeting to observe the Day at the University of Natal in 1973. One of the nine SASO members now charged under the Terrorism Act, in the Pretoria Supreme Court at the so-called Palace of Justice, Dr. Aubrey Mokoape, was arrested and charged with organising the commemoration of Sharpeville Day. As veterans of Robben Island prison will testify, political prisoners also defiantly hold special meetings to mark 21 March every year. Ever since 1960, from the eve of each anniversary of Sharpeville Day until after, police are put on alert throughout the Vaal triangle. This region in which Sharpeville is located is ringed off by heavily armed men, often with support aircraft hovering above the location itself. Anyone leaving or entering the place must show an official permit.

Sharpeville: a Source of Inspiration and Rededication

The reverence of the African people for this Day grows from the fact that the political campaign launched to attack a fundamental cornerstone of apartheid colonialism, i.e., the pass laws, brought them far closer to the seizure of political power than anything attempted before. Conversely the white minority regime dreads the memory of March 21, 1960, with the chain of staggering events which followed after that day.

In particular they hate to be reminded of those events which had the National Party Government as perilously close to collapse as it has ever been.

Lewis Nkosi, a South African journalist who left the country on an exit permit in 1961, was a political reporter with the Post, a newspaper aimed at the African market, when the Sharpeville massacre occurred. As is well known amongst Azanians, Mr. Nkosi was in that unique position of African professionals with good connections amongst whites. His assessment of the situation in Azania at the time can therefore be considered balanced as it reflects opinion on both sides of the colour line. Of the man who was the principal architect of the historic Positive Action Campaign against the pass laws, Mr. Nkosi wrote in 1963:

Continuing, Mr. Nkosi wrote:

"In March 1960, Robert Sobukwe, President of the banned Pan Africanist Congress, helped to orchestrate a crisis that panicked the South African Government and nearly brought about the kind of political anarchy which all too often makes possible the transference of power overnight."

This report comes closest to the truth of what it looked like in Azania after the Pan Africanist Congress launched its campaign against the pass laws on March 21, 1960.

Cold blooded massacres such as that in Sharpeville have been a deliberate tactic for crushing political opposition from the earliest days of European colonialism in Azania, as much as they have been the pattern elsewhere in the world. As late as in 1946 trigger-happy white police had been used to crack down on a massive miners` strike along South Africa's gold-belt, the Witwatersrand. This tactic is still very much in use: striking African miners were massacred at Carletonville and the Western Deep Level Mine as recently as 1973. The impact of it all is all too often too temporary. But not so with Sharpeville.

A Landmark in the Struggle against Apartheid

Perhaps those who have commented that PAC and Sobukwe struck a fluke blow at the apartheid regime ought to be forgiven for their understandable ignorance. A veteran of the struggle against white settler domination like I.B. Tabata is better placed to judge. Mr. Tabata has conceded that Mr. Sobukwe and the PAC read the mood of the masses more correctly than anyone else: hence massive support for the Positive Action Campaign continued to roll in as from March 21. It is fair to note that Mr. Tabata did not agree with the resistance tactics used by the PAC.

The leadership of PAC maintains that from their days as Africanists within the African National Congress they already had their finger on the national pulse. This is not the place for polemics but for the record it needs to be stated that PAC leaders explain that one of the main reasons why the Pan Africanist Congress had to be formed was the crying need amongst the masses for leadership that could take on the oppressor militantly. The grinding apartheid repression within South Africa was demanding a change of tactics from protest to positive action. The tactics of positive action were scoring successes elsewhere in Africa and the Azanian masses sorely wanted to have their fight against white domination linked up to the decolonisation struggle in the rest of Africa.

Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe and his Africanist colleagues resolved in 1958 to break away from the African National Congress and in April, 1959, they formed the Pan Africanist Congress, at the Orlando Community Hall in Johannesburg. The inaugural conference was attended by delegates from all over the country, representing more than 1,000 provisional branches of no less than 12 members each. A constituency wider than the already committed Africanists had grown in the period leading to the inaugural conference.

I have purposely introduced this article by a quote from Alan Moorehead's book, The Russian Revolution. I have done it because the quote was found to be applicable to the Azanian situation. The Africanists, Mr. Sobukwe and his comrades, believe there is no middle course between present-day white domination and African rule in Azania. Mr. Sobukwe said as much in an interview with a Swedish journalist who visited him in his place of "house arrest" in Kimberley, where he lives under a "maze of restrictions." He said "a total overthrow is needed."

In a speech he delivered at a rally to mark African Heroes Day in 1959, Mr. Sobukwe amplified the PAC attitude. He stated then:

"The issues are clear-cut. The Pan Africanist Congress has done away with equivocation and clever talk. The decks are cleared, and in the arena of South African politics there are today only two adversaries: the oppressor and the oppressed, the master and the slave."

As PAC members went around the country organising for the struggle, they found, in Mr. Sobukwe's own words, that the non-nonsense and militant posture of the PAC strikes "a responsive chord in the hearts of the sons and daughters of the land" and that it has "awakened the imagination of the youth of our land while giving hope to the aged who for years have lived in the trough of despair."

Preparation for the Anti-Pass Campaign

The go-ahead for launching the Positive Action Campaign was given at the first and only national conference of the PAC held on December 19-20, 1959, in Johannesburg. The angry apathy which hung over the oppressed African masses was gradually giving way to an atmosphere of expectancy. PAC slogans like " Izwe lethu" (our land), " I Africa" were catching on like epidemic in the townships and villages, others like "Africa for the Africans!" were sprouting on walls along with the name of Sobukwe which was rapidly becoming a household word. Drum, the leading magazine for blacks, asked in a headline article: "Africanists` fireworks or false alarm?" That issue was banned by the regime and the police seized copies already in circulation.

At last the order came out! Against the background of intensified door to door campaigning by PAC activists, Mangaliso Sobukwe announced at a press conference in Johannesburg on March 18 that the Pan Africanist Congress would launch the first phase of its unfolding programme for the liberation of South Africa on Monday, March 21, 1960. The target of this campaign would be the pass laws, the lynchpin of the system of apartheid in South Africa. The door to door campaign was reinforced with a call on all pass-carrying African men to leave their passes at home, march to police stations nearest to them and demand to be arrested for refusing to carry a pass, euphemistically called the "reference book" since 1953 when the "Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Native Documents Act" was passed.

The pass system was deliberately chosen because: (i) it is the lynchpin of apartheid; and (ii) of all the apartheid laws none is so pervasive, and few are as perverted, as the pass laws. They show no respect for the sanctity of marriage - men are forcibly separated from their wives or vice versa because one of them cannot obtain the permit to reside in the same area. They tear away children from their parents: a child above the age of 16 needs a special permit to live with its parents outside the bantustan reservation, otherwise it must find accommodation in one of the location barracks they call hostels in South Africa. They deny men and women the universal right to sell their labour to whom they choose; every African man or woman seeking employment has to obtain a special permit to look for work - within a limited period, usually 14 days; otherwise they face deportation to the `homeland' bantustan reservation they most likely have never known. The indignities are legion and falling foul with any of the pass law regulations leaves an African open to arrest and imprisonment. Sentences are most frequently served out on prison farms, under the most primitive conditions.

The best known African campaign before Sharpeville was the potato boycott. It came as a result of exposures in newspapers like the Post about conditions for African prisoners in the potato prison farms of Bethal, in the Eastern Transvaal. Investigative reporters found that prisoners are dressed in nothing but sacks; they sleep on damp cement floors and are out working the potato fields with bare hands from the crack of dawn until dusk. They are continuously whipped by jailers on horse back, and the one meal a day they eat is always half-cooked dried maize without any protein. Many die from disease and torture before they complete the relatively short terms of imprisonment, between two and six months.

The pass laws, therefore, affect every living black person in Azania. A campaign aimed at liquidating this obnoxious system automatically enjoys the support of every African man, woman and child. PAC aimed at striking a death blow at this cornerstone of apartheid fascism with its very first campaign. In his final message to all party branches and regions, on the eve of the campaign, Mr. Sobukwe explained that the principal aim of the campaign is to get enough of the black labour force behind bars. He said:

"Industry will come to a standstill and the Government will be forced to accept our terms. And once we score that victory, there will be nothing else we will not be able to tackle."

Contrary to less informed opinion, Mr. Sobukwe did recognise that the campaign's total victory would be sabotaged. Accordingly he added in the same message:

The challenge to the racist regime, on this occasion, was going beyond a simple demand for concessions. The bid was clearly for political power. It was expected that the regime may hit back like a cornered beast. In Mr. Sobukwe's message to the regions and branches it was pointed out:

In this non-violent campaign there is none that could have been more concerned to avoid the shedding of even an ounce of blood than the leadership of the PAC. Mr. Stanley Motjuwadi, a long-time journalist with Drum and its current editor, recalls in the issue of his magazine of November 22, 1972:

Any who have followed Sobukwe's role at the head of PAC know full well the man's courage: he went through nine years of imprisonment without flinching and all those who have seen him, during his imprisonment and now under house arrest, including Members of Parliament from the ruling National Party and the white opposition parties, testify that his convictions remain as strong and his determination as unwavering. Mindful of the panic a threat to their power creates in despots, Mr. Sobukwe wrote to the Commissioner of Police of South Africa, on the eve of the campaign, emphasising that the PAC campaign against passes would be non-violent and imploring the Commissioner to instruct his men to refrain from the use of violence in an attempt to put down demonstrations. As a further precaution Mr. Sobukwe sternly told PAC leaders and cadres all over the country:

"My instructions, therefore, are that our people must be taught now and continuously that in this campaign we are going to observe absolute non-violence."

Many assessors of the tragic events of March 21, 1960, have shown the same disregard for PAC's precautions against police violence as was shown by the South African police themselves.

Monday, March 21, 1960

It is appropriate to focus on Sharpeville itself at this stage. Under the chairmanship of Nyakale Tsolo, the PAC branch at Sharpeville approached almost every house and the men's hostel in the township, mobilising support for the strike against passes planned for Monday, March 21, 1960. The full story of Sharpeville is still to be told, hopefully by those who helped to make this history. I was fortunate as head of the regional executive committee of the Vaal from 1963 to work in the underground amongst many of the organisers and participants in the historic event. Like most veterans of war the people of Sharpeville hate to relive their wartime experience but I was able to learn from direct participants a great deal of what took place.

Not a single bus moved out of Sharpeville to take passengers to work on that Monday. PAC task force members started out before the break of dawn lining up marchers in street after street. By daybreak the marchers, under the leadership of the task force, were moving to a pre-appointed open ground, where they merged with other demonstrators. In line with the instruction of the Party leadership, when all the groups had been assembled, the 10,000 and more men, women and children proceeded to the local police station - chanting freedom songs and calling out campaign slogans " Izwe lethu" (Our land); " I Africa"; " Awaphele amapasti" (Down with passes); " Sobukwe Sikhokhele" (Lead us Sobukwe); "Forward to Independence, Tomorrow the United States of Africa"; and so on and so forth.

When the marchers reached Sharpeville's police station a heavy contingent of police was lined up outside, many on top of British-made Saracen armoured cars. Mr. Tsolo and other members of the Branch Executive moved forward - in conformity with the novel PAC motto of "Leaders in Front" - and asked the white policeman in command to let them through so that they could surrender themselves for refusing to carry passes. Initially the police commander refused but much later, towards 11 a.m., they were let through. The chanting of freedom songs was picking up and the slogans were being repeated with greater volume. Journalists who rushed there from other areas, after receiving word that the campaign was a runaway success in this mostly ignored African township, more than 30 miles south of Johannesburg, confirm that for all their singing and shouting the crowd's mood was more festive than belligerent. But shortly after the PAC branch leaders had been let through into the police station, without warning, the police facing the crowd opened fire and in two minutes hundreds of bodies lay sprawling on the ground like debris. The joyful singing had given way to murderous gunfire, and the gunfire was followed by an authentic deadly silence, and then screams, wild screams and cries of the wounded.

Littering the ground in front of that police station in nearby dusty streets were 69 dead and nearly 200 injured men, women and children; a revolting sight which appalled decent human beings the world over as pictures of the massacre got around.

