# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
In His Own Words: Nelson Mandela's Prison Years - The Nelson Mandela Foundation - Google Arts & Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During the 1950s and early 1960s Nelson Mandela frequently found himself in police station cells, court holding cells and prison cells for short periods of...

# data[].attributes.body
How Nelson Mandela fought apartheid—and why his work is not complete

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Nelson Mandela fought apartheid-and why his work is not complete

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

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nelson Mandela, Anti-Apartheid Activist and World Leader | Biography

# data[].attributes.body
"Apartheid (“apartness” in the language of Afrikaans) was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against non-white citizens of South Africa."

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"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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; a parent 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, refined 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 Black people 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.

Sharpeville Massacre

In 1960, at the Black township of Sharpeville, the police opened fire on a group of unarmed Black people 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 people were killed and more than 180 wounded.

The Sharpeville massacre 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.

Nelson Mandela

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! MOBILIZE! FIGHT ON! BETWEEN THE ANVIL OF UNITED MASS ACTION AND THE HAMMER OF THE ARMED STRUGGLE WE SHALL CRUSH APARTHEID!"

President F.W. de Klerk

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 any remaining 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 another conservative president, F.W. de Klerk, who had supported apartheid throughout his political career.

When Did Apartheid End?

Though a conservative, De Klerk underwent a conversion to a more pragmatic political philosophy, and his 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 Black citizens 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.

Sources

The End of Apartheid. Archive: U.S. Department of State.
A History of Apartheid in South Africa. South African History Online.
South Africa: Twenty-Five Years Since Apartheid. The Ohio State University: Stanton Foundation.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Apartheid: Definition & South Africa | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Apartheid, the legal and cultural segregation of the non-white citizens of South Africa, ended in 1994 thanks to activist Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nelson Mandela Gives Speech After Release From Prison on Feb. 11, 1990 | NowThis

# data[].attributes.body
"After the censorship of television, news, photography became a political weapon which played a vital role in the fight for South Africa's liberation."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An exhibition of photographs and moving images telling the history of apartheid is one of the events held in South Africa to celebrate 20 years of democracy.

The event features the work of dozens of photographers and artists.

The images explain the country's long, hard journey to freedom, particularly for those visitors born after 1994 - the "born-free" generation.

BBC Africa's Nomsa Maseko reports.
For more African news from the BBC, download the Africa Today podcast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An exhibition of photographs and moving images telling the history of apartheid is one of the events held in South Africa to celebrate 20 years of democracy. The event features the work of dozens of photographers and artists. The images explain the country's long, hard journey to freedom, particularly for those visitors born after 1994 - the "born-free" generation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sibonisile Tshabalala was only 18 days old when her mother Thandeka Sidya left her with her grandmother Roseline, in the Johannesburg township of Katlehong.

But she was not heading to a menial job in an office or restaurant in the city center. On April 27, 1994, Thandeka Sidaya wanted to be at the polls when they opened at 8 a.m., to cast her vote for the man whose fearless activism and 27-year imprisonment toppled a legal and economic system that had brutalized non-white South Africans for almost half a century, and fueled decades of international condemnation and protest. Thandeka stood in line for hours, submitted her ballot for Nelson Mandela as first black president of South Africa, and then returned to her newborn so that Roseline Sidya could head to the polls. ( See Nelson Mandela's life in pictures.)

"For them, it was too important to miss the chance to vote for the first time," the 25-year-old industrial engineering graduate says. "They wanted to be able to say that they helped end apartheid."

Tshabalala's birth at the dawn of post-apartheid South Africa places her squarely on the front lines of what legendary South African cleric and theologian Desmond Tutu named the "Rainbow Generation." They are the first cohort of modern black, biracial and other ethnic groups who would not live under the legal and political system crafted by South Africa's white minority-largely descendants of late 17 th century Dutch colonialists known as Afrikaners-which sanctioned racial segregation and economic discrimination against non-whites.

How ironic, then, that a 34-year-old Dutch woman raised on a houseboat in the Netherlands would one day be a champion for post-apartheid South Africans. When photographer Ilvy Njiokiktjien's photo book 'Born Free: Mandela's Generation of Hope" is released on May 1, it will be the end of a journey that began when she first took a photography course at age 16 during a high school exchange program in South Dakota. Njiokiktjien had actually experienced more diversity as a schoolgirl in Utrecht, with classmates from Morocco, Turkey and Sri Lanka.

By the time she entered a college exchange program at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa in 2004, Njiokiktjien knew very little about the history of apartheid, and was unprepared for witnessing its painful residue.

"I remember it being quite shocking, the division between whites and blacks. Downtown Grahamstown is beautiful and pristine and looks like a fairy tale. But if you look down that main road, you see this big township that was full of mainly poor blacks, who came into the city center during the day to work or look for work. It may sound naïve, but I was a bit stunned that everything was still so distinctly separate." ( See rare, rescued apartheid-era portraits.)

By 2007, when Njiokiktjien was interning at the Star Newspaper in Johannesburg, that idea for her book blossomed.

"I was getting news assignments every day, and I started noticing that there was a lot of protests. That kind of showed me a whole different side of South Africa, that kind of 'standing up for your rights' mentality that I wasn't used to. I saw students fighting for their rights and workers demanding better pay, and it struck me that this may have been occurring more often because apartheid had ended."

Racial segregation existed in South Africa long before the 20 th century. But in 1948, the National Party of South Africa, comprised mostly of descendants of those colonialists, developed an official policy of racial segregation. The Group Areas Act of 1950 also mandated residential and business zones in cities for each racial group, and other races could not live in or own land in those areas. By the late 1950s, more than 80 percent of South Africa's land was owned by whites, and non-whites had to carry documents allowing them to enter restricted areas. ( Read how public transit in Johannesburg is still reckoning with apartheid-era segregation.)

Though that policy is over, the impact remains. For example, 24 year old Darshana Govindram lives in Chatsworth, a suburb of the port city of Durban. It was created to segregate people of Indian descent, and is still majority Indian.

Govindram told Njiokiktjien that she wants to become an airline pilot, but can't afford the fees. Student protests about high tuition costs have bolstered her spirits, but she still realizes she won't reach her goal anytime soon. And she recalls her late grandmother saying that life was better in South Africa under apartheid because there was less crime and corruption-an idea she rejects.

Still, many young non-white South Africans describe a Catch-22 situation that makes it hard for them to feel fully free.

Sibonisile Tshabalala, who received her engineering degree on April 9 th, her 25 th birthday, says she gets a stipend from her contract job with a Johannesburg company. But it's far less that what some white college graduates are paid for staff positions.

In some ways, Tshabalala says, post-apartheid is still a struggle. "When I look at my white peers, I realize that as hard as I have worked to gain an education, we did not start from the same playing field. My parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, they suffered. And the consequences are still coming to me as a young black South African."

This scenario is common for many aspiring members of the "Rainbow Nation," who are hit with what's been coined as the "Black Tax"-the obligation of supporting extended family who weren't as fortunate as they were. It leaves many youths stuck in second gear, supporting unemployed parents and grandparents, paying school fees for siblings, with no time to think about larger goals.

Njiokiktjien says that the broad range of subjects and life experiences she witnessed while compiling the images took her on a rollercoaster of emotions. So many young people shared their hopes and dreams, but sometimes there was despair about unemployment and crime and xenophobia and violence against the LGBTQ community. It's only been within this past year that she's begun to feel more hopeful about the future for the Born Free generation.

One of the reasons for that epiphany occurred after she met Wilmarie Deetlefs, a 24 year old white Afrikaner, and her boyfriend Zakithi Buthelezi, 27, in Johannesburg. (Related: Track the rise of interracial marriage 50 years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling.)

Buthelezi is the grandson of prominent Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was Minister of Home Affairs in South Africa under Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. Buthelezi told Njiokiktjien that he has not experienced hostility for having a white girlfriend, but Deetlefs said a taxi driver once snarled at her, "Go get yourself a man of your own color."

Still, the young couple, who now live in Cape Town, believe they are part of a "clean slate" in South Africa. Deetlef says she thinks her generation will lead the way toward true reconciliation, and that's what Njiokiktjien wants to nurture with her book.

"I want to show the country and the rest of the world that there is this generation of young South Africans with such incredible willpower to reach their goals, sometimes even without jobs, and even though they are not being spoon fed, they are getting things done, because they try so hard. I believe they will create a positive future for South Africa."

Editor's Note: This article originally misstated when apartheid ended. It ended 29 years ago.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Apartheid ended 29 years ago. How has South Africa changed?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sibonisile Tshabalala was only 18 days old when her mother Thandeka Sidya left her with her grandmother Roseline, in the Johannesburg township of Katlehong. But she was not heading to a menial job in an office or restaurant in the city center.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For a child growing up in Soweto, South Africa, in 1976, apartheid was an abstract concept. White minority rule didn’t mean much in a community that was exclusively black. Parents and neighbors complained of denigrating treatment at work and segregated facilities in the nearby city of Johannesburg, but except for the occasional police superintendent or social worker, many children never encountered white people, and rarely experienced the racial divisions of a repugnant social order that treated most of the country’s residents like a lesser form of humanity.

Read More: See the Photos That Gave Americans Their First Glimpse of Apartheid in 1950

That all changed when the government decreed that instead of learning in English, as most black children were, they would be taught in Afrikaans. To 15-year-old Antoinette Sithole, it was a bombshell. Not only was Afrikaans the language of their colonial oppressors—Afrikaans evolved from the Dutch spoken by South Africa’s first European settlers—she was already having a hard time understanding much of her subject matter. “Obviously physical science on its own is very difficult,” remembers Sithole, now 65. “The very same subject that you are struggling with in English, we are going to do them in Afrikaans? This doesn’t make sense.”

So Sithole and an estimated 20,000 other students from Soweto’s high schools decided, in secret, to hold a protest. For a young woman caught up in the heady excitement of drafting slogans, writing signboards and practicing revolutionary songs, it was an immense rush. “We were a little bit scared, you know, but we felt free already. It was like, ‘Now we are taking the streets of Soweto with a message.’” The night before the protest, Sithole ironed her school uniform and packed her school bag with placards, while her younger brother, 13-year-old Hector Pieterson, looked on enviously. Younger students were not supposed to be part of the protest.

Read More: South Africa’s Justice Minister Is Objecting to Parole for the Killer of an Anti-Apartheid Hero

June 16, 1976 dawned cold and cloudy. As Sithole made her way towards the pre-planned gathering point, she had no idea that the protest would not only change the course of South African history, but that it would also profoundly impact her own life, and that of three other people who are now indelibly linked to the uprising through a singular image that rocked the world.

Sam Nzima

Hector Pieterson, 1976.

Though the protest had been planned secretly, one of the organizers leaked details to the media in order to guarantee coverage. Sam Nzima, a 42-year-old photojournalist with The World newspaper, was sent out to cover it. Nzima got his start in photography by taking portraits with a second-hand Brownie camera. When he made it to The World in 1968, there was nowhere else for a black photographer in apartheid-era South Africa to go—even the news was segregated. The World was written by blacks, for blacks. Its sister publication, The Star, was for whites. “Black photographers were not allowed to work for The Star,” says Nzima. “We were only allowed to interview blacks, and we were not allowed to write about whites.” It didn’t even occur to Nzima to protest. “The thing about protesting, you go to jail,” he remembers.

Nzima arrived at Naledi High School around six in the morning. Students were already preparing their placards, scrawling slogans with thick lines of paint: AWAY WITH AFRIKAANS; AFRIKAANS MUST BE ABOLISHED; WE ARE BEING CERTIFIED BUT NOT EDUCATED. Even then, Nzima felt a thick sense of foreboding. Few of the children had any experience with the apartheid state, but he had seen plenty of police crackdowns in his work. They never ended peacefully. “I knew that they would be arrested or be killed. There were no rubber bullets back then. It was live ammunition. When they pull out the gun, you must know that you are dead.”

Read More: Nas: ‘It’s Not Cool For the U.S. to Look Like Apartheid South Africa’

A few hours later, students were pouring in from across Soweto, waving their placards and singing. Everyone she knew was there, says Sithole. Friends from school, distant acquaintances from church and cousins from miles away. “It was amazing,” she remembers. “It was like we were going on a school trip, but on foot.” Suddenly, she heard a bang, and thick clouds of teargas filled the streets. Police marched down the streets, shouting at the students to disperse. “We all ran amok in confusion, running for cover, dashing into other people’s homes,” remembers Sithole. She didn’t understand why her eyes were burning until someone explained tear gas and gave her water to soothe the pain.

When Sithole crept out of her hiding place, she spotted her younger brother across the street. “He was not supposed to be there. He was too young to understand what was really going on,” she recalls. She waved, and he smiled, too caught up in the excitement to be afraid. Sithole shouted at him to stay put. She kept telling him that they would be ok; that she would find a way to get him home, but inside she was terrified. “I was just saying that because I’m a big sister trying to be brave and bold.”

Several students regrouped, and started singing the banned liberation anthem, “Nkosi Sikelel’iAfrika,”or “Lord Bless Africa.” Nzima stood off to the side, between the students and the police, and watched as an enraged white commander shot his gun directly into the crowd. The students scattered. By the time Sithole returned to the street, her brother was nowhere to be found. “Everybody was just shooting at random,” says Nzima. He rushed in with his camera. “I saw a little boy fall down.”

From her position on the edge of the crowd, Sithole saw a man run past with a body in his arms. “The first thing that I spotted was my brother’s shoes,” she says. Confused, Sithole caught up with him. “Who are you?” she demanded. “This is my brother. I’ve been looking for him. Where are you taking him?” But the man just kept on running. Sithole, desperate to keep up, looked more closely at the limp body in his arms. “I saw blood coming from the side of the mouth. I panicked. ‘Can’t you see he’s hurt?’” she shouted at the man. “Who are you, where are you taking him?”