The same pattern of events had taken place in nearby Vanderbijl Park, where two Africans were gunned down by white police a few minutes later, and at Langa and Nyanga, a thousand miles away in Cape Town, where five people were shot dead by white police.

Domestic and International Implications

With that savagery the apartheid regime sealed the path of non-violence and PAC resolved to continue the struggle through arms in future.

It was a revealing comment, the one made by Carel de Wet, the Member of Parliament for Vanderbijl Park, a former cabinet minister in Mr. Vorster's Government, who is currently serving a second term as ambassador to the Court of St. James. He complained: "Why did the police kill only two kaffirs in my constituency?" Clearly the mass killings were by design and they were intended to "teach the kaffirs a lesson." But the African people refused to be intimidated by the racist regime's hired killers, Africans across the land poured out into the streets in their hundreds and thousands in support of the campaign against passes. Much of industry, as hoped for by the PAC leadership, ground to a halt. As a result there was an unprecedented run on the stock market and a helter-skelter pull-out of £43 million in foreign capital by investors. The country's reserves drained rapidly. In contrast to the exuberant anti-government demonstrations by Africans in every major city in South Africa, perilous gloom seemed to settle over white South Africa and thousands fled abroad, causing the overseas travel business to be the only brisk business in town. The frustration of white settlers, particularly the mostly complacent English-speaking settlers, was dramatically shown by one man, David Pratt. He is the English-speaking farmer who fired two shots into Mr. Verwoerd's head at the annual Rand Ester Show in Johannesburg in April 1960. On that occasion the settler premier miraculously escaped death. (He was later stabbed to death in the House of Parliament in 1966.) Mr. Pratt told a magistrate he had done it because Verwoerd "was leading the country into darkness" before he was whisked off to a mental asylum and oblivion.

Speaking after yet another massive PAC demonstration of 30,000 outside Parliament in Cape Town, the man who acted as Prime Minister after Mr. Verwoerd had been shot, Paul Sauer, called for a "new book"for South Africa and said things should not be allowed to slide back to conditions that had created the worst crisis the racist regime had ever faced.

The Verwoerd regime did not heed one of their own kind. Paul Sauer was quickly dropped from the cabinet and disappeared into the backbenches before dying. The Minister of Justice who had given partial victory to PAC by temporarily suspending the pass laws also got the sack from the cabinet. The regime declared a state of emergency at the beginning of April 1960, and arrested over 18,000 people, including most of the country's leading anti-apartheid politicians, black and white. During this first ever nation-wide state of emergency the PAC was outlawed, and with it the ANC. The state of emergency was virtually a declaration of martial law. Meetings were banned, curfew was imposed and press censorship was introduced, in effect if not in fact.

The international community reacted with shocked anger to the Sharpeville, Langa, Nyanga and Vanderbijl Park massacres. The question of apartheid was brought up in the United Nations Security Council for the first time soon after the Sharpeville massacre. In April 1960, the Council called on the apartheid regime to "initiate measures aimed at bringing about racial harmony based on equality... and abandon its policies of apartheid and racial discrimination". When the racist regime refused to give in to the reasonable and legitimate demands of the African people and strengthened its discrimination laws through the emergency, almost every country in the world turned from shocked anger to angry condemnation. Most countries have never stopped their attacks on the apartheid policies of the South African white-settler regime. Since that time international public disgust with apartheid South Africa is manifest in her total isolation from normal human contact with the rest of the world, her international standing is better to only that of her sister pariah - the Ian Smith racist regime in Rhodesia.

The Observance of the International Day: a Tribute to the Martyrs of Sharpeville, Langa, Nyanga, Vanderbijl Park

The support of the international community is especially valuable to the people of Azania in their struggle for self-determination. The world community's heightened sensitivity to political injustice in 1960 combined with the political assault on the apartheid system - an assault conceived and carried out by the Azanian people - plays an important part in immortalising Sharpeville.

The designation by the United Nations of March 21 as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is a source of pride to the Azanian people and their liberation movement. The posthumous tribute to the martyrs of Sharpeville, Langa, Nyanga and Vanderbijl Park is viewed as tantamount to the canonisation of men, women and children who paid for the noble cause of freedom with their own blood.

Further, it is important to bear in mind that the Azanian people see their own struggle as part of the whole of mankind's fight for the elimination of oppression. At the beginning of his trial - along with other PAC leaders, including Potlako K. Leballo, the National Secretary who is presently Acting President, Zeph Mothopeng, the Secretary for Judicial Affairs, and the late Rosett Ndziba, a former member of the Regional Executive Committee for the Witwatersrand - Mangaliso Sobukwe delivered an unprecedented political statement from the dock, the record of which the court refuses to release. Mr. Leballo referred to this statement when addressing the Security Council in 1974:

The good rapport between the struggling African majority in South Africa and the international community suffers, however, from the economically inspired indifference of major industrial nations whose business companies have not only reversed the outflow of capital sparked off by the PAC anti-pass campaign but have multiplied manifold their investments in the apartheid republic.

Typical of the unfeeling attitude of foreign investors is a disclosure in Newsweek, which reveals that:

This rationale lacks credibility and could never survive the test of an open meeting. South Africa has depended on foreign investments throughout its economic growth which dates to the last century. During that time Africans have had their every political, social and labour right taken away by an unending stream of draconian laws. It comes as no surprise when we find that erstwhile advocates of "foreign investments in South Africa to influence change" like Chief Gatsha Buthelezi of the KwaZulu bantustan and the Rev. Beyers Naude of the Christian Institute say in a joint statement published recently: "Foreign investment in the central economy is devoid of all morality." They were responding to a statement made by the "Minister of Bantu Administration," M.C. Botha. Mr. Botha had spelled out in unequivocal terms just how little the so-called homelands are ever going to get by way of autonomy.

"In the economic framework of the country, the economy of the homelands is interwoven with that of the Republic of South Africa and it stands to reason that the development of the homelands cannot be carried out at a pace which would have detrimental effect on the economy of the country."

Mr. Botha's statement makes it clear that South Africa is one country and effectively undermines the "independence" gimmick for so-called homelands. Safeguarding of the vital economic interests of South Africa under apartheid is based on keeping the bantustan reserves as reservoirs of cheap labour, the source of super-profits for foreign investors. No amount of foreign "economic influence" will alter that. On the contrary, the 16 major U.S. corporations investing in South Africa whose executives met in January - including IBM, ITT, GM, Ford, Firestone, Burroughs and Goodyear - know it.

"There Will Always be Others to Take our Place"

At the end of their trial, at which they were charged of sedition and incitement because of their leadership of the Positive Action Campaign in the uprising which followed the Sharpeville shootings, Mr. Sobukwe told the court: "If we are sent to jail there will always be others to take our place." This forecast, based on a deep understanding of African hatred for white settler domination, has been vindicated countless times.

In the post-Sharpeville era the South African racist regime has enacted a series of harsh laws to harass its opponents, compounding the notoriety of apartheid year in and year out. Evidence was abundant that both the PAC and the ANC had resolved to carry on with the struggle underground, after the outlawing of the two African organisations. In 1962, the present white settler Prime Minister, J.B. Vorster, then "Minister of Justice," propelled himself to the front ranks of the ruling National Party's extremists by introducing the General Law Amendment Act, a sweeping piece of legislation, more notoriously known as the "Sabotage Act," which upgraded simple offences like painting anti-government slogans to treasonable offences, punishable by a minimum of five years and a maximum of the death sentence.

The apartheid regime was forced into desperate measures by the spreading activities of the liberation movement in the underground, confounding the earlier boasts of that regime that it had "broken the backbone" of the African organisations. PAC's underground armed wing, which came to be known by the Xhosa name (which means authentic), succeeded in spreading Mau Mau style panic amongst the white settlers. In the underground, PAC's branches had been regrouped into small cells and armed units, whose standard weapon, like that of the Mau Mau of Kenya, was the panga, a home-made machete. These Poqo units staged a number of armed attacks on police and Government stooges, including guards of the puppet chief minister of the Transkei, Kaiser Matanzima. It was as a result of one of these attacks on the main police station in Paarl, when two whites were killed, that Mr. Vorster ordered Justice Snyman to conduct an inquiry into the Paarl uprising.

Midway through his inquiries, Justice Snyman suspended hearings and submitted an interim report warning the Government that PAC planned similar attacks on white South Africans on a nation-wide scale during 1963, on orders of Potlako Leballo and the national headquarters of the PAC in Maseru, Lesotho. Mr. Vorster reacted by amending the Sabotage Act to include the infamous 90-day "detention without trial" law and the so-called "Sobukwe Clause" (of the same Act) empowering the "Minister of Justice" to detain at his pleasure the PAC leader after he completed the three-year hard labour sentence for leading the Sharpeville campaign. Under the 90-day detention law the rule of habeas corpus was overridden and any commissioned police officer could order the detention of a political suspect for 90 days at a time and the courts, such as they are, are powerless to act. This travesty of justice, universally condemned within South Africa and abroad, has today been succeeded by an even more draconian indefinite detention law, the 1967 Terrorism Act. Black consciousness movement detainees have been held under the Terrorism Act for indefinite periods after the pro-FRELIMO rallies in September 1974.

A massive swoop on suspected members of the PAC was mounted by the South African security police from the end of March 1963. By the middle of the year more than 10,000 Poqo suspects were behind bars. The ANC underground, which had been conducting a campaign of sabotage under its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, suffered similarly. Some of the casualties of this blitzkrieg against the underground movement were those who appeared with Nelson Mandela, the former Transvaal president of the ANC, in the comparatively well reported Rivonia trial which began in October 1963. Thousands of detainees were during 1963 convicted of belonging to PAC and furthering its aims in violation of the ban imposed in 1960. They received relatively milder sentences. Hundreds of those whom state prosecutors found to have come from higher up in the ranks received far more severe sentences. Records show that 40 Poqo activists were executed from amongst those arrested in 1963. The list of executed PAC men has since that time passed the 100 mark: because even within prisons jailbreaks were staged and government spies were killed. Also several other cells have been raided during the latter part of the 1960s and in the 1970s. Most of those charged under the Sabotage Act have been given long stretches on Robben Island, where many from the 1963 arrests are still serving, and a few have been executed. In his extensively researched but hopelessly one-sided book, Urban Revolt in South Africa, Edward Feit grudgingly concedes that the growing discontent amongst the African masses was attested to "by the mounting support for PAC and its terrorist wing Poqo." Mr. Sobukwe's promise that "others will take our place" was being fulfilled. With the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement, following the bleak period and widespread apathy ushered in by the ruthless suppression of the 1960s, it is evident that apartheid brutality has all but spent itself as a deterrent. The timing could not be more fortuitous in the light of the victories which African liberation movements have scored in Angola and Mozambique and the intensifying armed struggle in Namibia and Zimbabwe. Just as Sharpeville resulted from the high tide of decolonisation in Africa north of the Zambesi, the battle for liberation everyone is predicting soon to take place in South Africa stands to gain from the favourable conditions now surrounding the African masses within Azania.

The Apartheid Regime is Vulnerable

The greatest significance of the campaign which led to the Sharpeville shootings lies in the fact that it proved that the South African apartheid regime, like all oppressive regimes, is vulnerable. Further it shows that it is the human element and not sophisticated weapons alone, which will be the decisive factor in the resolution of the struggle between the African majority and their white minority oppressors. Years after apartheid South Africa equipped itself with the finest arsenal of modern weapons in the whole of Africa, a seasoned commentator on the political scene, Allister Sparks, told readers of the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail that the growing black labour movement "places tremendous real power in the hands of black workers; this is going to become the main pressure factor in South African politics in the future." I would add that the decisive factor will be the armed struggle. Be that as it may, it is worth recalling that on the eve of Sharpeville, Mr. Sobukwe said when African workers force industry to come to a standstill "the Government will be forced to come to our terms." A combination of renewed armed struggle, with the rough edges of the 1960s smoothed out, and pressure on industry by the African labour force, are far more powerful than any weapon in Mr. Vorster's arsenal.