A car screeched to a halt in front of them to transport the boy to a nearby medical clinic, but it was already too late. “He’s dead,” the man told Sithole, as he placed the body in the car. “Hearing that, I was torn into two,” says Sithole. “I could see myself on the other end crying in desperation. It was not real. It was like, this couldn’t be happening. I was with my brother just now. How could this have happened?”

It wasn’t until two years later that Sithole learned the name of the man who had tried to save her brother. Eighteen-year-old Mbuyisa Makhubo had already finished school, so he wasn’t part of the protest. But he knew about it from his friends. He was at home when he heard the gunfire. “Mama, they are killing the kids,” he shouted, according to his sister, Gwendolyn Nontsikelelo. He tore through the backyard, leapt over the gate and ran to help. To his older sister, now 61, that was typical Makhubo, always trying to lend a hand. It was a bit of a family joke—whenever his mother sent him out to sell apples at a football match to earn some extra money, he invariably gave a few away to the hungry, despite shorting his own profits.

Nzima, the photographer, vividly remembers hearing Makhubo’s anguish as he tried to save the boy. “‘I must try to help this dying bleeding boy,’” he said, as he ran towards to the clinic.

From the time the white policeman fired his first shot, to the point where the boy’s body was loaded into the car, Nzima took six pictures. Even though he had been anticipating violence, he still wasn’t prepared. “I did not expect to see a 13-year-old boy being shot by the police.” he says. “So many were injured. So many were killed. But Hector Pieterson was the first.” Nzima knew the photos were good, but he also knew he would be singled out by the police for photographing the violence. So he rewound the film mid-roll and stuffed it in his sock. He started on a fresh roll, as enraged students turned on the police. “The students got hold of one policeman and they put him down on the ground and they slaughtered him like a goat,” recalls Nzima. “They set him on fire. He was burnt beyond recognition.” When other officers saw that Nzima was still taking pictures, they forced him to open up all his cameras. “All the films were exposed,” says Nzima. “And that one of the policeman who was killed by the students was destroyed.”

Nzima often thinks about the two scenes he captured that day. One of a boy being killed by the police, and another of students killing a policeman. Only one image made it back to The World. Had it been the other, South Africa’s history might have been a lot different. When the photos were developed a few hours later, an argument broke out among editors at The World over whether or not to run the now iconic image of a clearly traumatized Makhubo carrying a dead boy in his arms, his sister running alongside in anguish. “There was a big debate,” recalls Nzima. “This picture is going to horrify the people,” one editor said. “If we use this picture, it’s going to spark civil war in South Africa.” Another countered that there was no better illustration of what was happening in Soweto. Children had been killed by the apartheid police. The latter argument won, and The World published an evening Extra edition.

No one was prepared for the impact. The World had a relationship with international wire agencies, and by the next day, Nzima’s photo was splashed across the front pages of newspapers from New York to Moscow. Suddenly the world could no longer ignore the horror of apartheid. Almost overnight, international opinion hardened against South Africa’s apartheid regime. The U.S. government condemned the shooting, and activists worldwide began lobbying for economic sanctions, which eventually brought the apartheid government to its knees. In South Africa the picture helped launch a civil uprising and emboldened the black liberation movement. “We never thought that would be the turning point,” says Sithole. “The protest was about Afrikaans in school. But it raised eyebrows for other countries that this is not right. How can kids be killed for claiming their rights?”

Sam Nzima's photo used in The World on June 16, 1976.

The World

Though the photo’s publication would eventually bring about the end of apartheid, in 1994, for Nzima, Sithole and Makhubo the immediate aftermath was horrifying. Nzima started getting harassed by the police. A few days after the photo’s publication he got a call from a friend in the force. “Sam,” said the friend, “Choose between your job and your life.” The police had been given new orders: “Wherever you find Sam taking pictures, shoot at him, kill him. Then you come and fill the forms here that it was a stray bullet.”

Nzima immediately resigned from The World, and fled for his hometown of Lillydale, a hardscrabble hamlet a day’s drive from Johannesburg. Three months later the police caught up to him and put him under house arrest. He never took a photo again. The government shut down The World two years later, and raided the office. Nzima’s negatives are thought to have been destroyed.

Sithole buried her brother two weeks later, on July 3. At the beginning she couldn’t bear to look at the photo. “It used to break me in pieces,” she says. But over time she was able to put it into a kind of perspective. More than 170 people died that day, and hundreds more in subsequent uprisings. “We were not the only ones,” she says.

Nontsikelelo only heard about her brother’s role when she passed a newsstand on her way home from work that evening. He didn’t come home until very late, and he refused to talk about it. “He just changed from that day,” recalls Nontsikelelo. “He was hurt, he was confused. I think he felt bad that Hector died. His intention was to save him.” Soweto was in flames, and the riots lasted for days. “It was very tense. You didn’t know what to feel, what to say,” says Nontsikelelo.

Soon the police started coming around. They accused Makhubo of posing the photo in order to embarrass the government. Makhubo slipped deeper into depression. He stopped sleeping at home. And then one day, he just left. The family set a place for him at the table for Christmas dinner. When he didn’t come home, they decided they would never celebrate Christmas again.

Makhubo phoned home once, from Botswana. The family would get scraps of news from time to time through anti-apartheid activists. The last they heard of him was in 1978. He sent a letter from Nigeria saying he was planning on walking to Jamaica. That was Nontsikelelo’s first indication that he was mentally unstable. “How can a man walk from Nigeria to Jamaica?” she asks.

For Makhubo’s family, the photograph elicits mixed emotions. “To us the picture is a misery,” says Nontsikelelo, as she gazes at a replica on the bookshelf of her Soweto home. “This guy just disappeared off the face of the earth. Where is he? Did he die? If he did, how? Who was there? That’s the thing that makes us miserable.” The hardest thing, she says, is the sense that she should have done more to help him. “When I look at his frowning face, I want to say to him, ‘Don’t worry, you tried your best. You’re not responsible that [the boy] died. You did what you did to help him. Please don’t be sad.’”

Back in Lillydale, Nzima picks up his old Pentax, the camera that made him famous—and ended his career. He hits the shutter button and winds the non-existent film in a habit untarnished by decades of disuse. “That picture destroyed my future in journalism,” says Nzima, now 83. “I regretted that I took the picture at that time, because I was compelled to leave my job. Now I say people are free in South Africa because of the contribution that I’ve done by this picture.”

Every year Nzima meets with young South African student groups to teach them about the Soweto uprising. Sithole helped establish and run Soweto’s Hector Pieterson museum and memorial. But both still regret Makhubo’s disappearance. “I wish Mbuyisa can come back home,” says Nzima. “Then Mbuyisa, Antoinette, and myself can come together and say, ‘Well done. We have shaped a lot in South Africa.’”

Contact us at letters@time.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This Photo Inspired the World to Fight Against Apartheid

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Soweto uprising happened 4o years ago

# data[].attributes.body
The Harsh Reality of Life Under Apartheid in South Africa

"For decades, the country's black majority was controlled by racist laws enshrining white supremacy."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From 1948 through the 1990s, a single word dominated life in South Africa. Apartheid -Afrikaans for "apartness"-kept the country's majority Black population under the thumb of a small white minority. It would take decades of struggle to stop the policy, which affected every facet of life in a country locked in centuries-old patterns of discrimination and racism.

What Was Apartheid?

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

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

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

Apartheid Laws and Segregation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela and the Black Consciousness Movement

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

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

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

When Did Apartheid End?

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

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

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

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

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

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

HISTORY Vault: Voices of Civil Rights

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Harsh Reality of Life Under Apartheid in South Africa | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For decades, the country's Black majority was controlled by racist laws enshrining white supremacy.

# data[].attributes.body
The Day Apartheid Died: Photos of South Africa's First Free Vote

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The long wait: When voting was finally open to all in South Africa in 1994, residents of the black township Soweto turned out in force. Credit... Denis Farrell/Associated Press

Wednesday's vote caps a quarter-century of transformation that began when a white-minority regime realized its time was past.

The long wait: When voting was finally open to all in South Africa in 1994, residents of the black township Soweto turned out in force. Credit... Denis Farrell/Associated Press

Some expected the end of apartheid in South Africa to set off a civil war.

As elections approached 25 years ago - the first in which citizens of all races were able to vote - horrific acts of violence threatened to undermine the hopes for a South Africa freed from white minority rule. White supremacists assassinated a young black leader in his driveway. A mob stoned and stabbed an American volunteer to death, shouting "one settler, one bullet." And in the black townships, political rivalries set off deadly attacks in which people were burned alive.

Yet, the final transfer of power was a remarkably peaceful, joyful four days. Millions of black South Africans, finally full citizens in the land of their ancestors, stood in line for hours, patiently waiting for the chance to vote for new leaders and end the brutal subjugation of the apartheid system. Officials would later declare that there had not been a single election-related fatality.
[As South Africans vote in Wednesday's election, the A.N.C. faces an electorate increasingly disillusioned with the country's democracy.]

Image

The voters cast their ballots in mud-walled schoolhouses and blue tents pitched for the day in shantytowns. They overwhelmingly handed the government to Nelson Mandela, a man who had spent 27 years of his life in prison for trying to overthrow the white government.

Most of that time, Mr. Mandela was jailed on a barren island, where, like other inmates, he was forced to break rocks all day. Apartheid was part of daily life there, too. The amount and type of clothing each man was allotted was determined by race. As a black man, Mr. Mandela was not entitled to socks or underwear, and had to wear short pants, even in the winter.

But Mr. Mandela emerged neither embittered nor dispirited. The world instead met a gifted elder statesman. He was practical enough to settle for a temporary power-sharing agreement that would reassure the country's whites, and charismatic enough to charm crowds wherever he went. He preached forgiveness and reconciliation, not vengeance.

At his inauguration as president, Mr. Mandela eagerly rushed to begin his oath even before the chief justice had a chance to prompt him. Then, he told the assembled crowd in Pretoria that the time had come for healing, a time when "all South Africans, both black and white could walk tall, a rainbow nation at peace with itself.

"Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world," he said.

Among his guests was one of his prison wardens.

With the elections, the power that had belonged to whites since European settlers first arrived near Cape Town more than 300 years before passed to a newly elected Parliament as diverse as any in the world.

Officially, apartheid, which means apartness in the white settlers' language of Afrikaans, was established in 1948, though racial discrimination had long been part of South Africa's history. Its aim was to divide the country by race under a separate but equal doctrine that was anything but. Blacks were assigned to small patches called "homelands" scattered around the country, largely based on tribal affiliation. Though whites accounted for less than 20 percent of the population, they kept control of more than 80 percent of the land.

Thousands of blacks were forcibly removed from their homes. Police officers arrived in the middle of the night, using dogs to herd them into pickup trucks and dumping them - and their belongings, if they were lucky - sometimes hundreds of miles away in densely populated areas that offered little hope for making a living.

Blacks had to carry passbooks and get permission to leave the homelands in search of work. Other races faced official discrimination, as well. Indians and people of mixed race, known as "coloreds" were also told where they could live. In some cases, when racial identity wasn't clear, the authorities used a "pencil test," seeing how easily a pencil fell out of a person's hair to determine racial classification. Sometimes family members were separated on the basis of such tests.

By the 1980s, however, the white government had begun to recognize that the apartheid system was untenable. Social unrest was growing and much of the world began to boycott South Africa, refusing to invest in its businesses or buy its goods.

Negotiations were slow at first, but when F. W. de Klerk became president in 1989, he surprised the world by moving quickly. He released Mr. Mandela the following year and also unbanned his political party, the African National Congress.

Still, the negotiations took another four years. The questions of how the transition to majority rule would work seemed unending. Would there be power sharing, and how would it work? Who would control the army? Would women have the vote? Would there be a death penalty?

Some homeland governors balked at seeing their lands reincorporated into South Africa. When the government of one of those homelands collapsed over the issue, three days of looting, arson and bloodshed followed, sending jitters throughout the country.

Another holdout was Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the leader of the largely Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party. At one point, Mr. Buthelezi, speaking at a rally of 10,000, said that the plans afoot were an attempt "to wipe us off the face of the earth.'' Clashes between supporters of Mr. Mandela's A.N.C. and Mr. Buthelezi's I.F.P. were frequent.

Meanwhile, groups of heavily armed far-right extremists wandered the country, promising to defend the fatherland at all costs. Shortly before the elections, a car bomb exploded in Johannesburg near the A.N.C. headquarters. That same day, six polling stations around the country were bombed and more blasts went off on the eve of the elections. Officials said that during an 18-day span leading up to the election, 111 people were killed in election-related violence and 402 were injured.

But on April 27, a jubilant Mr. Mandela cast his ballot at a squatter camp that had been part of a Zulu homeland. On that very day, a new Constitution came into effect, sweeping away the homelands and all other legal trappings of apartheid. The process of remaking a country with 11 national languages, and a legacy of racial injustice, had begun.

Suzanne Daley, editor of the International New York Times, was the South Africa bureau chief for The Times from 1995 to 1999. Produced by Mona Boshnaq and Gaia Tripoli.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Day Apartheid Died: Photos of South Africa's First Free Vote (Published 2019)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wednesday's vote caps a quarter-century of transformation that began when a white-minority regime realized its time was past. The long wait: When voting was finally open to all in South Africa in 1994, residents of the black township Soweto turned out in force. Credit...

# data[].attributes.body
Apartheid Museum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Apartheid Museum

The Apartheid Museum is open Wednesdays to Sundays, 09:00 to 17:00 and public holidays.
Please note: Our landlines are currently down. Please email us - info@apartheidmuseum.