Sharpeville Day in 1976 is therefore being commemorated under very promising prospects for the struggle in Azania. At this time, supporters of the Azanian national liberation struggle would do well to be mindful of one particular danger facing Azanians in particular and Africa in general. According to a survey published in 1972 by the United Nations Unit on Apartheid "total foreign investment in South Africa amounted in 1970 to R5, 818 million. A guide to the rate at which foreign money is pouring into South Africa is that for 1970 alone £328 million came in, "only to be exceeded once again during 1971." The principal investors are Britain, the United States, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, i.e., the leading Western industrial countries and Japan. The first four are members of NATO and the first three are also permanent members of the Security Council.

In its very first meeting to consider the question of apartheid in South Africa, the Security Council recognised that apartheid could endanger international peace, which is an understatement. But for these countries and their investments, apartheid South Africa would not be as strong an enemy for the oppressed African majority to deal with.

In a brilliant article which tears away the double talk which he calls South Africa's "new-speak," a Washington Post correspondent says South African foreign policy

On the other side of the blackmail coin is an even grimmer picture, crystallised by the introduction of the new Defence Amendment Bill which declares as a "legitimate target" any African country, south of the Sahara, judged by the apartheid regime to be posing a threat to South Africa. The aggression against the People's Republic of Angola and stubborn occupation of the southern part of this independent African State is a demonstration that this new defence bill, like all of South Africa's barbaric laws, is no mere threat. Apartheid South Africa feels licensed to commit aggression against any independent African State. The British magazine, The Economist, reveals where Western countries stand when their economic interests get affected:

"It is on the borders of South Africa... that the West should be ready to draw a line in defence of its economic interests."

And since it is OAU tradition that independent States should help those countries fighting for their liberation, it is clear that "defence of its economic interests"for the West could include aggression against those countries in Africa which refuse to take South Africa's bribes.

To help the Azanian liberation movement, and Africa as a whole, a commitment is required from the international community which goes beyond the condemnations poured at South Africa since Sharpeville. Measures need to be taken, within the United Nations system, as well as at the national level in every country, and these must rapidly lead to all United Nations Member States, amongst other measures, ratifying and implementing the provisions of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

A recent report from the Nairobi Sunday Nation on the general atmosphere inside Azania is fitting for concluding this article because the situation it describes is reminiscent of the mood inside the country during the time of Sharpeville:

"At first glance inside South Africa there is little to show that it could be on the brink of prolonged war. But scratch the surface, there are all the fears and frustrations of a population preparing to defend itself. It is whites who are getting edgy...

"At the scene of a shooting in central Johannesburg - I hear a chilling comment: `They are getting frightened, it's Angola.' Main railway stations are periodically packed with soldiers, many leaving behind wives and children as they head off to the barracks. The radio plays record requests `for the boys on the border'...

"A mining official discreetly displays his armoury, which he bought just in case - two hand guns, a .22 rifle and a shotgun. Many of the whites have been on retreat most of their lives, moving down Africa as each country gained independence and black rule. South Africa was the last `refuge'... Now they all sit in South Africa - four and half million whites outnumbered five to one by blacks - wondering what the future holds. A lot have yet another escape route through retaining their original nationality, particularly the British. In the meantime they will heed Major General Neil Webster, Director-General of Resources, who recently told them `to get used to the idea of living with a warlike situation for many years to come'."

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The Sharpeville Massacre: Its historic significance in the struggle against apartheid

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By David M. Sibeko Sunday Nation, Nairobi, 22 February 1976 "Half measures are no good in this wilderness any more than a leaking boat is any good in an ocean. One needs certainty, a sense of security, something solid to hold on to in the dangerous void - and it has to be absolutely solid."

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The June 16 1976 Uprising that began in Soweto and spread countrywide profoundly changed the socio-political landscape in South Africa. Events that triggered the uprising can be traced back to policies of the Apartheid government that resulted in the introduction of the Bantu Education Act in 1953. The rise of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and the formation of South African Students Organisation (SASO) raised the political consciousness of many students while others joined the wave of anti-Apartheid sentiment within the student community. When the language of Afrikaans alongside English was made compulsory as a medium of instruction in schools in 1974, black students began mobilizing themselves. On 16 June 1976 between 3000 and 10 000 students mobilized by the South African Students Movement's Action Committee supported by the BCM marched peacefully to demonstrate and protest against the government's directive. The march was meant to culminate at a rally in Orlando Stadium.

On their pathway they were met by heavily armed police who fired teargas and later live ammunition on demonstrating students. This resulted in a widespread revolt that turned into an uprising against the government. While the uprising began in Soweto, it spread across the country and carried on until the following year.

The aftermath of the events of June 16 1976 had dire consequences for the Apartheid government. Images of the police firing on peacefully demonstrating students led an international revulsion against South Africa as its brutality was exposed. Meanwhile, the weakened and exiled liberation movements received new recruits fleeing political persecution at home giving impetus to the struggle against Apartheid.
Bantu Education Policy
The word 'Bantu' in the term Bantu education is highly charged politically and has derogatory connotations. The Bantu Educational system was designed to 'train and fit' Africans for their role in the newly (1948) evolving apartheid society. Education was viewed as a part of the overall apartheid system including 'homelands', urban restrictions, pass laws and job reservation. This role was one of labourer, worker, and servant only. As H.F Verwoerd, the architect of the Bantu Education Act (1953), conceived it:

"There is no place for [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. It is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim, absorption in the European community"
Pre-apartheid education of Africans
It is mistaken however, to understand that there was no pre-apartheid educational marginalization of black South Africans. Long before the historic 1948 white elections that gave the Nationalist Party power, there was a system of segregated and unequal education in the country. While white schooling was free, compulsory and expanding, black education was sorely neglected. Financial underprovision and an urban influx led to gravely insufficient schooling facilities, teachers and educational materials as well as student absenteeism or non-enrolment. A 1936 Inquiry identified problems, only to have almost nothing done about these needs.
Bantu education and the racist compartmentalizing of education.
In 1949 the government appointed the Eiselen Commission with the task of considering African education provision. The Commission recommended 'resorting to radical measures' for the 'effective reform of the Bantu school system'.

In 1953, prior to the apartheid government's Bantu Education Act, 90% of black South African schools were state-aided mission schools. The Act demanded that all such schools register with the state, and removed control of African education from the churches and provincial authorities. This control was centralized in the Bantu Education Department, a body dedicated to keeping it separate and inferior. Almost all the mission schools closed down. The Roman Catholic Church was largely alone in its attempt to keep its schools going without state aid. The 1953 Act also separated the financing of education for Africans from general state spending and linked it to direct tax paid by Africans themselves, with the result that far less was spent on black children than on white children.

In 1954--5 black teachers and students protested against Bantu Education. The African Education Movement was formed to provide alternative education. For a few years, cultural clubs operated as informal schools, but by 1960 they had closed down.

The Extension of University Education Act, Act 45 of 1959, put an end to black students attending white universities (mainly the universities of Cape Town and Witwatersrand). Separating tertiary institutions according to race, this Act set up separate 'tribal colleges' for black university students. The so-called 'bush' Universities such as Fort Hare, Vista, Venda, Western Cape were formed. Blacks could no longer freely attend white universities. Again, there were strong protests.

Expenditure on Bantu Education increased from the late 1960s, once the apartheid Nationalist government saw the need for a trained African labour force. Through this, more African children attended school than under the old missionary system of education, albeit grossly deprived of facilities in comparison with the education of other races, especially whites.

Nationally, pupil:teacher ratios went up from 46:1 in 1955 to 58:1 in 1967. Overcrowded classrooms were used on a rota basis. There was also a lack of teachers, and many of those who did teach were underqualified. In 1961, only 10 per cent of black teachers held a matriculation certificate [last year of high school]. Black education was essentially retrogressing, with teachers being less qualified than their students.

The Coloured Person's Education Act of 1963 put control of 'coloured' education under the Department of Coloured Affairs. 'Coloured' schools also had to be registered with the government. 'Coloured' education was made compulsory, but was now effectively separated from white schooling.

The 1965 Indian Education Act was passed to separate and control Indian education, which was placed under the Department of Indian Affairs. In 1976, the SAIC took over certain educational functions. Indian education was also made compulsory.

Because of the government's 'homelands' policy, no new high schools were built in Soweto between 1962 and 1971 -- students were meant to move to their relevant homeland to attend the newly built schools there. Then in 1972 the government gave in to pressure from business to improve the Bantu Education system to meet business's need for a better trained black workforce. 40 new schools were built in Soweto. Between 1972 and 1976 the number of pupils at secondary schools increased from 12,656 to 34,656. One in five Soweto children were attending secondary school.
Oppression through inferior education and the 1976 Soweto uprising
An increase in secondary school attendance had a significant effect on youth culture. Previously, many young people spent the time between leaving primary school and obtaining a job (if they were lucky) in gangs, which generally lacked any political consciousness. But now secondary school students were developing their own. In 1969 the black South African Student Organization (SASO) was formed.

Though Bantu Education was designed to deprive Africans and isolate them from 'subversive' ideas, indignation at being given such 'gutter' education became a major focus for resistance, most notably in the 1976 Soweto uprising. In the wake of this effective and clear protest, some reform attempts were made, but it was a case of too little, too late. Major disparities in racially separate education provision continued into the 1990s.

When high-school students in Soweto started protesting for better education on 16 June 1976, police responded with teargas and live bullets. It is commemorated today by a South African national holiday, Youth day, which honors all the young people who lost their lives in the struggle against Apartheid and Bantu Education.

In the 1980s very little education at all took place in the Bantu Education system, which was the target of almost continuous protest. The legacy of decades of inferior education (underdevelopment, poor self-image, economic depression, unemployment, crime, etc.) has lasted far beyond the introduction of a single educational system in 1994 with the first democratic elections, and the creation of the Government of National Unity.
Strikes in the Schools
Presumably, not all students of the earlier generation 'worshipped the school authorities'! The first, recorded stoppages of lessons, (always called strikes in the South African newspapers), and the first riots in African schools occurred in 1920. In February, students at the Kilnerton training centre went on a hunger strike 'for more food'... read on
Cape Schools Join the Revolt
The school students in Cape Town reacted to the news they heard of events in Soweto. A teacher at one of the Coloured schools was later to write: 'We haven't done much by way of teaching since the Soweto riots first began. Kids were restless, tense and confused. 'There is no similar record of what the African children thought, but it is known that they were aware of the extra police patrols that were set up in the townships following June 16. After the first shootings in Cape Town, a teacher at one of the schools recounted... read on
The NUSAS Issue
Throughout the 1960's black students campaigned for the right to affiliate to the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and just as steadfastly, the move was vetoed by the campus authorities. NUSAS was also keen to welcome the colleges into their fold. Not only would this make it the largest student organisation in the country, but it would also bring into the liberal ''old all student opponents of the government's apartheid policy.... read on

Countdown to conflict: The main cause of the protests that started in African schools in the Transvaal at the beginning of 1975 was a directive from the Bantu Education Department that Afrikaans had to be used on an equal basis with English as one of the languages of instruction in the department's secondary schools... read on

The introduction of Afrikaans alongside English as a medium of instruction is considered the immediate cause of the Soweto uprising, but there are a various factors behind the 1976 student unrest. These factors can certainly be traced back to the Bantu Education Act introduced by the Apartheid government in 1953. The Act introduced a new Department of Bantu Education which was integrated into the Department of Native Affairs under Dr Hendrik F. Verwoerd. The provisions of the Bantu Education Act and some policy statements made by the Bantu Education Department were directly responsible for the uprisings. Dr Verwoerd, who engineered the Bantu Education Act, announced that "Natives (blacks) must be taught from an early age that equality with Europeans (whites) is not for them".

Although the Bantu Education Act made it easier for more children to attend school in Soweto than it had been with the missionary system of education, there was a great deal of discontent about the lack of facilities. Throughout the country there was a dire shortage of classrooms for Black children. There was also a lack of teachers and many of the teachers were under-qualified. Nationally, pupil-to-teacher ratios went up from 46:1 in 1955 to 58:1 in 1967. Because of the lack of proper classrooms and the crippling government homeland policy, students were forced to return to "their homelands" to attend the newly built schools there.

The government was spending far more on White education than on Black education; R644 was spent annually for each White student, while only R42 was budgeted for a Black school child. In 1976 there were 257 505 pupils enrolled in Form 1 at high schools which had a capacity for only 38 000 students.

To alleviate the situation pupils who had passed their standard six examinations were requested to repeat the standard. This was met with great resentment by the students and their parents. Although the situation did not lead to an immediate revolt, it certainly served to build up tensions prior to the 1976 student uprising.

In 1975 the government was phasing out Standard Eight (or Junior Certificate (JC)). By then, Standard Six had already been phased out and many students graduating from Primary Schools were being sent to the emerging Junior Secondary Schools. It was in these Junior Secondary schools that the 50-50 language rule was to be applied.

The issue that caused massive discontent and made resentment boil over into the 1976 uprising was a decree issued by the Bantu Education Department. Deputy Minister Andries Treurnicht sent instructions to the School Boards, inspectors and principals to the effect that Afrikaans should be put on an equal basis with English as a medium of instruction in all schools. These instructions drew immediate negative reaction from various quarters of the community. The first body to react was the Tswana School Boards, which comprised school boards from Meadowlands, Dobsonville and other areas in Soweto. The minutes of the meeting of the Tswana School Board held on 20 January 1976 read:

"The circuit inspector told the board that the Secretary for Bantu Education has stated that all direct taxes paid by the Black population of South Africa are being sent to the various homelands for educational purposes there.

"In urban areas the education of a Black child is being paid for by the White population, that is English and Afrikaans speaking groups. Therefore the Secretary for Bantu Education has the responsibility of satisfying the English and Afrikaans-speaking people. Consequently, as the only way of satisfying both groups, the medium of instruction in all schools shall be on a 50-50 basis.... In future, if schools teach through a medium not prescribed by the department for a particular subject, examination question papers will only be set in the medium with no option of the other language".

Teachers also raised objections to the government announcement. Some Black teachers, who were members of the African Teachers Association of South Africa, complained that they were not fluent in Afrikaans. The students initially organised themselves into local cultural groups and youth clubs. At school there was a significant number of branches of the Students Christian Movements (SCMs), which were largely apolitical in character. SASM penetrated these formations between 1974 and 1976. And when conditions ripened for the outbreak of protests, SASM formed an Action Committee on 13 June 1976, which was later renamed the Soweto Student Representative Council (SSRC). They were conscientised and influenced by national organisations such as the Black Peoples' Convention (BPC), South African Student Organisations (SASO)and by the Black Consciousness philosophy. They rejected the idea of being taught in the language of the oppressor.

The uprising took place at a time when liberation movements were banned throughout the country and South Africa was in the grip of apartheid. The protest started off peacefully in Soweto but it turned violent when the police opened fire on unarmed students. By the third day the unrest had gained momentum and spread to townships around Soweto and other parts of the country. The class of 1976 bravely took to the streets and overturned the whole notion that workers were the only essential force to challenge the apartheid regime. Indeed, they succeeded where their parents had failed. They not only occupied city centres but also closed schools and alcohol outlets.
June 16 Soweto Youth Uprising
The introduction of Afrikaans alongside English as a medium of instruction is considered the immediate cause of the Soweto uprising, but there are a various factors behind the 1976 student unrest. These factors can certainly be traced back to the Bantu Education Act introduced by the Apartheid government in 1953. The Act introduced a new Department of Bantu Education which was integrated into the Department of Native Affairs under Dr Hendrik F. Verwoerd. The provisions of the Bantu Education Act and some policy statements made by the Bantu Education Department were directly responsible for the uprisings. Dr Verwoerd, who engineered the Bantu Education Act, announced that "Natives (blacks) must be taught from an early age that equality with Europeans (whites) is not for them".

Although the Bantu Education Act made it easier for more children to attend school in Soweto than it had been with the missionary system of education, there was a great deal of discontent about the lack of facilities. Throughout the country there was a dire shortage of classrooms for Black children. There was also a lack of teachers and many of the teachers were under-qualified. Nationally, pupil-to-teacher ratios went up from 46:1 in 1955 to 58:1 in 1967. Because of the lack of proper classrooms and the crippling government homeland policy, students were forced to return to "their homelands" to attend the newly built schools there.

The government was spending far more on White education than on Black education; R644 was spent annually for each White student, while only R42 was budgeted for a Black school child. In 1976 there were 257 505 pupils enrolled in Form 1 at high schools which had a capacity for only 38 000 students.

To alleviate the situation pupils who had passed their standard six examinations were requested to repeat the standard. This was met with great resentment by the students and their parents. Although the situation did not lead to an immediate revolt, it certainly served to build up tensions prior to the 1976 student uprising.

In 1975 the government was phasing out Standard Eight (or Junior Certificate (JC)). By then, Standard Six had already been phased out and many students graduating from Primary Schools were being sent to the emerging Junior Secondary Schools. It was in these Junior Secondary schools that the 50-50 language rule was to be applied.

The issue that caused massive discontent and made resentment boil over into the 1976 uprising was a decree issued by the Bantu Education Department. Deputy Minister Andries Treurnicht sent instructions to the School Boards, inspectors and principals to the effect that Afrikaans should be put on an equal basis with English as a medium of instruction in all schools. These instructions drew immediate negative reaction from various quarters of the community. The first body to react was the Tswana School Boards, which comprised school boards from Meadowlands, Dobsonville and other areas in Soweto. The minutes of the meeting of the Tswana School Board held on 20 January 1976 read:

"The circuit inspector told the board that the Secretary for Bantu Education has stated that all direct taxes paid by the Black population of South Africa are being sent to the various homelands for educational purposes there.

"In urban areas the education of a Black child is being paid for by the White population, that is English and Afrikaans speaking groups. Therefore the Secretary for Bantu Education has the responsibility of satisfying the English and Afrikaans-speaking people. Consequently, as the only way of satisfying both groups, the medium of instruction in all schools shall be on a 50-50 basis.... In future, if schools teach through a medium not prescribed by the department for a particular subject, examination question papers will only be set in the medium with no option of the other language".

Teachers also raised objections to the government announcement. Some Black teachers, who were members of the African Teachers Association of South Africa, complained that they were not fluent in Afrikaans. The students initially organised themselves into local cultural groups and youth clubs. At school there was a significant number of branches of the Students Christian Movements (SCMs), which were largely apolitical in character. SASM penetrated these formations between 1974 and 1976. And when conditions ripened for the outbreak of protests, SASM formed an Action Committee on 13 June 1976, which was later renamed the Soweto Student Representative Council (SSRC). They were conscientised and influenced by national organisations such as the Black Peoples' Convention (BPC), South African Student Organisations (SASO)and by the Black Consciousness philosophy. They rejected the idea of being taught in the language of the oppressor.

The uprising took place at a time when liberation movements were banned throughout the country and South Africa was in the grip of apartheid. The protest started off peacefully in Soweto but it turned violent when the police opened fire on unarmed students. By the third day the unrest had gained momentum and spread to townships around Soweto and other parts of the country. The class of 1976 bravely took to the streets and overturned the whole notion that workers were the only essential force to challenge the apartheid regime. Indeed, they succeeded where their parents had failed. They not only occupied city centres but also closed schools and alcohol outlets.
Timeline of June 16
It is hard to get a clear picture of what exactly happened on the day of June 16th. Most of the information comes from eyewitness accounts of students who participated, journalists who were on the scene, as well as the police reports on the events. As with all history, a lot depends on the perspective of the person telling the story as well as those who have subsequently written about it. Some accounts directly contradict each other. We are not endeavouring to write an objective account but are providing a platform for people to tell their own stories which we hope will form an accurate portrayal of events. Please send us an e-mail us and tell us if any of the information is factually incorrect.
07:00
Not all the children who were to participate in the march on June 16 knew about it on the morning of the 16th. For many it was an ordinary school day. But, by this time, students were feeling very frustrated and dissatisfied with the Bantu education system in general and the introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. It was exam time for the senior students and many were scared that they would fail the exams if they would have to write in Afrikaans.

Nonetheless the march that was planned by the Action Committee of the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC) was well organised and was to be conducted in a peaceful way. The leaders of the original march, mainly came from two high schools, Naledi High in Naledi and Morris Isaacson in Mofolo. Sfiso Ndlovo argues, however, that the main centre of organisational activity was Phefeni Junior Secondary, close to Vilakazi Street in Orlando. Phefeni was certainly close to the railway station from which many students got off their trains to join the march. The plan was that students from Naledi High were to march from their direction and pick up students from the schools on their way. The Morris Isaacson students were to march from their school doing the same until they met at a central point where they would proceed peacefully together to the Orlando Stadium. Other schools also were part of the original plan but it is not clear that the students at all those schools were fully aware of the march.
07:30
The first students to gather together were at Naledi High. The mood was high spirited and jovial. At assembly the principal gave support to the children and wished them good luck. The first chairperson of the Action Committee, Tepello Motopanyane addressed them and informed them that discipline and a peaceful march were to be the order of the day.

Meanwhile, at Morris Isaacson students also gathered. They were also addressed by one of the leaders of the Action Committee, Tsietsi Mashinini, and then set out.

On the way they passed by other schools, where some were waiting and those who were not were recruited on the spot to join.

- Dan Moyane Morris Isaacson High School

"The first time we heard of it was during our short break. Our leaders informed the principal that students from Morris Isaacson were marching. We then joined one of the groups and marched."
- Sam Khosa Ibhongo secondary School
In the end there were 11 columns of students marching to Orlando Stadium to meet at the central point of "Uncle Toms" Municipal hall. Before this point, there had been some minor skirmishes with police but it was here that police stopped them, barricading their path. Other schools had been stopped by the police earlier on and had dispersed but managed to join later. It is hard to determine how many students there were, estimates range from 1 000 to 10 000.
09:00
The march was halted and some people helped Tietsi Mashinini climb up onto a tractor so that everyone could see him when he addressed the crowd:

Brothers and Sisters, I appeal to you-keep calm and cool. We have just received a report that the police are coming. Don't taunt them, don't do anything to them. Be cool and calm. We are not fighting.

It was a tense moment for both the police and the students. Police reports stated that the situation was explosive and they retreated to await further reinforcements.
09:30
The students carried on marching until they got to what is now Hector Petersen Square, close to Orlando High School. The march came to a halt again. Different reports of what actually started the shooting have been put forward.

"Despite the tense atmosphere the students remained calm and well ordered.

Suddenly a white policeman lobbed a teargas canister into the front of the crowd. People ran out of the smoke dazed and coughing. The crowd retreated slightly but remained facing the police, waving placards and singing. A white policeman drew his revolver. Black journalists standing by the police heard a shot: "Look at him. He's going to shoot at the kids". A single shot ran out. There was a split seconds silence and pandemonium broke out. Children screamed. More shots were fired. At least four students fell and others ran screaming in all directions." Brooks & Brickhill Whirlwind before the storm, 1980
12:00
After the first massacre, the students fled in different directions. Anger at the senseless killings inspired retaliatory action. West Rand Administrative Buildings (WRAB) vehicles and buildings were set alight and burned to the ground, a white WRAB official was pulled out of his car and beaten to death, bottlestores were burned and looted. Other encounters with the police occurred where more students were killed especially in the vicinity of the Regina Mhundi church in Orlando and the Esso garage in Chiawelo. As students were stopped by the police in one area they moved their protest action to others. By the end of the day most of Soweto, including Diepkloof, which was relatively quiet during the morning, had felt the impact of the protest. For the students at some schools, this was the first they heard or saw. Schools were closed early at about 12:00 and many students walked out of school to a township on fire.

"It was past twelve, past twelve to one. Sister Joseph allowed us to go home, because now it was chaos around. So when we went home we could see that now cars were burning, especially the company cars, those from town, those owned by whites".

As more students were let out of school they joined those protesters that were closest to them. Some accounts see the events of the afternoon to be chaos or a "free for all" especially on the basis that bottlestores and beerhalls were raided and looted. The apartheid press certainly tried to portray it that way. It was clear that the events of the afternoon were not organised and an atmosphere of panic and defiance existed. However, others argue that the students attacked targets for political reasons and were disciplined in who and what they attacked. A white university student who was sympathetic was actually taken to safety by the schoolchildren themselves. It was overwhelmingly, WRAB structures and cars that were razed. One black owned business was attacked, the shop of Richard Maponya but this was deliberate. Maponya was a wealthy businessman who was despised by most people because "he exploits us and is a sell out".