Homepage

About us

The Apartheid Museum opened in 2001 and is acknowledged as the pre-eminent museum in the world dealing with 20th century South Africa, at the heart of which is the apartheid story.

The Apartheid Museum, the first of its kind, illustrates the rise and fall of apartheid.

An architectural consortium, comprising several leading architectural firms, conceptualised the design of the building on a seven-hectare stand. The museum is a superb example of design, space and landscape offering the international community a unique South African experience.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Apartheid Museum opened in 2001 and is acknowledged as the pre-eminent museum in the world dealing with 20th century South Africa, at the heart of which is the aparth

# data[].attributes.body
EBook

Apartheid Museum Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Apartheid Museum opened in 2001 and is acknowledged as the pre-eminent museum in the world dealing with 20th century South Africa, at the heart of which is the apartheid story.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Photo: ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty Images

Quick Facts

"Even being in exile really is a constant reminder of the sickness of our society, and that we are virtually in prison, even in our country. Those who are outside prison walls are simply in a bigger prison because the Black man is virtually a prisoner, and all those other fellow whites and other groups that are oppressed as we are, we are all really in prison, in a bigger apartheid prison."

Name

Winnie Mandela

Birth Date

September 26, 1936

Death Date

April 2, 2018

Education

Shawbury High School, Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work, University of the Witwatersrand

Place of Birth

Bizana, South Africa

Place of Death

Johannesburg, South Africa

Originally

Nkosikazi Nobandle Nomzamo Madikizela

Maiden Name

Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela

Full Name

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela

Who Was Winnie Mandela?

Winnie Mandela embarked on a career of social work that led to her involvement in activism. She married African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela in 1958, though he was imprisoned for much of their four decades of marriage. Winnie became president of the ANC Women's League in 1993, and the following year she was elected to Parliament. However, her accomplishments were also tainted by convictions for kidnapping and fraud. She passed away on April 2, 2018, in Johannesburg‚ South Africa.

Early Life and Career

Born Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela on September 26, 1936, in Bizana, a rural village in the Transkei district of South Africa, Winnie eventually moved to Johannesburg in 1953 to study at the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work. South Africa was under the system known as apartheid, where citizens of Indigenous African descent were subjected to a harsh caste system, while European descendants enjoyed much higher levels of wealth, health and social freedom.

Winnie completed her studies and, though receiving a scholarship to study in America, decided instead to work as the first Black medical social worker at Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg. A dedicated professional, she came to learn via her fieldwork of the deplorable state that many of her patients lived in.

In the mid-1950s, Winnie met attorney Nelson, who, at the time, was the leader of the African National Congress, an organization with the goal of ending South Africa's apartheid system of racial segregation. The two married in June 1958, despite concerns from Winnie's father over the couple's age difference and Nelson's steadfast political involvements. After the wedding, Winnie moved into Nelson's home in Soweto. She became legally known thereafter as Winnie Madikizela-Mandel.

Confinement and Leadership

Nelson was routinely arrested for his activities and targeted by the government during his early days of marriage. He was eventually sentenced in 1964 to life imprisonment, leaving Winnie to raise their two small daughters, Zenani and Zindzi, on her own. Nonetheless, Winnie vowed to continue working to end apartheid; she was involved surreptitiously with the ANC and sent her children to boarding school in Swaziland to offer them a more peaceful upbringing.

Monitored by the government, Winnie was arrested under the Suppression of Terrorism Act and spent more than a year in solitary confinement, where she was tortured. Upon her release, she continued her activism and was jailed several more times.

Following the Soweto 1976 uprisings, in which hundreds of students were killed, she was forced by the government to relocate to the border town of Brandfort and placed under house arrest. She described the experience as alienating and heart-wrenching, yet she continued to speak out, as in a 1981 statement to the BBC on Black South African economic might and its ability to overturn the system.

In 1985, after her home was firebombed, Winnie returned to Soweto and continued to criticize the regime, cementing her title of "Mother of the Nation." However, she also became known for endorsing deadly retaliation against Black citizens who collaborated with the apartheid regime. Additionally, her group of bodyguards, the Mandela United Football Club, garnered a reputation for brutality. In 1989, a 14-year-old boy named Stompie Moeketsi was abducted by the club and later killed.

Freedom and Charges of Violence

Through a complex mix of domestic political maneuvering and international outrage, Nelson was freed in 1990, after 27 years of imprisonment. The years of separation and tremendous social turmoil had irrevocably damaged the Mandela marriage, however, and the two separated in 1992. Before that, Winnie was convicted of kidnapping and assaulting Moeketsi; after an appeal, her six-year sentence was ultimately reduced to a fine.

Even with her conviction, Winnie was elected president of the ANC's Women's League. Then, in 1994, Nelson won the presidential election, becoming South Africa's first Black president; Winnie was subsequently named deputy minister of arts, culture, science and technology. However, due to affiliations and rhetoric seen as highly radical, she was ousted from her cabinet post by her husband in 1995. The couple divorced in 1996, having spent few years together out of almost four decades of marriage.

Winnie appeared before the nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 and was found responsible for "gross violations of human rights" in connection to the killings and tortures implemented by her bodyguards. While ANC leaders kept their political distance, Winnie still retained a grassroots following. She was re-elected to Parliament in 1999, only to be convicted of economic fraud in 2003. She quickly resigned from her post, though her conviction was later overturned.

In a 2010 Evening Standard interview, Winnie sharply criticized Archbishop Desmond Tutu and her ex-husband, disparaging Nelson's decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize with former South African President F.W. de Klerk. Winnie later denied making the statements.

In 2012, one year before her husband's death, the British press published an email composed by Winnie, in which she criticized the ANC for its general treatment of the Mandela clan.

Death and Legacy

Following extended hospital visits to treat a kidney infection, Winnie passed away on April 2, 2018, in Johannesburg.

A family spokesperson confirmed the death, saying, "The Mandela family is deeply grateful for the gift of her life and even as our hearts break at her passing‚ we urge all those who loved her to celebrate this most remarkable woman."

Despite the conflicts, Winnie is still widely revered for her role in ending South Africa's oppressive policies. Her story has been the subject of an opera, books and films, her character interpreted by many different actresses across numerous productions. She was played by actress Alfre Woodard in the 1987 television movie Mandela; by Sophie Okonedo in the TV movie Mrs. Mandela (2010); and by Jennifer Hudson in the 2011 film Winnie.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Even being in exile really is a constant reminder of the sickness of our society, and that we are virtually in prison, even in our country. Those who are outside prison walls are simply in a bigger prison because the Black man is virtually a prisoner, and all those other fellow whites and other groups that are oppressed as we are, we are all really in prison, in a bigger apartheid prison."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On March 21, 1960, police officers in a black township in South Africa opened fire on a group of people peacefully protesting oppressive pass laws, killing 69. The anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre is remembered the world over every March 21 on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Apartheid and the pass system

The Sharpeville Massacre occurred in a South Africa that denied the rights and freedoms of anyone who was not considered "white" under a system called "apartheid."

Apartheid means "apartness" in the Afrikaans language. The concept was endorsed, legalized and promoted by the National Party, which was elected in South Africa in 1948 by a minority, exclusively white electorate.

Apartheid laws placed all South Africans into one of four racial categories: "white/European," "native/black," "coloured," (people of "mixed race") or "Indian/Asian." White people - 15 percent of the South African population - stood at the top, wielding power and wealth. Black South Africans - 80 percent of the population - were relegated to the very bottom. Apartheid laws restricted almost every aspect of black South Africans' lives.

Some of the most racist laws were pass laws, which forced black South Africans to carry a pass at all times. Such laws had existed before apartheid, but under apartheid, they became much worse. The government used the pass laws to control the movement of black South Africans, restricting where they could work and live.

The architects of apartheid

Apartheid was firmly rooted in South Africa's colonial history. As in Canada and other colonized regions, Indigenous communities were progressively dispossessed of their lands. By the time the National Party (NP) took power, the white minority controlled 92 percent of the land.

The NP emerged from centuries of conflict among Dutch and British colonizers and Indigenous communities. The Party was formed mainly of Afrikaners - descendants of Dutch colonizers - who believed they had a God‐given mission to establish white rule in Africa. After the NP was elected, it quickly passed laws to further entrench longstanding practices of segregation and racial oppression.

Resistance and Sharpeville

For years, many South Africans chose to peacefully protest apartheid laws, including the pass laws. In March 1960, a group called the Pan African Congress (PAC) decided to organize a peaceful protest in the black township of Sharpeville. The plan was for protestors to march to the local police station without their passes and ask to be arrested.

On March 21, thousands of South Africans marched to the Sharpeville police station. They gathered in peaceful defiance, refusing to carry their pass books. They chanted freedom songs and shouted, "Down with passes!" Simon Mkutau, who participated in the protest, would later recall, "The atmosphere was cheerful; people were happy, singing and dancing." ¹ However, as time went by, more and more police began to appear, along with increasing numbers of armoured vehicles. Military jets began to fly overhead. Then, without warning, the police opened fire on the unarmed crowd. Lydia Mahabuke was there when it happened.

While we were standing there and singing we suddenly saw the police in a row pointing their guns at us. Whilst we were still singing, without any word, without any argument, we just heard the guns being fired.

Lydia Mahabuke

Mahabuke tried to run but felt something hit her in the back. "After having felt this, I tried to look back. People were falling, scattered. There was blood streaming down my leg. I tried to hobble. I struggled to get home." ²

In total, 69 people were killed and more than 180 people were injured, mostly shot in the back as they fled the violence. A later report would state over 700 bullets had been fired, all by police. ³ Afterwards, some witnesses claimed they saw police putting guns and knives in the hands of dead victims, to make it look like the protestors were armed and violent. Others said they saw police mocking people who they found alive. Some even claimed that the police killed the injured where they lay on the ground. Ambulances arrived and took victims to the hospital. In some cases, however, police followed the wounded to the hospital, arrested them and took them to prison. In other cases, the police waited until victims had healed somewhat, then arrested them. ⁴

The aftermath

After the arrests, everyone was afraid to talk about the tragedy. "In the days after the shootings, nothing happened," said Albert Mbongo, who participated in the protest and managed to escape without injury. ⁵

Nobody dared say anything, because if you did you were arrested. I couldn't even attend the burial, because only women and children were allowed there.

Albert Mbongo

Away from Sharpeville, however, many people did express their outrage both inside and outside South Africa. To protest the massacre, Chief Albert Luthuli, the President‐General of the African National Congress (ANC) burned his own pass. Nelson Mandela and other ANC members also burned their passes in solidarity. Shortly afterwards, on March 30, approximately 30,000 protesters marched to Cape Town to protest the shootings. ⁶

The international response to the massacre was swift and unanimous. Many countries around the world condemned the atrocity. On April 1, the United Nations (UN) Security Council passed a resolution condemning the killings and calling for the South African government to abandon its policy of apartheid. A month later, the UN General Assembly declared that apartheid was a violation of the UN Charter. This was the first time the UN had discussed apartheid. ⁷ Six years later, as a direct result of the Sharpeville Massacre, the UN declared March 21 to be the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

After Sharpeville, South Africa's government had become increasingly isolated, but the government refused to abandon its policies of apartheid and racial discrimination. First, the government declared a state of emergency and detained around 2,000 people. Then, on April 8, 1960, both the ANC and PAC were banned - it became illegal to be a member of these organizations.

Many members of both organizations decided to go underground. Nelson Mandela was among those who chose to become outlaws. He would later say, "We believe in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that 'the will of the people shall be the basis of authority of the government,' and for us to accept the banning was the equivalent of accepting the silencing of Africans for all time." ⁸

Mandela and others no longer felt they could defeat apartheid peacefully. Both the PAC and the ANC formed armed wings and began a military struggle against the government. Many long years of struggle and suffering lay ahead - but Sharpeville was the beginning of the end for apartheid. Prakash Diar, a South African human rights lawyer, explains: "The whole world was outraged at what the police had done. On March 21, 1960, the isolation of South Africa started.

It took a long time, but the isolation and boycott of South Africa slowly started, because what they were practicing was inhumane and unjust.

Prakash Diar

The eyes of the world would turn to Sharpeville again years later. During the 1980s, Diar would defend six people unjustly charged with murder by the apartheid government. The five men and one woman would become known as the Sharpeville Six - their case would attract international attention, once again putting Sharpeville on the world stage and exposing the inhumanity of the apartheid government. ⁹

In December 1996, two years after the end of apartheid, South Africa enacted a new constitution that enshrined the rights and freedoms of all peoples. It was signed by President Nelson Mandela in the town of Sharpeville, very close to where the massacre had happened. In South Africa, March 21 is now known as Human Rights Day.
You can learn more about Sharpeville and the struggle against apartheid in the Museum exhibition Mandela: Struggle for Freedom.

¹ Lodge, Tom, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.

² Ibid, 10.

3 Venter, Sahm, Exploring Our National Days: Human Rights Day 21 March(Auckland Park: Jacanda Media, 2007), 22.

⁴ Lodge, Tom, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences, 13-14.

⁵ Ibid, 17.

⁶ The Road to Democracy in South Africa: Volume 1 [1960-1970] (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010), 239.

⁷ Dubow, Sam, Apartheid 1948-1994, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 83.

⁸ Asmal, Kader, David Chidester and Wilmot James, éd., Nelson Mandela in his Own Words: From Freedom to the Future, London, Abacus, 2013, p. 30.

⁹ You can read the story of the Sharpeville Six in Prakash Diar's book, The Sharpeville Six (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1990).

The age of artificial intelligence

Cost: Free

Technology and surveillance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On March 21, 1960, police officers in a black township in South Africa opened fire on a group of people peacefully protesting oppressive pass laws, killing 69. The anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre is remembered the world over every March 21 on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the black township of Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, South Africa, Afrikaner police open fire on a group of unarmed black South African demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding 180 in a hail of submachine-gun fire. The demonstrators were protesting against the South African government's restriction of nonwhite travel. In the aftermath of the Sharpeville massacre, protests broke out in Cape Town, and more than 10,000 people were arrested before government troops restored order.

The incident convinced anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela to abandon his nonviolent stance and organize paramilitary groups to fight South Africa's system of institutionalized racial discrimination. In 1964, after some minor military action, Mandela was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison. He was released after 27 years and in 1994 was elected the first black president of South Africa.
READ MORE: Remembering Nelson Mandela

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the black township of Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, South Africa, Afrikaner police open fire on a group of unarmed black South African demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding 180 in a hail of submachine-gun fire. The demonstrators were protesting against the South African government's restriction of nonwhite travel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sharpeville massacre was turning point in anti-apartheid movement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A chronology of key events in the history of South Africa from 4th-century migrations to the present day.

# data[].attributes.body
"Forgiveness is not just personally rewarding. It's also a political necessity, says Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He explains how forgiveness allowed South Africans to imagine a new beginning-one based on honesty, peace, and compassion."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Malusi Mpumlwana was a young enthusiastic antiapartheid activist and a close associate of Steve Biko in South Africa's crucial Black Consciousness Movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was involved in vital community development and health projects with impoverished and often demoralized rural communities. As a result, he and his wife were under strict surveillance, constantly harassed by the ubiquitous security police. They were frequently held in detention without trial.

I remember well a day Malusi gave the security police the slip and came to my office in Johannesburg, where I was serving as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. He told me that during his frequent stints in detention, when the security police routinely tortured him, he used to think, "These are God's children and yet they are behaving like animals. They need us to help them recover the humanity they have lost." For our struggle against apartheid to be successful, it required remarkable young people like Malusi.

All South Africans were less than whole because of apartheid. Blacks suffered years of cruelty and oppression, while many privileged whites became more uncaring, less compassionate, less humane, and therefore less human. Yet during these years of suffering and inequality, each South African's humanity was still tied to that of all others, white or black, friend or enemy. For our own dignity can only be measured in the way we treat others. This was Malusi's extraordinary insight.

I saw the power of this idea when I was serving as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. This was the commission that the postapartheid government, headed by our president, Nelson Mandela, had established to move us beyond the cycles of retribution and violence that had plagued so many other countries during their transitions from oppression to democracy. The commission granted perpetrators of political crimes the opportunity to appeal for amnesty by giving a full and truthful account of their actions and, if they so chose, an opportunity to ask for forgiveness-opportunities that some took and others did not. The commission also gave victims of political crimes a chance to tell their stories, hear confessions, and thus unburden themselves from the pain and suffering they had experienced.

For our nation to heal and become a more humane place, we had to embrace our enemies as well as our friends. The same is true the world over. True enduring peace-between countries, within a country, within a community, within a family-requires real reconciliation between former enemies and even between loved ones who have struggled with one another.

How could anyone really think that true reconciliation could avoid a proper confrontation? After a husband and wife or two friends have quarreled, if they merely seek to gloss over their differences or metaphorically paper over the cracks, they must not be surprised when they are soon at it again, perhaps more violently than before, because they have tried to heal their ailment lightly.

True reconciliation is based on forgiveness, and forgiveness is based on true confession, and confession is based on penitence, on contrition, on sorrow for what you have done. We know that when a husband and wife have quarreled, one of them must be ready to say the most difficult words in any language, "I'm sorry," and the other must be ready to forgive for there to be a future for their relationship. This is true between parents and children, between siblings, between neighbors, and between friends. Equally, confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation in the lives of nations are not just airy-fairy religious and spiritual things, nebulous and unrealistic. They are the stuff of practical politics.

Those who forget the past, as many have pointed out, are doomed to repeat it. Just in terms of human psychology, we in South Africa knew that to have blanket amnesty where no disclosure was made would not deal with our past. It is not dealing with the past to say glibly, "Let bygones be bygones," for then they will never be bygones. How can you forgive if you do not know what or whom to forgive? In our commission hearings, we required full disclosure for us to grant amnesty. Only then, we thought, would the process of requesting and receiving forgiveness be healing and transformative for all involved. The commission's record shows that its standards for disclosure and amnesty were high indeed: of the more than 7,000 applications submitted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it granted amnesty to only 849 of them.

Unearthing the truth was necessary not only for the victims to heal, but for the perpetrators as well. Guilt, even unacknowledged guilt, has a negative effect on the guilty. One day it will come out in some form or another. We must be radical. We must go to the root, remove that which is festering, cleanse and cauterize, and then a new beginning is possible.

Forgiveness gives us the capacity to make a new start. That is the power, the rationale, of confession and forgiveness. It is to say, "I have fallen but I am not going to remain there. Please forgive me." And forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew. Not to forgive leads to bitterness and hatred, which, just like self-hatred and self-contempt, gnaw away at the vitals of one's being. Whether hatred is projected out or projected in, it is always corrosive of the human spirit.

We have all experienced how much better we feel after apologies are made and accepted, but even still it is so hard for us to say that we are sorry. I often find it difficult to say these words to my wife in the intimacy and love of our bedroom. How much more difficult it is to say these words to our friends, our neighbors, and our coworkers. Asking for forgiveness requires that we take responsibility for our part in the rupture that has occurred in the relationship. We can always make excuses for ourselves and find justifications for our actions, however contorted, but we know that these keep us locked in the prison of blame and shame.

In the story of Adam and Eve, the Bible reminds us of how easy it is to blame others. When God confronted Adam about eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam was less than forthcoming in accepting responsibility. Instead he shifted the blame to Eve, and when God turned to Eve, she, too, tried to pass the buck to the serpent. (The poor serpent had no one left to blame.) So we should not be surprised at how reluctant most people are to acknowledge their responsibility and to say they are sorry. We are behaving true to our ancestors when we blame everyone and everything except ourselves. It is the everyday heroic act that says, "It's my fault. I'm sorry." But without these simple words, forgiveness is much more difficult.

Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.

If the wrongdoer has come to the point of realizing his wrong, then one hopes there will be contrition, or at least some remorse or sorrow. This should lead him to confess the wrong he has done and ask for forgiveness. It obviously requires a fair measure of humility. But what happens when such contrition or confession is lacking? Must the victim be dependent on these before she can forgive? There is no question that such a confession is a very great help to the one who wants to forgive, but it is not absolutely indispensable. If the victim could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would be locked into the culprit's whim, locked into victimhood, no matter her own attitude or intention. That would be palpably unjust.

In the act of forgiveness, we are declaring our faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to change. We are welcoming a chance to make a new beginning. Because we are not infallible, because we will hurt especially the ones we love by some wrong, we will always need a process of forgiveness and reconciliation to deal with those unfortunate yet all too human breaches in relationships. They are an inescapable characteristic of the human condition.

We have had a jurisprudence, a penology in Africa that was not retributive but restorative. Traditionally, when people quarreled, the main intention was not to punish the miscreant but to restore good relations. This was the animating principle of our Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For Africa is concerned, or has traditionally been concerned, about the wholeness of relationships. That is something we need in this world-a world that is polarized, a world that is fragmented, a world that destroys people. It is also something we need in our families and friendships. For retribution wounds and divides us from one another. Only restoration can heal us and make us whole. And only forgiveness enables us to restore trust and compassion to our relationships. If peace is our goal, there can be no future without forgiveness.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Malusi Mpumlwana was a young enthusiastic antiapartheid activist and a close associate of Steve Biko in South Africa's crucial Black Consciousness Movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was involved in vital community development and health projects with impoverished and often demoralized rural communities.

# data[].attributes.headline
Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa

# data[].attributes.subject
Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa

# data[].attributes.body
"Desmond Tutu is the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, retired as Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, 1996.  He then served as chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

This essay draws from his latest book, God Has a Dream (Doubleday, 2004).  Audio of Archbishop Tutu reading from his book can be heard at http://www.godhasadream.com."

# data[].attributes.body
"If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator. You can move on, and you can even help the perpetrator to become a better person too."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Desmond Tutu

Photography by Brian Moody

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC was created by Nelson Mandela's Government of National Unity in 1995 to help South Africans come to terms with their extremely troubled past. It was established to investigate the violations that took place between 1960 and 1994, to provide support and reparation to victims and their families, and to compile a full and objective record of the effects of apartheid on South African society.

To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of self-interest. It is also a process that does not exclude hatred and anger. These emotions are all part of being human. You should never hate yourself for hating others who do terrible things: the depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger.

However, when I talk of forgiveness I mean the belief that you can come out the other side a better person. A better person than the one being consumed by anger and hatred. Remaining in that state locks you in a state of victimhood, making you almost dependent on the perpetrator.

If you can find it in yourself to forgive, then you are no longer chained to the perpetrator.

You can move on, and you can even help the perpetrator to become a better person too.

But the process of forgiveness also requires acknowledgement on the part of the perpetrator that they have committed an offence. I don't like to talk about my own personal experience of forgiveness, although some of the things people have tried to do to my family are close to what I'd consider unforgivable. I don't talk about these things because I have witnessed so many incredible people who, despite experiencing atrocity and tragedy, have come to a point in their lives where they are able to forgive. Take the Craddock Four, for example. The police ambushed their car, killed them in the most gruesome manner, set their car alight. When, at a TRC hearing, the teenage daughter of one of the victims was asked: would you be able to forgive the people who did this to you and your family? She answered, "We would like to forgive, but we would just like to know who to forgive." How fantastic to see this young girl, still human despite all efforts to dehumanise her.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Photography by Brian Moody Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC was created by Nelson Mandela's Government of National Unity in 1995 to help South Africans come to terms with their extremely troubled past.

# data[].attributes.body
Nelson Mandela & The African National Congress (ANC)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The U.S. Government Had Nelson Mandela on Terrorist Watch Lists Until 2008. Here's Why

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On the centennial of Nelson Mandela's birth, he is remembered as a symbol of peace-but he was on the U.S. terror watch list until 2008

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"The biggest and most powerful moment in South African rugby" - 25 years after Mandela's release

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pictures of the life of anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The life of the man who led the drive to end apartheid in South Africa and became its first black president

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nelson Mandela led the fight against apartheid in South Africa and became the country's first black president after spending 27 years in jail as a political prisoner

# data[].attributes.headline
A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela's Autobiography

# data[].attributes.subject
A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela's Autobiography

# data[].attributes.body
"Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.

[…]

The time for the healing of the wounds has come.
The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come.
The time to build is upon us."

"No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."

"I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended."

# data[].attributes.headline
LISTEN: Two Mandela Speeches That Made History

# data[].attributes.subject
LISTEN: Two Mandela Speeches That Made History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion. Menial tasks in South Africa are invariably performed by Africans. When anything has to be carried or cleaned the white man will look around for an African to do it for him, whether the African is employed by him or not. Because of this sort of attitude, whites tend to regard Africans as a separate breed. They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realise that we have emotions - that we fall in love like white people do; that we want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that we want to earn money, enough money to support our families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school. And what 'house-boy' or 'garden-boy' or labourer can ever hope to do this?

Pass laws, which to the Africans are among the most hated bits of legislation in South Africa, render any African liable to police surveillance at any time. I doubt whether there is a single African male in South Africa who has not at some stage had a brush with the police over his pass. Hundreds and thousands of Africans are thrown into jail each year under pass laws. Even worse than this is the fact that pass laws keep husband and wife apart and lead to the breakdown of family life.

Poverty and the breakdown of family life have secondary effects. Children wander about the streets of the townships because they have no schools to go to, or no money to enable them to go to school, or no parents at home to see that they go to school, because both parents, if there be two, have to work to keep the family alive. This leads to a breakdown in moral standards, to an alarming rise in illegitimacy, and to growing violence which erupts not only politically, but everywhere. Life in the townships is dangerous. There is not a day that goes by without somebody being stabbed or assaulted. And violence is carried out of the townships into the white living areas. People are afraid to walk alone in the streets after dark. Housebreakings and robberies are increasing, despite the fact that the death sentence can now be imposed for such offences. Death sentences cannot cure the festering sore.

The only cure is to alter the conditions under which Africans are forced to live and to meet their legitimate grievances. Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing, and not work which the Government declares them to be capable of. We want to be allowed to live where we obtain work, and not be endorsed out of an area because we were not born there. We want to be allowed and not to be obliged to live in rented houses which we can never call our own. We want to be part of the general population, and not confined to living in our ghettoes. African men want to have their wives and children to live with them where they work, and not to be forced into an unnatural existence in men's hostels. Our women want to be with their men folk and not to be left permanently widowed in the reserves. We want to be allowed out after eleven o'clock at night and not to be confined to our rooms like little children. We want to be allowed to travel in our own country and to seek work where we want to, where we want to and not where the Labour Bureau tells us to. We want a just share in the whole of South Africa; we want security and a stake in society.

Above all, My Lord, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. I know this sounds revolutionary to the whites in this country, because the majority of voters will be Africans. This makes the white man fear democracy.

But this fear cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the only solution which will guarantee racial harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. Political division, based on colour, is entirely artificial and, when it disappears, so will the domination of one colour group by another. The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs as it certainly must, it will not change that policy.

This then is what the ANC is fighting. Our struggle is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by our own suffering and our own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. [someone coughs]

During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LISTEN: Two Mandela Speeches That Made History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion. Menial tasks in South Africa are invariably performed by Africans.