There probably was an element of free for all in the looting of bottlestores. Many students came home with booze and a lot of people enjoyed the results of the plunder. But people had long seen alcohol as a method used by the apartheid government to try and make black people apathetic. Most of the beerhalls were built by the municipality. People were shouting "less liquor, better education". There were probably different motivations at play in the raids of the bottlestores. In any political protest there are those that are more politically motivated and disciplined than others, to see it as one or the other is to misunderstand the nature of political mass action.

Fires continued blazing into the night. At 21:00 Armoured Police cars later known as Hippos started moving into Soweto. Official figures were that 23 people had been killed, but some reports estimated that it was at least 200. It is hard to know how many people had been killed because of police efforts to cover up the number of people who died.
Events on June 17

The second day... was marked by uncontrollable fury and burning hostility...Police also assumed another attitude. They shot at random, and at anyone who would raise a fist and shout "Power", into their face

Many others joined the original protesters. Not everyone had heard about Hector Petersen and the others who were killed yet, but the word was spreading.

The following day I pick up stones. I joined the struggle....On the 16th I just came home and stay...because we formed the slogan "an injury to one is an injury to all" So we were supposed to be there.

- Solomon Marikele Rhulane Senior Primary

The heavily biased Cilliers Report for this day sums up the events. Schools, trains, buses, delivery vehicles, West Rand Administrative Buildings (WRAB) buildings, cars of business people, all were targeted. The fury and frustration that had been simmering amongst township youth had free reign. There was enormous police presence on the morning of the 17th 1500 police armed with sten guns, automatic rifles, and hand machine carbines had taken up strategic positions in the township. Helicopters flew overhead. The army was on standby. The police force had never developed other methods of crowd control other than the use of live bullets. The police shot at people indiscriminately and casualties were even higher than the day before.

The violent reaction of the police only made the children angrier.

At a press conference Mr. Manie Mulder announced that nearly all the WRAB buildings in Soweto had been destroyed. This amounted to 21 offices being burnt down, 10 being plundered, 3 schools burnt as well as unknown numbers of municipal halls, beerhalls, bottlestores.

The Rand had lost value overnight. Thousands of workers had refused to go to work. It was indeed a crisis for the Apartheid government. It was also a serious loss of face in light of US Secretary of State, Henry Kissingers impending visit to South Africa.

To add to this, 300 predominantly white Wits students marched through the city centre to protest the killing of schoolchildren. As they marched through the streets they were joined by many black workers.

At this point the political leadership of the Soweto Students Representative Council (SSRC), SASM and other organisations were desperately trying to take leadership of the protest and to channel the anger of the youth and to give the movement political direction. The ANC in exile called for immediate international action and the intensification of economic sanctions. The protest action also spread to other townships around Soweto. In Thembisa, students organised a solidarity march, which, although heavily guarded did not result in violence. In Kagiso, police tried to stop a gathering of students and adults; the result was a forced retreat and the destruction of WRAB buildings, vehicles and schools. When the police returned with reinforcements, they shot indiscriminately into the crowd, killing at least five people.
Events on June 18
On the third day of the Uprising 18th June, the situation in Soweto was still volatile. Outside butchery in Moroka there were some fatalities. Fires were blazing in many Soweto townships, like Zola, Ikwezi, Moletsane, Naledi and Tladi. Administrative buildings, wine stores and beer halls, which were hated by the young people, were also set on fire. Buses and cars running through Soweto were burned. Police intensified their terror in trying to return the situation to normality in the township. However this angered the insurgents young people and brought them up against heavily armed police. They used stones to counter armoured police cars, helicopters and guns. At about 10 a.m the chairman of the West Rand Administrative Board (WRAB) Manie Mulder was in Soweto to asses the situation. He was escorted by a large police vans. All the WRAB owned cars that had escaped being burned were taken out of Soweto after Mulder's visit. The columns of cars drove past Orlando police station into the direction of Johannesburg.

But in general the action on this day had already moved to the East and West Rand and Alexandra townships as well as other parts of the country. The people in other parts of the country were not revolting to pledge their solidarity with the people of Soweto. They shared the same problem, the same sorrows and the same causes of resentment and rebellion. A general stawaway was organised in Alexandra Township and four people were killed when the police opened fire on marching residents. The government, which for the first time publicly addressed the issue, and justified the harsh measures taken by the police. There were some reports of students seizing weapons from police and using them to shoot back.
Response to the June 16 Soweto Youth Uprising by organisations in exile
June 16 marks the commemoration of National Youth Day in South Africa. This is the day the country reflects on the massacre of school children during the Soweto Uprising of 1976. The response of the organisations in exile can be understood in the context of the events that took place on the day. The students had organised a peaceful march against the Afrikaans Medium Decree, issued in 1974, which made it mandatory for Black schools to use the Afrikaans language as the medium of instruction in Mathematics, Social Sciences and Geography at the secondary school level. Punt Janson, the Deputy Minister of then Bantu Education, was quoted as saying: "I have not consulted the African people on the language issue and I'm not going to. An African might find that 'the big boss' spoke only Afrikaans or spoke only English. It would be to his advantage to know both languages."

The policy was deeply unpopular since Afrikaans was regarded by some as the language of the oppressor. It was against this background that on 30 April 1976, students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike and boycotted classes. By 16 June, their rebellion spread to other schools in Soweto. Incidentally, the student-organised mass rally on this date turned violent, as the police responded with bullets to stones thrown by the angry students. Many students were shot. The official death toll was 23, but it could have been higher than 200 because the incident triggered widespread violence throughout South Africa, which claimed more lives. The first student to be shot on that fateful day was 15-year old Hastings Ndlovu. However, the killing in the same incident of Hector Pieterson, aged 12, and in particular the publication of his photograph taken by Sam Nzima, made him an international icon of the uprising. It became the major rallying point of the struggle against apartheid.
Military Response: Camps in exile
The incident triggered widespread violence not only in Soweto but also throughout South Africa. For the political organisations in exile, notably, the African National Congress(ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress(PAC), the Soweto unrest in June 1976 provided a golden opportunity both for recruitment and military training of young men and women. Many Black people felt in danger of being arrested by the police and further underground activities were launched as a result of this threat. Discreet recruitment operations culminated in many incensed students taking up arms against the government, and being sent for military training. Hence the mushrooming of military camps such as Mkhumbane in Temeke (Tanzania) outside the country, under the command and mentorship of Ntate Mashego and the Engineering camp in Angola. Recruits were advised on how to unlawfully cross the border(s) into Botswana, Swaziland, Angola, Mozambique and Tanzania, where they received military training. It is essential to note that the accession to power of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) in Mozambique and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in Angola in 1975, together with the exodus of thousands of young people in the months following the Soweto uprising, created favourable conditions for the resumption of sabotage activity in South Africa, especially after the collapse of the ANC/Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU) joint operation (i.e. the Wankie Campaign). These developments were followed by the infiltration of trained fighters back into South Africa, bombings of white installations and the subsequent arrest and trials of anti-apartheid activists.

Clearly, an issue that gave rise to a vast number of trials under security legislation was the massive recruitment of people and their transportation out of South Africa. While there is certainly some indication that this was already on the increase prior to June 1976, the revolts of 1976 gave an enormous boost to the activity of organisations recruiting members for military training. This is especially so in the case of the ANC, but there is also some evidence that PAC activity had been revitalised to some extent. As a result, there were many South Africans in ANC and PAC training camps. The period also witnessed a large number of trials against recruitment for military training. Those who were brought to trial for this offence seemed to reach a peak in 1977 and the first part of 1978. Many trained guerrilla fighters returned to South Africa, often wielding a large quantity of arms, explosives and ammunition. This group included the Black school children who fled or were recruited in the wake of the June 1976 rebellion. Their activities gave rise to a number of trials as exemplified by the case of Petrus Bushy Molefe, aged 22, who underwent training in East Germany, and was charged for sabotage and terrorism under the Sabotage and Terrorism Acts of June 1962 and June 1967 respectively. Related to this was the large quantity of arms and ammunition found by police in their attempts to uncover guerrillas in the urban areas and in clashes in the rural areas. It is important to note that most of the arms caches that were uncovered comprised weapons originating from the then Soviet Union, and the Eastern bloc countries, which suggests that the West was not prepared to lend similar support to the Southern African liberation movements.<

On 30 November 1976 a group of armed guerrillas clashed with the South African Police near Bordergate, on the Swaziland/South African border. A hand grenade was detonated by one of the guerrillas, injuring two policemen, and allowing the insurgents to escape. Shortly before this incident a railway line near Dikgale, in the Pietersburg district, was damaged in a successful sabotage attempt. From December 1976, in a series of raids covering Johannesburg, Soweto, Alexandra, Rustenburg, Odi, Nebo, Pietersburg and Sekhukhuniland, security police detained a number of ANC activists. Towards the middle of 1977 twelve accused activists, who included Mosima Gabriel "Tokyo" Sexwale, were charged under the Terrorism Act in the famous trial of the "Pretoria 12". They were mainly accused of being members or active supporters of certain unlawful organisations in South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Russia and China such as the ANC, the South African Communist Party(SACP) and Umkhonto we Sizwe(MK). They were also alternately charged with endangering, in various ways, the maintenance of law and order in South Africa; undergoing military and other training; possession of explosives, ammunition, firearms and weapons; harbouring and rendering assistance to guerrillas; as well as taking part in the activities of a banned organisation. On the whole, they were accused of conspiring to overthrow the white government and were all convicted on the main count of sedition.

Thus, the response of the political organisations operating in exile was one that was premised on mobilisation, recruitment of people and the organisation of the armed phase of the struggle from outside in order to topple the apartheid government. Clearly, the events of the Soweto revolt and the response from the liberation movement in exile are not isolated developments. They have their roots in the spirit of resistance to the growing crisis of apartheid. The collective resistance to oppression and exploitation in South Africa also fundamentally underpins the relationship that was forged between internal and external forms of organisation after this incident. It led to major transformations in the strategies of the various exiled liberation movements more in accordance with the changing conditions in the country. A militant approach, that found expression in the recruitment and subsequent training of the cadres in neighbouring as well as some European and Asian countries, was emphasised.
References to Youth and the National Liberation Struggle 1894-1994

Brits, J. P. (1995). The Concise Dictionary of Historical and Political Terms, London: Penguin.

Christie, P. (1991). The Right to Learn: The Struggle for Education in South Africa, Johannesburg: Sached Trust/Ravan Press.

Cross, M. (1992). Resistance and Transformation: Education Culture and Reconstruction in South Africa, Johannesburg: Skotaville.

Howcroft, P. unpublished South African Encyclopaedia papers.

Kallaway, P. (ed) (1984). Apartheid and Education: The Education of Black South Africans, Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

Saunders, C. & Southey, N. (1998). A Dictionary of South African History, Cape Town: David Philip.

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The June 16 1976 Uprising that began in Soweto and spread countrywide profoundly changed the socio-political landscape in South Africa. Events that triggered the uprising can be traced back to policies of the Apartheid government that resulted in the introduction of the Bantu Education Act in 1953.

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With colonialism, which began in South Africa in 1652, came the Slavery and Forced Labour Model. This was the original model of colonialism brought by the Dutch in 1652, and subsequently exported from the Western Cape to the Afrikaner Republics of the Orange Free State and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. Many South Africans are the descendents of slaves brought to the Cape Colony from 1653 until 1822.

The changes wrought on African societies by the imposition of European colonial rule occurred in quick succession. In fact, it was the speed with which change occurred that set the colonial era apart from earlier periods in South Africa. Of course, not all societies were equally transformed. Some resisted the forces of colonial intrusion, slavery and forced labour for extended periods. Others, however, such as the Khoikhoi communities of the south-western Cape, disintegrated within a matter of decades.

Initially, a colonial contact was a two-way process. However, Africans were far from helpless victims in the initial encounter. Colonial contact was not simply a matter of Europeans imposing themselves upon African societies. For their part, African rulers saw many benefits to be had from maintaining relations with Europeans, and for a considerable period of time they engaged with Europeans voluntarily and on their own terms.

Most importantly, trade with Europeans gave African rulers access to a crucial aspect of European technology, namely firearms. More than anything else, those who had ownership and control over firearms were able to gather around themselves larger and larger groups of people. In short, the ownership of firearms turned into a status symbol and a means to gain political power.

Sadly, the article of trade in which Europeans showed the greatest interest, and which Africans were prepared to sacrifice, were slaves. The Atlantic slave trade stands at the centre of a long history of European contact with Africa. This was the era of the African Diaspora, an all embracing term historians have used to describe the consequences of the slave trade. Estimates of the number of slaves transported from their African homes to European colonial possession in the Americas range from 9 to 15 million people. Although a great deal of violence accompanied the trade in slaves, the sheer scale of operations involved a high degree of organisation, on the part of both Europeans and Africans. In other words, the Atlantic slave trade could not have taken place without the cooperation, or complicity, of many Africans.

As the number of transported slaves increased, African societies could not avoid transformation, and 400 years of slave trading took their toll. Of course, not all African societies were equally affected, but countries such as Angola and Senegal suffered heavily.

The most important consequences of the Atlantic slave trade were demographic, economic, and political. There can be no doubt that the Atlantic slave trade greatly retarded African demographic development, a fact that was to have lasting consequences for the history of the continent. At best, African populations remained stagnant. The export of the most economically active men and women led to the disintegration of entire societies. The trade in slaves also led to new political formations. In some cases, as people sought protection from the violence and warfare that went with the slave trade, large centralised states came into being.
Slavery at the Cape
Jan van Riebeeck, who founded the first colony at Cape Town in 1652, was an official of the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch marked their permanence by building a five-pointed stone castle on the shores of the bay, a structure that continues to dominate the city centre of Cape Town. From within the walls of the Castle, the VOC administered and governed the expanding colony.

At first, the Dutch were primarily concerned with supplying their ships with fresh produce as they rounded the Cape en route to the spice-producing islands of the Indonesian archipelago. This is because the Dutch had their most important colonial interests in Indonesia, which included the growing of crops and spices that could not be produced in Europe. In Indonesia, the Dutch enslaved entire populations, ruling them by force and coercing them to produce crops. In the Cape, Van Riebeeck first attempted to get cattle and labour through negotiation, but as soon as these negotiations broke down slavery was implemented.

Even with slavery, the Dutch did not have sufficient labour power to provide for their ships. In 1657, some Company officials were released from their contracts and were allocated land along the Liesbeeck River. These officials became known as the Free Burghers (Farmers), and formed the nucleus of the white South African population that came to be known as Boers or Afrikaners.

It soon became apparent that if the free burghers were to be successful as agricultural producers, they would need access to substantial labour. The indigenous peoples with whom the Dutch first came into contact, the Khoikhoi, had been settled in the region for at least a thousand years before the Dutch arrived, and were an unwilling labour force. This is because the Khoikhoi were a pastoral people, and as long as they had their lands, flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, they could not be pressed into service for the Dutch settlers. The settlers also practiced a form of settled agriculture that came into direct conflict with the pastoral economy of the Khoikhoi, and involved regular and structured seasonal migration.

Therefore, as the Dutch settlement expanded, independent Khoikhoi communities were placed under unbearable pressure. Within 50 years of the establishment of the Dutch settlement, the indigenous communities near Table Bay, despite heroic struggles on their part, had been dispossessed of their lands and their independent means of existence had come to an end.

Individual Khoikhoi men and women became incorporated into colonial society as low-status servants. Beyond the mountains of Table Valley, communities of Khoisan (as the Khoikhoi and the indigenous hunter-gatherer San are collectively called) survived until the end of the eighteenth century, but there can be little doubt that for the indigenous populations of the Cape the arrival of the Dutch settlers proved to be a major turning point.

The Dutch settlers were therefore forced to look elsewhere for their labour needs. In 1658, a year after the first free burghers had been granted their plots of land, the first slaves were imported into South Africa, specifically for agricultural work. These slaves arrived at the Cape on 28 March 1658 on board the Amersfoort and had been captured by the Dutch from a Portuguese slaver en route to Brazil. Of the 250 slaves captured, only 170 survived the journey to the Cape. Most of these slaves were originally captured by the Portuguese in present-day Angola. On 6 May 1658, 228 slaves from another group of slaves arrived at the Cape on board the Hassalt, from Ghana. From 1710 onwards, the adult slave population outnumbered the adult colonial population by as much as three to one.

Another source of slaves was the VOC's return fleets from Batavia and other places in the east which sailed around the Cape on their way to Europe. VOC officials could not take their slaves with them when they returned home, as slavery was illegal in the Netherlands. Therefore, many of these officials sold their slaves at the Cape because they could get a better price for their slaves there than in the East Indies. Foreign ships on their way to the Americas from Madagascar also sold slaves at the Cape.

The Indian subcontinent was the main source of slaves during the early part of the 18th century, and approximately 80% of slaves came from India during this period. A slaving station was established in Delagoa Bay (present-day Maputo) in 1721, but was abandoned in 1731. Between 1731 and 1765 more and more slaves were bought from Madagascar.

In 1795, the Cape Colony became a British colony, before it was returned to the Dutch in 1802. During this first period of British rule, South-East Africa became the main source of slaves. This trend continued with the return of the Dutch who continued to buy slaves from slave traders operating in present-day Mozambique.

When in control of the Cape, the VOC sent slavers to Mozambique and Madagascar. The main purpose of these expeditions was to trade slaves. In those days, travelling by ship was very uncomfortable and unhygienic for ordinary people, but especially for slaves who had to be kept confined.

Between 1720 and 1790, slave numbers increased from 2 500 to 14 500. At the time of the final ending of slavery in 1838, the slave population stood at around 38 000. However, unlike the European population, which doubled in number with each generation through natural increase, the harsh living conditions of the Cape's slave population meant that their numbers could only be sustained through continued importation. Between 1652 and the ending of the slave trade in 1807, about 60 000 slaves were imported into the Colony.

Thus the Cape became not just a society in which some people were slaves, but a fully-fledged slave society. In slave societies, the institution of slavery touched all aspects of life, as slavery was central to the social, economic and legal institutions. As the boundaries of the Cape Colony expanded beyond the immediate vicinity of Table Bay, slaves were put to work on the wine and wheat farms of the south-western Cape. Quite simply, the colonial economy could not function without the use of slave labour, and therefore slave-ownership was widespread. Although most of the European settlers of the south-western Cape owned fewer than ten slaves, almost all of them owned at least some slaves.

The most important social feature of slave societies is that they were polarised between people who were slaves and those who were not. Slaves were also defined by their race, and although the VOC did not institute a codified form of racial classification, the fact is that slaves were black and slave owners were white. There were a few slaves who had been freed, who were called "free blacks". These "free blacks" had managed to acquire slaves of their own, but these slave owners were a tiny minority of the slave-owning population. Thus, colonial South Africa was from the very start a society structured along racial lines, in which black people occupied a subordinate position.

Slavery was fully supported by the Roman-Dutch legal system that the VOC brought to the Cape. In terms of Roman-Dutch law, slaves were defined, first and foremost, as property. This form of slavery, known as chattel slavery, meant that one human being was the legal belonging of another human being. Slaves could be bought and sold, bequeathed or used as security for loans. Since slaves were kept in a state of slavery against their will, the slave owners and the VOC needed a system of laws to ensure that slaves were kept in their subordinate position.

Therefore, slaves in the Cape were strictly controlled, and according to law, slaves could be severely punished for acts such as running away or failing to obey their owners' orders. Slave owners were allowed to use harsh punishment like whipping, withholding food, and making slaves work more hours. Slaves who tried to run away were put in chains to prevent them from running away again, because many slaves from West and East Africa believed that if they ran away they could find their way back home. Slaves could even be put to death for attacking their owners.

The food given to the slaves was terrible. It was only after the slave trade in Cape Town was banned that slave owners began to treat their slaves better. Better treatment of slaves was due to the fact that slaves were no longer easily available and therefore more expensive. Slaves were also treated better because slave owners did not want them to run away or die while they were still young. This was in contrast to the treatment of slaves before banning, as then it was cheaper for slave owners to buy new slaves instead of providing good care for them.
How could slaves limit the power of slavery?
The single largest limitation that the slave owners faced was that they were compelled to acknowledge that their slaves were not merely property, but also human beings with human values, desires and emotions. On farms and households in the Cape, slaves and slave owners lived very near each other and came into daily contact.

The culture that grew out of these regular interactions was one of domination, but it was also one that was based on acknowledging the humanity of the other party. From the very first day when a slave was acquired by a settler and given a new name, slaves and owners became involved in a constant struggle to see how much each could impose their will on the other.

We see this clearly in the records of the trial of the slave, Reijnier, a runaway who was caught and tried 22 years later. The story of Reijnier is based on the records of a criminal trial. We can tell much about the slave society of the Cape by examining the legal records that have been left behind by the VOC and are now held by the Cape Archives in Cape Town.

In the first few decades of the eighteenth century, Reijnier lived in the district of Drakenstein in the south-western Cape. Reijnier, who had come from Madagascar, was the property of the free burgher, Matthijs Krugel. On Krugel's farm, Simonsvalleij, Reijnier had built a long-standing relationship with Manika, a female slave who had been imported from India. They had a number of children together, including a daughter named Sabina.

It is clear that Manika and Reijnier's situation was unusual in the context of the Cape, as few slaves were able to build and sustain such longstanding relationships. Since the colonists preferred to import male rather than female slaves, the slave population suffered from great sexual imbalance. Until the end of the eighteenth century male slaves outnumbered female slaves by as much as four to one, although this ratio could vary significantly from district to district.

The children born to Manika were born into slavery, for slave women passed this status onto their children. Manika's children would have been among only a small proportion of slaves who were born at the Cape in the course of the eighteenth century, as mentioned earlier, the slave population grew as a result of continued importation.

We can only speculate as to the nature of the relationship that existed between Reijnier and Manika and the kind of life they would have been able to lead. Since they came from such different places of origin, they would probably have communicated with each other in a type of pidgin. Their owners would have spoken to them in Dutch, and out of this mixture of languages grew Afrikaans, as the slaves contributed their share to the development of this dialect.

It is clear that Reijnier and Manika's owners, Krugel and his wife, whom they would have called Mijnheer and Mevrou, dominated their lives. Their roles as parents were also greatly inhibited by their status as slaves. For some reason, Krugel's wife had taken to regularly beating Reijnier and Manika's daughter, Sabina. Possibly this was a result of sexual jealousy, or perhaps Sabina did not perform her duties to the satisfaction of Mevrou Krugel. As parents, Reijnier and Manika had little control over the maltreatment that Sabina suffered and which they were forced to witness. It is a sad testimony to his lack of power that Reijnier, in an attempt to put an end to the abuse of his daughter, was prepared to ask Krugel to sell Sabina and possibly be separated from her for life.

However, to say that Reijnier lacked power is not to say that he was absolutely powerless. There were clear limits to the level of domination that slave owners could exercise over their slaves. On one occasion, on a Saturday in a year around 1737, Mevrou Krugel had gone too far in her maltreatment of Sabina. She had clearly overstepped the boundaries that maintained the delicate balance of power between masters and slaves. On this occasion Krugel's wife stripped Sabina naked, tied her to a post and beat her mercilessly with a sjambok. Afterwards, to accentuate the pain, she rubbed salt into the wounds, a tactic commonly employed by Cape slave owners.

The event obviously scarred Manika deeply, as she was able to tell the story clearly when she appeared before the law courts 22 years later. When Reijnier returned to the homestead after having worked in the fields he did not hesitate to vent his anger at the maltreatment of his daughter. His wife, Manika, was the unfortunate victim of his wrath. These were human actions and emotions, not the actions of people who could be defined simply as property.

By now, Krugel and his wife had lost control over the slaves on Simonsvalleij. In an attempt to restore his authority, Krugel beat all the slaves on the farm. This was to no avail, for, as Manika testified, Reijnier turned on his master and assaulted him, although she did not witness the assault herself. As a consequence, Reijnier had to flee the farm.

The mountains and valleys of the south-western Cape provided many hiding places for slaves who had deserted their owners. For more than two decades Reijnier lived in the mountains around the Berg River as a droster, as runaway slaves were called. For all this time Krugel had lost the labour of his slave, and therefore Reijnier had turned out to be a poor investment. It seemed that Krugel and his wife could not control their slaves, and resorted to physical violence as a means to maintain authority over their labour force, as many slave owners did. However, if such violence was allowed to spiral out of control, it could be counterproductive. Through his actions, Reijnier had shown the limitations of the use of slave labour in a colonial society.

To read more about 'the world that slaves lived in, slave names and lifestyles, visit the Iziko online slavery heritage project
The Story of Dina
Another anecdote of slave life concerns a slave woman by the name of Dina, who was owned by Roelof Petrus Johannes Campher, a cattle farmer in the district of George, Cape Colony. In October 1837, Dina was working in her master's cattle kraal, loading cattle dung onto the wagon. The cattle dung would be taken to the farm garden to be used as a fertiliser. When the wagon was full, she stopped loading the wagon and instead piled up the dung for the next load.

Her master asked her why she was doing this but he was not pleased with her explanation. Roelof then beat her twice with an ox strap. Dina tried to run to Mrs Campher to ask her to stop Roelof from beating her. However, Roelof removed her clothes from the back, tied her to a ladder and continued to beat her with an ox strap. He gave her twenty-one lashes, and before beating her, Roelof said to Dina that he did not care about the law. After the beating Dina was forced to go back to work.

The story of Dina shows that severe beatings like these were very common even though the laws were written to avoid them. The story of Dina can be told because she reported it to the council of justice. Cases like these occurred regularly, but were not reported, as many slaves were still used to being whipped by their masters. Dina did not complain that she was being beaten. Instead, she complained that she was beaten without doing anything wrong. This shows that the reforms were not fully implemented in the Cape Colony.
What was the impact of runaway slaves on the Cape slave society?
Almost from the start, slaves began to runaway, because of ill treatment, overwork and the natural desire to live as a free person.

Reijnier was one of many slave runaways. He never ventured too far from the settler farms, and it is probably this that led to his eventual capture. Manika may not have been entirely truthful when she testified that she had not seen him in all the years after he had fled. Runaway slaves were frequently supplied with foodstuffs from surrounding farms, since they often lacked the knowledge that would allow them to feed themselves from the natural environment.

Individual runaways were thus very vulnerable. It made sense for them to join bands and find strength in numbers. Thus there existed throughout the eighteenth century, and until the ending of slavery, a community of runaway slaves in the caves of the Hottentots Holland Mountains overlooking False Bay. This was the maroon community of Hangklip.

This community survived as long as it did because of the protected physical environment. The series of caves in which the runaways lived had only two entrances. On the one side, they were protected by the ocean, which made entry difficult and very dangerous. The other entrance, from the mountain, could be easily defended.

The maroon community at Hangklip was never able to cut itself off from the rest of colonial society and for this reason they were vulnerable. If they attacked wagons crossing the Hottentots Holland Mountains, they exposed themselves to the possibility of recapture. Although they could to some extent live off fish caught from the ocean, mostly they were dependent for their survival on goods obtained from slaves who lived on surrounding farms, and from other runaways who lived as far away as Table Mountain across the Cape Flats.

The Hangklip maroons were not as successful as the maroon communities of slaves that existed in Brazil, for example, where colonial authorities were compelled to recognise their independence. However, the fact remains that the Dutch authorities were never able to wipe out the community, and the Hangklip maroons continued to live on the margins of colonial society.

It became clear to the colonial authorities at the Cape, especially after the British took over political power from the Dutch, that the use of slave labour had severe limitations. Two minor rebellions of slaves in 1808 and 1825, in which a number of white settlers were killed, made the continued use of slave labour even less appealing. Moreover, by the second decade of the nineteenth century the use of slave labour was no longer as profitable as it had been in earlier decades. Thus, when the British government finally ended slavery in 1838, the Cape ceased to be a slave society. It remained a colonial society, but the ending of slavery was another significant turning point in the history of South Africa.
Slavery moves towards South Africa's interior
It soon became apparent to the Boers that beyond the Western Cape and Boland regions, the terrain of South Africa was unsuitable for intensive agriculture but very suitable for cattle farming. The majority of them lacked the financial means to buy slaves imported all the way from Indonesia, but since they were already in the process of dispossessing the indigenous population of their land, it seemed logical to take both the land and the people by force.

In the wars which they fought against the Khoi and the San, the Boers frequently followed a policy of exterminating the mature adults, but capturing the children and raising them on the farms. These children were taught to speak Dutch and to practice the Christian religion. This system was hypocritically known as "apprenticeship", but in fact it was nothing better than slavery because normal human and family rights were not respected, and children were bought and sold separately from their parents.

During the period of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, the British captured the Cape from the Dutch who were allied to Napoleon. From 1828 onwards the British introduced a number of administrative changes, known collectively as "the Revolution in Government". These changes imposed British laws and the English language on the reluctant Boers, and limited the amount of land and labour that could be claimed by an individual.

In response, the Boers set out on an epic quest (see Great Trek) to establish themselves as a free people in their own country, where they could govern themselves according to their own tastes and habits. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish themselves in what is today KwaZulu-Natal, they settled on the highveld. There they founded two republics, the Orange Free State (1854) and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR), better known as the Transvaal (1858).
The Abolition of Slavery at the Cape
The British occupied the Cape again in 1806, and in 1814 the Cape officially became a British colony. The growing influence of the concept of human rights at the beginning of the 19th century, and the effects of a changing economic system in Western Europe during the same period both contributed to the questioning of the practice of slavery.

Therefore from 1806, the British introduced laws (Amelioration laws) aimed at improving the welfare of slaves in the Cape. The slave guardian appointed by the British government was responsible for enforcing these laws. As a result, the lives of some slaves improved after 1807. Even though there were reforms and laws to protect slaves, some masters continued to ill-treat their slaves by administering cruel punishment and ignoring these reform laws. Slaves were expected to report any ill treatment to the slave protector appointed by the colonial government.
Amelioration laws
Slaves were allowed to make legal marriages after 1824.

Families were allowed to live together: wives and husbands could not be separated and their children could not be sold before a certain age.

Slaves were now taught Christianity, and the baptism of slaves was encouraged. Sunday became a day of rest.

Slaves had to receive a reasonable amount of food, shelter and clothing.

The number of hours the slaves could be made to work was limited.

The punishment of slaves was more strictly controlled.

Slaves were granted property rights. Slaves who worked in their free time could save what they earned, and buy freedom for themselves and their families - even against the wishes of the owner.

Some slaves in Cape Town were given a basic education.

The government appointed slave guardians to ensure that these laws were obeyed. There is evidence that the slaves knew about their rights and made use of them. Some brought complaints against their owners in the courts or to the Guardian of Slaves. Both slave uprisings happened during this period, and in both cases the slaves demanded immediate freedom.

The end of slavery at the Cape was not due to internal pressure, but from a decision from outside. In 1807 the British government banned the slave trade to all her colonies, including the Cape. This meant that no more slaves (from any destination) could be sent to work in the Cape. However, those who were already in the Cape continued to work as slaves until 1834 when all slaves in the British Empire were to be set free (emancipated). Many of the slaves chose to remain on with their owners while some started a new life in and around Cape Town working as tradesmen. Gradually these people became absorbed into the Cape community.

To read more about the process of 'Emancipation' and the Cape after emancipation visit the Iziko online slavery heritage project
Does slavery still exist today?
Today, the term slavery is used to indicate a wide range of human rights abuses and exploitative labour practices. The United Nations defines contemporary slavery as consisting of:

...a variety of human rights violations. In addition to traditional slavery and the slave trade, these abuses include the sale of children, child prostitution, child pornography, the exploitation of child labour, the sexual mutilation of female children, the use of children in armed conflicts, debt bondage, the traffic in persons and in the sale of human organs, the exploitation of prostitution, and certain practices under apartheid and colonial regimes.

The term "slavery" therefore has a much broader use than chattel slavery. As recently as May 2002, the Anti-Slavery Society reported that "Millions of children are in slavery. Girls as young as six work as maids in the Philippines, children break rocks in Ghana's quarries, young boys are abducted from their homes in South Asia and forced to be camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates and girls are forced into prostitution in the United Kingdom".

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History of slavery and early colonisation in South Africa

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With colonialism, which began in South Africa in 1652, came the Slavery and Forced Labour Model. This was the original model of colonialism brought by the Dutch in 1652, and subsequently exported from the Western Cape to the Afrikaner Republics of the Orange Free State and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek.

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Deputy Minister in the Presidency Thembi Siweya, left, visits homeless people at Johannnesburg's Park Station on 'Census Night', 2 February. GCIS/Flickr

Statistics South Africa has embarked on its once-a-decade process to count all people in the country - including non-citizens. Census 2022 is arguably the most important in the country since the first post-apartheid census in 1996

That census was the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994 that all South Africans were counted. Under apartheid, fictitious "homelands" excluded millions of people from the count. Excluding them allowed the apartheid government to deny their rights, and responsibility for meeting their needs - by not counting them, the apartheid government ensured that they did not count, for anything.

Homelands or Bantustans were ten mainly rural, underdeveloped areas where black South Africans were required to live and have nominal "self-rule" and "independence", along ethnic group lines, separate from whites. They had their own censuses.

The 1996 census was a vital tool to inform every government department, economic entity, and every citizen, about the state of the nation, the depth of need, and the location of needs to be met. While it is a legal obligation for everyone to complete a census form, the 1996 census saw a real willingness to participate and to get counted - from a newly liberated population, still basking in the post-apartheid moment.

Fast-forward past the last census of 2011 to the present. In the period since then, the country has witnessed state capture, a former president (briefly) in prison, a collapse in the provision of basic services such as water, rising violence and hostility to "foreigners".

The country also has appalling rates of gender-based violence, and is reeling from a global pandemic coming on top of the disease burden already afflicting South Africans. COVID-19 took many lives and wrecked many more livelihoods. After two years of pandemic, lockdowns and curfews, accompanied by and amplifying cynicism about the institutions of government and political parties, South Africa is in a bad space.

The recent local elections saw the lowest ever turnout, with only the Northern Cape province seeing over half its voters actually cast a ballot. Stories of massive corruption in procuring personal protective equipment and unnecessary "deep cleaning" of public buildings cemented the view of both politicians and public servants as self-interested to the point of lacking all empathy for citizens.

With frequent power cuts further sapping the will, South Africans have reached a remarkably low point when it comes to faith in government or politics.

Census and accountability

In this context, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) launched Census 2022, and has asked all people in the country to "get counted". Cynicism about politicians and public officials should not blind South Africans to the power of data, and the pooled facts of all the lives being lived in South Africa right now, and the story they will tell of the past decade.

The census is a tool for accountability: it is the ultimate judgement on how all governments have performed, from cities to provinces to national, and thus also on all parties involved in governance. The census will be a reckoning for what has gone before, as well as critical for all planning in society going forward.

The census will inform economics, social policy, health care and investment. It is a tool to understand what has happened to South Africans in the last 11 years since Census 2011, and a critical planning tool as we look to the future.

This is not the time to withhold participation, as people did in the recent elections: this is time to make sure we get counted, so that all are given a deeply accurate portrait of life in South Africa today. The picture may or may not be pretty: but it will be powerful, and inescapable.

Despite the challenges of the last few years - which included repeated funding cuts as well as the impact of the pandemic - Stats SA has moved relentlessly to prepare for the census.

To deal with both a reluctance to participate and the effect of COVID-19, everyone can choose how to complete the census - online, on a phone, or in person. Stats SA has done what it can to make it comfortable for everyone to participate.

Every count matters

The cynicism about government and politics is warranted - as the reports of the Zondo Commission into state capture are making clear.

But Stats SA is not a government department - it forms part of the state machinery, just as the Chapter 9 institutions, which protect the country's democracy, do. State capture did not extend to Stats SA, which is an autonomous entity, led by an entirely independent Statistician-General, advised by an independent Statistics Council.

It is staunchly independent of outside influence, be it from government, political parties or others. Census 2022 will be the most defining judgement of how government has managed South Africa since 2011. Stats SA is the custodian of the data, protected by law - not government.

The census will count everyone in South Africa. This includes citizens, visitors and migrants, people living without shelter, in institutions, and so on. Counting undocumented migrants will provide a better idea of how many "foreigners" are actually in South Africa, rather than relying on speculation and political rhetoric.

The census will focus everyone on the core challenges the country faces, where they are, and who is most affected.

By law, the raw data cannot be shared with other government departments (or anyone else), as directed by the National Statistics Act. Stats SA protects the data, processes and analyses it, and and shares results in a way that no individual can possibly be identified or located.

All people should "get counted" so that their voices are heard, their needs identified, and South Africa can plan for a better future.

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South Africa undertakes its most important census since the end of apartheid

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Statistics South Africa has embarked on its once-a-decade process to count all people in the country - including non-citizens. Census 2022 is arguably the most important in the country since the first post-apartheid census in 1996 That census was the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994 that all South Africans were counted.

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Contents

1. Who Started Apartheid in South Africa?

2. Apartheid Becomes Law

3. Apartheid and Separate Development

4. Opposition to Apartheid

5. Apartheid Comes to an End

Apartheid ("apartness" in the language of Afrikaans) was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa. After the National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, its all-white government immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation. Under apartheid, nonwhite South Africans (a majority of the population) would be forced to live in separate areas from whites and use separate public facilities. Contact between the two groups would be limited. Despite strong and consistent opposition to apartheid within and outside of South Africa, its laws remained in effect for the better part of 50 years. In 1991, the government of President F.W. de Klerk began to repeal most of the legislation that provided the basis for apartheid. President de Klerk and activist Nelson Mandela would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for their work creating a new constitution for South Africa.

Who Started Apartheid in South Africa?

Racial segregation and white supremacy had become central aspects of South African policy long before apartheid began. The controversial 1913 Land Act, passed three years after South Africa gained its independence, marked the beginning of territorial segregation by forcing black Africans to live in reserves and making it illegal for them to work as sharecroppers. Opponents of the Land Act formed the South African National Native Congress, which would become the African National Congress (ANC).

Did you know? ANC leader Nelson Mandela, released from prison in February 1990, worked closely with President F.W. de Klerk's government to draw up a new constitution for South Africa. After both sides made concessions, they reached agreement in 1993, and would share the Nobel Peace Prize that year for their efforts.

The Great Depression and World War II brought increasing economic woes to South Africa, and convinced the government to strengthen its policies of racial segregation. In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party won the general election under the slogan "apartheid" (literally "apartness"). Their goal was not only to separate South Africa's white minority from its non-white majority, but also to separate non-whites from each other, and to divide black South Africans along tribal lines in order to decrease their political power.

Apartheid Becomes Law

By 1950, the government had banned marriages between whites and people of other races, and prohibited sexual relations between black and white South Africans. The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided the basic framework for apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race, including Bantu (black Africans), Coloured (mixed race) and white. A fourth category, Asian (meaning Indian and Pakistani) was later added. In some cases, the legislation split families; parents could be classified as white, while their children were classified as colored.

A series of Land Acts set aside more than 80 percent of the country's land for the white minority, and "pass laws" required non-whites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas. In order to limit contact between the races, the government established separate public facilities for whites and non-whites, limited the activity of nonwhite labor unions and denied non-white participation in national government.

Apartheid and Separate Development

Hendrik Verwoerd, who became prime minister in 1958, would refine apartheid policy further into a system he referred to as "separate development." The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantu homelands known as Bantustans. Separating black South Africans from each other enabled the government to claim there was no black majority and reduced the possibility that blacks would unify into one nationalist organization. Every black South African was designated as a citizen as one of the Bantustans, a system that supposedly gave them full political rights, but effectively removed them from the nation's political body.

In one of the most devastating aspects of apartheid, the government forcibly removed black South Africans from rural areas designated as "white" to the homelands and sold their land at low prices to white farmers. From 1961 to 1994, more than 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes and deposited in the Bantustans, where they were plunged into poverty and hopelessness.

Opposition to Apartheid

Resistance to apartheid within South Africa took many forms over the years, from non-violent demonstrations, protests and strikes to political action and eventually to armed resistance. Together with the South Indian National Congress, the ANC organized a mass meeting in 1952, during which attendees burned their pass books. A group calling itself the Congress of the People adopted a Freedom Charter in 1955 asserting that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black or white." The government broke up the meeting and arrested 150 people, charging them with high treason.

In 1960, at the black township of Sharpesville, the police opened fire on a group of unarmed blacks associated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an offshoot of the ANC. The group had arrived at the police station without passes, inviting arrest as an act of resistance. At least 67 blacks were killed and more than 180 wounded. Sharpesville convinced many anti-apartheid leaders that they could not achieve their objectives by peaceful means, and both the PAC and ANC established military wings, neither of which ever posed a serious military threat to the state. By 1961, most resistance leaders had been captured and sentenced to long prison terms or executed. Nelson Mandela, a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), the military wing of the ANC, was incarcerated from 1963 to 1990; his imprisonment would draw international attention and help garner support for the anti-apartheid cause. On June 10, 1980, his followers smuggled a letter from Mandela in prison and made it public: "UNITE! MOBILISE! FIGHT ON! BETWEEN THE ANVIL OF UNITED MASS ACTION AND THE HAMMER OF THE ARMED STRUGGLE WE SHALL CRUSH APARTHEID!".

Apartheid Comes to an End

In 1976, when thousands of black children in Soweto, a black township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the Afrikaans language requirement for black African students, the police opened fire with tear gas and bullets. The protests and government crackdowns that followed, combined with a national economic recession, drew more international attention to South Africa and shattered all illusions that apartheid had brought peace or prosperity to the nation. The United Nations General Assembly had denounced apartheid in 1973, and in 1976 the UN Security Council voted to impose a mandatory embargo on the sale of arms to South Africa. In 1985, the United Kingdom and United States imposed economic sanctions on the country.

Under pressure from the international community, the National Party government of Pieter Botha sought to institute some reforms, including abolition of the pass laws and the ban on interracial sex and marriage. The reforms fell short of any substantive change, however, and by 1989 Botha was pressured to step aside in favor of F.W. de Klerk. De Klerk's government subsequently repealed the Population Registration Act, as well as most of the other legislation that formed the legal basis for apartheid. De Klerk freed Nelson Mandela on February 11, 1990. A new constitution, which enfranchised blacks and other racial groups, took effect in 1994, and elections that year led to a coalition government with a nonwhite majority, marking the official end of the apartheid system.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Who Started Apartheid in South Africa? Apartheid Becomes Law Apartheid and Separate Development Opposition to Apartheid Apartheid Comes to an End Apartheid ("apartness" in the language of Afrikaans) was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Contents

1. Who Started Apartheid in South Africa?

2. Apartheid Becomes Law

3. Apartheid and Separate Development

4. Opposition to Apartheid

5. Apartheid Comes to an End

Apartheid ("apartness" in the language of Afrikaans) was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa. After the National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, its all-white government immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation. Under apartheid, nonwhite South Africans (a majority of the population) would be forced to live in separate areas from whites and use separate public facilities. Contact between the two groups would be limited. Despite strong and consistent opposition to apartheid within and outside of South Africa, its laws remained in effect for the better part of 50 years. In 1991, the government of President F.W. de Klerk began to repeal most of the legislation that provided the basis for apartheid. President de Klerk and activist Nelson Mandela would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for their work creating a new constitution for South Africa.

Who Started Apartheid in South Africa?

Racial segregation and white supremacy had become central aspects of South African policy long before apartheid began. The controversial 1913 Land Act, passed three years after South Africa gained its independence, marked the beginning of territorial segregation by forcing black Africans to live in reserves and making it illegal for them to work as sharecroppers. Opponents of the Land Act formed the South African National Native Congress, which would become the African National Congress (ANC).

Did you know? ANC leader Nelson Mandela, released from prison in February 1990, worked closely with President F.W. de Klerk's government to draw up a new constitution for South Africa. After both sides made concessions, they reached agreement in 1993, and would share the Nobel Peace Prize that year for their efforts.

The Great Depression and World War II brought increasing economic woes to South Africa, and convinced the government to strengthen its policies of racial segregation. In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party won the general election under the slogan "apartheid" (literally "apartness"). Their goal was not only to separate South Africa's white minority from its non-white majority, but also to separate non-whites from each other, and to divide black South Africans along tribal lines in order to decrease their political power.

Apartheid Becomes Law

By 1950, the government had banned marriages between whites and people of other races, and prohibited sexual relations between black and white South Africans. The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided the basic framework for apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race, including Bantu (black Africans), Coloured (mixed race) and white. A fourth category, Asian (meaning Indian and Pakistani) was later added. In some cases, the legislation split families; parents could be classified as white, while their children were classified as colored.

A series of Land Acts set aside more than 80 percent of the country's land for the white minority, and "pass laws" required non-whites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas. In order to limit contact between the races, the government established separate public facilities for whites and non-whites, limited the activity of nonwhite labor unions and denied non-white participation in national government.

Apartheid and Separate Development

Hendrik Verwoerd, who became prime minister in 1958, would refine apartheid policy further into a system he referred to as "separate development." The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantu homelands known as Bantustans. Separating black South Africans from each other enabled the government to claim there was no black majority and reduced the possibility that blacks would unify into one nationalist organization. Every black South African was designated as a citizen as one of the Bantustans, a system that supposedly gave them full political rights, but effectively removed them from the nation's political body.

In one of the most devastating aspects of apartheid, the government forcibly removed black South Africans from rural areas designated as "white" to the homelands and sold their land at low prices to white farmers. From 1961 to 1994, more than 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes and deposited in the Bantustans, where they were plunged into poverty and hopelessness.

Opposition to Apartheid

Resistance to apartheid within South Africa took many forms over the years, from non-violent demonstrations, protests and strikes to political action and eventually to armed resistance. Together with the South Indian National Congress, the ANC organized a mass meeting in 1952, during which attendees burned their pass books. A group calling itself the Congress of the People adopted a Freedom Charter in 1955 asserting that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black or white." The government broke up the meeting and arrested 150 people, charging them with high treason.

In 1960, at the black township of Sharpesville, the police opened fire on a group of unarmed blacks associated with the Pan-African Congress (PAC), an offshoot of the ANC. The group had arrived at the police station without passes, inviting arrest as an act of resistance. At least 67 blacks were killed and more than 180 wounded. Sharpesville convinced many anti-apartheid leaders that they could not achieve their objectives by peaceful means, and both the PAC and ANC established military wings, neither of which ever posed a serious military threat to the state. By 1961, most resistance leaders had been captured and sentenced to long prison terms or executed. Nelson Mandela, a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), the military wing of the ANC, was incarcerated from 1963 to 1990; his imprisonment would draw international attention and help garner support for the anti-apartheid cause. On June 10, 1980, his followers smuggled a letter from Mandela in prison and made it public: "UNITE! MOBILISE! FIGHT ON! BETWEEN THE ANVIL OF UNITED MASS ACTION AND THE HAMMER OF THE ARMED STRUGGLE WE SHALL CRUSH APARTHEID!".

Apartheid Comes to an End

In 1976, when thousands of black children in Soweto, a black township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the Afrikaans language requirement for black African students, the police opened fire with tear gas and bullets. The protests and government crackdowns that followed, combined with a national economic recession, drew more international attention to South Africa and shattered all illusions that apartheid had brought peace or prosperity to the nation. The United Nations General Assembly had denounced apartheid in 1973, and in 1976 the UN Security Council voted to impose a mandatory embargo on the sale of arms to South Africa. In 1985, the United Kingdom and United States imposed economic sanctions on the country.

Under pressure from the international community, the National Party government of Pieter Botha sought to institute some reforms, including abolition of the pass laws and the ban on interracial sex and marriage. The reforms fell short of any substantive change, however, and by 1989 Botha was pressured to step aside in favor of F.W. de Klerk. De Klerk's government subsequently repealed the Population Registration Act, as well as most of the other legislation that formed the legal basis for apartheid. De Klerk freed Nelson Mandela on February 11, 1990. A new constitution, which enfranchised blacks and other racial groups, took effect in 1994, and elections that year led to a coalition government with a nonwhite majority, marking the official end of the apartheid system.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Who Started Apartheid in South Africa? Apartheid Becomes Law Apartheid and Separate Development Opposition to Apartheid Apartheid Comes to an End Apartheid ("apartness" in the language of Afrikaans) was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa.