The police opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protesters in Sharpeville. Later investigations showed that most of the people killed were shot in the back. That massacre in March 1960 changed everything for the liberation struggle in South Africa. It took a localized national resistance and forced it onto the world stage.
Welcome to South Africa in the 1960s, a country ruled by an unapologetically racist system designed to ensure domination by the white minority. The official policy was called apartheid, marketed by its architects as a kind of good neighborliness between different peoples. White people first arrived at the southern tip of Africa in 1652 and brutally established control over the people who lived there. By 1948, the Afrikaners, white descendants of Dutch settlers, introduced apartheid to guarantee power stayed in white hands.
To experience apartheid as a black person was a series of daily humiliations. Being stripped of one’s dignity. Being stripped of the feeling of humanity. It controlled where you lived, who you could marry, who you could have intimate relations with.
It controlled which hospital you went to, which school you attended, which cemetery you were buried in. There was no aspect of life unaffected by apartheid. Whites, by contrast, lived a life of privilege. A significant amount of money was spent on my education, admitted one young white person growing up under apartheid.
But there was something surreal about living in a country where people of color would simply disappear from view at sundown, forbidden from being in what was called a white group area. For black people, being in a white area without proper papers was a crime. The pass laws, a cornerstone of apartheid, required them to carry special documents whenever they visited those white areas. By 1960, a number of black organizations had sprung up to resist.
On March 21, they called one of their largest demonstrations yet in the town of Sharpeville to protest the pass laws. The protest was peaceful, but as more police arrived, tensions rose until suddenly they boiled over and the police opened fire. The government cracked down on the opposition. The largest and best-known resistance group was the African National Congress, and its leaders were forced into hiding.
Among them was a man named Nelson Mandela. A reporter managed to track him down and asked what it was that the African really wanted. “The Africans want the franchise on the basis of one man, one vote,” Mandela answered. “They want political independence.
There are many people who feel that it is useless and futile for us to continue talking peace and nonviolence against a government whose reply is only savage attacks on an unarmed and defenseless people. ”
To further the goal of equal rights with whites, the ANC abandoned its policy of nonviolence and launched a campaign of sabotage against the country’s infrastructure. But in 1964, Mandela and other ANC leaders were caught and put on trial. They were sentenced to life in prison on the notorious Robben Island.
It effectively decapitated the leadership of the African National Congress. But overseas, the ANC started to find allies. This was the era of the civil rights movement. The world was changing, and South Africa was being left behind.
Peter Hain was a young South African whose parents were among the few white people to actively oppose apartheid. “I lived as a child in Pretoria, the son of two brave anti-apartheid activists,” he said. “My childhood was one of being under constant police surveillance, being followed to school as I rode my bike by the special branch, our house being raided in the early hours, my parents being arrested and detained. Eventually they stopped my father working as an architect, and we had to leave the country.
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In 1969, the Springboks, South Africa’s world-famous all-white national rugby team, arrived for a tour of Britain. Hain saw the tour as a perfect target. “I know if we can stop their sport, we can really hit them hard,” he said. “It’s in my DNA.
I’m a sports-mad young white South African by origin, and I know how important it is to white South Africans. ”
They invaded pitches and were carried off by security. There were huge demonstrations outside. Sometimes some of them were beaten up, but they kept demonstrating.
The protests succeeded in drawing worldwide attention to the evils of apartheid. After 1970, South African sports teams found they were no longer welcome in Europe. That mattered to whites back home. “Growing up in South Africa in the 1970s, sport in our lives is everything,” said one white South African.
“When countries including the United Kingdom, Holland, and France started boycotting events in which we participated, it came as a huge blow. Sports gave people the ability to believe they were the same as the rest of the world. With the boycott, they had to look and say, nobody wants us. Nobody will have us.
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The pressure had some effect. By the mid-1970s, the government was loosening some of apartheid’s stricter laws. Whites and blacks could now sit on park benches together. But the attitude change was not shared by all.
One white man openly volunteered his view: “I’d rather see the changes come up with some education, but they’ve got no education and it’ll take them a couple of hundred years. They’ve only just come down from the trees. ”
Clearly, attitudes had not changed. Neither had the economic oppression most black South Africans lived under.
Soweto was a sprawling black township just outside Johannesburg. More than a million Africans, forbidden from living in Johannesburg itself, were forced to live in overcrowded slums. In 1976, the government declared that school children must study in Afrikaans, the language of the country’s white Afrikaner population. Afrikaans was associated with white domination.
To be instructed in a language so closely tied to subjugation and racial humiliation was a step too far for the school kids of Soweto. They took to the streets, saying, “We will not be taught in this way. We’re not going to have this anymore. ”
Once again, extreme police brutality met a peaceful form of protest.
Police fired live ammunition into a crowd of peaceful protesters, very young people, school children of 13, 14, and 15 years old. More than 500 people were killed in the Soweto uprising, most of them children. The images of South African policemen firing into a crowd of school children were broadcast across the world. As far as the international community was concerned, the South African government lost all legitimacy.
But most white South Africans remained firmly committed to apartheid. In 1978, they elected a new prime minister, P. W. Botha, who was every bit as brutal and hardline as his predecessors.
In 1981, the all-white Springbok rugby team showed up in New Zealand for a tour. Like in Europe, they were greeted by a wave of anti-apartheid activists. New Zealand was split down the middle, anti-apartheid activists on one hand, rugby supporters on the other. Eventually, they stopped the Springboks.
The slogan was clear: “No blacks, no freedom. No one in this country is going to be free. ”
A powerful new voice was emerging in the anti-apartheid struggle, that of Bishop Desmond Tutu, dean of Johannesburg. His position in the clergy protected him from arrest, but he was as passionate in his opposition to the regime as Nelson Mandela.
He was a pacifist, a position that gave him power and credibility as a voice for reconciliation. In the fall of 1984, the struggle received a boost. Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “The response amongst our people,” Tutu said, “we believe it is saying to us, God is on our side.
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Even among some white South Africans, Bishop Tutu struck a chord. One white man prayed: “I pray that the day may come when even my own people will understand something of the message that you have been trying. ”
But even as Tutu won the Peace Prize, unrest was again exploding in the townships. In the fall of 1984, demonstrations against rent increases near Johannesburg turned violent.
Government offices were burned. Liquor stores owned by the government were burned. The police sent in their Casspirs, their armored vehicles. The army was there.
People were fighting back. There was a sense of growing conflict. Just like the Sharpeville and Soweto massacres, police had no hesitation in using live ammunition on protesters. But now, the brutality only triggered more protests.
People went out onto the street, police fired and killed individual people. There was a funeral, and the funeral turned into a political rally. The funeral became violent. Police killed more people.
Another funeral, another rally. The violence begot more violence. There’s a very real sense that this was a revolutionary moment, the moment at which the state really lost control over the African population. In desperation, Botha made a dramatic offer to the still-imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela.
The government offered Mandela and his colleagues their freedom, on condition that they renounce violence and enter into negotiations on terms set by the state. On February 10, 1985, Mandela’s response was delivered by his 24-year-old daughter Zindzi at a huge rally in Soweto. “My father says,” she announced, “I cannot and will not give any undertaking at a time when I and you, the people, are not free. Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.
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They refused to renounce violence as long as the machinery of the apartheid state was practicing violence against the non-white people of South Africa. They demanded the police and army be pulled out of the townships, a non-negotiable for the government. The ANC decided to double down on its strategy. Through its president in exile, Oliver Tambo, it called on black South Africans to plunge the country into chaos.
Tambo used Radio Freedom to make the call for South Africa to be made ungovernable, directing it specifically at the youth. Young people across the country heard the call and embraced it. To break the escalating cycle of violence, the government called in the army. This was a period of immense exhilaration for many young black people.
“I go to university for the first time in 1985,” one recalled. “My friends and I were all incredibly excited. There’s a headiness to this period. There’s a headiness to being on the street facing a line of policemen.
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By the summer of 1985, Botha’s government had lost control of the townships. On July 20, 1985, he addressed the nation, declaring a state of emergency and granting broader, harsher powers to the security forces. “(unclear)” said Bishop Tutu. “This is typical of a government that doesn’t know how to deal with dissent.
They believe security and peace will come from the barrel of a gun. ”
His prediction came true. The government cracked down, and the violence moved from the black townships to the campus of Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University, where police showed little restraint in putting down peaceful protest. The presence of foreign news crews meant the violence was beamed every night into living rooms around the world.
“You can see day in and day out the brutality waged against ordinary people in townships,” one observer noted. “That has a massive impact upon how the world views how things are unfolding. ”
Botha’s government tried to impose censorship, cracking down on foreign news crews. A police officer was filmed firing directly at a cameraman.
Another cameraman was shot in the leg. But such brutality only sparked more anger among anti-apartheid campaigners outside South Africa. Following clashes in London’s Trafalgar Square on November 3, 1985, American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson addressed a huge crowd: “They want to lock out the foreign press. They might do their killing and lynching in the dark.
Television did not create apartheid. It has exposed apartheid. ”
As protests continued, Botha remained defiant: “Destroy white South Africa, and this country will drift into faction strife, chaos, and poverty. ”
Activists found a new way to protest by staging boycotts of white-owned businesses.
For the whites of Port Elizabeth, no single black action had as great an impact as the boycott. “It’s one of the most effective weapons the blacks have found,” said one white resident. “This one is hurting him. ”
But at funerals and rallies, as the death toll mounted, Bishop Tutu found it harder and harder to control the fury of the crowds.
After one funeral, a man believed to be a police informer was attacked by the crowd and his car set alight. Tutu saved him, bundling him into a vehicle and appealing once more for calm. “We cannot use methods to attain liberation which our enemy will use against us,” he said. By the end of 1985, it seemed the government and those rising up against it had reached a bloody impasse.
“The state remained incredibly strong,” noted one analyst, “but it wasn’t able to quell the rebellion either. What we effectively have is a stalemate between these two competing forces, between the South African state on the one hand and the township youth on the other. ”
It would take the international community to break the deadlock, but that would require action from world leaders. Despite the violent uprisings and growing global outrage, US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher seemed more worried about communists than about South Africa’s racist regime.
“The Thatcher and Reagan governments had a strong interest in maintaining South Africa as not just a white-run state but also an anti-communist state,” one observer explained. “They were willing to hold their nose and deal with a regime that was committing human rights abuses. ”
Neither agreed to impose economic sanctions. “I’m against sanctions,” Thatcher said.
“Because they don’t work, and because I don’t see how it helps any situation to create unemployment in Britain in order to create unemployment in South Africa. ”
For the anti-apartheid movement, this refusal to stop foreign investment made their challenge more difficult. “The bankers were saying, well, we wouldn’t like to lose 14 billion,” one activist recounted. “I’m sorry, but they have not made a moral decision.
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So protesters in the US and UK took matters into their own hands, launching mass boycotts of South African goods. “For the first time, people felt they could make a difference through where we shop and how we shop,” one activist said. “We see how corporations work and know it does make a difference. ”
Anti-apartheid activists targeted large companies with South African links.
Shell became the focus of a credit card cutting ceremony, with a union leader urging his million members to boycott the brand. Western banks started recalling loans, dealing the South African economy a severe setback. Finally, the tide began to turn. When President Reagan attempted to veto legislation imposing sanctions, he was overruled by his own party in both the Senate and the House.
“Even people on the relatively conservative end of the political spectrum came around to the idea that this is a moral imperative rather than a political choice,” one observer said. This support was huge for the movement, especially for those on the front lines battling apartheid inside South Africa. “The combination of pressure from inside and out,” said one activist, “is the most important factor that led to the beginning of the end of apartheid. ”
But while the strategy of making South Africa ungovernable kept the pressure on, many young South Africans paid with their lives.
Meanwhile, Nelson Mandela languished in a cell on Robben Island for more than 20 years. Branded as a terrorist by some, he became embraced as a hero of the people. The “Release Mandela” campaign became a rallying cry for the international anti-apartheid movement. “The irony is that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” one observer noted.
“Mandela became a cause célèbre. It really shifted people away from thinking of him as a terrorist. ”
International pressure was matched by fury on the streets of South Africa. The black majority, seeing no end to apartheid and no power to change it, could only pray something would change.
In January 1989, Botha suffered a serious stroke and was forced to step down. He was replaced by F. W. de Klerk, who seemed an unlikely advocate for change.
“De Klerk came from a family of hardcore Afrikaner nationalists,” noted one observer, “but he had this vision that South Africa really would have to adapt or die and make peace with the ANC. ”
He started to reach out to Nelson Mandela in prison. The time was ripe for finding common ground. Mandela was getting older, and it would be a disaster if he died in prison.
The international sanctions and endless mass protests were economically crippling. De Klerk knew one way to end them. On February 11, 1990, he gave the official order, and Nelson Mandela was released. “There was this absolutely intoxicating atmosphere,” one reporter recalled.
“We saw Nelson Mandela with his fist in the air. I burst into tears. It was an absolutely overwhelming moment. And he’s walking to freedom, and we’re thinking, this is what we fought for, and victory is now in sight.
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But Mandela’s freedom didn’t mean the white minority government was ready to give up power. The struggle wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. The ANC, no longer outlawed, sat down with de Klerk’s National Party to hammer out how to hold elections.
“We are ready for honorable compromise without surrendering our principles,” said an ANC representative. But black groups opposed to Mandela and the ANC threatened the delicate negotiations. Chief Buthelezi in Natal had been cooperating with the apartheid government in exchange for some autonomy. Now he saw his power threatened.
His followers launched violent attacks on ANC supporters. “It was a horrific scene,” reported one witness. “There were bodies everywhere, mowed down at random. Some shot, others hacked to death.
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The National Party government seemed to be quietly encouraging such black-on-black violence, hoping to exploit divisions for political gain. “On one level you have the negotiation process,” one analyst said, “but at the same time you have the state conducting massive secret operations to try and undermine the ANC within townships. ”
Thousands were murdered, and the violence continued unchecked. The massacre of commuters on a train to Soweto in September killed 26 people and injured over 100.
It appeared to be a professionally planned attack. For many, it was a turning point, including for Mandela. Those with him at the negotiations witnessed his fury. “He is looking down at de Klerk who is still seated,” one witness recalled, “and he is saying to him, ‘You have betrayed me.
You have betrayed us. You have been fueling the black-on-black violence. I do not trust you, and I will not trust you again. ‘ I had never seen Mandela angry until that point, and it was a sight to behold.
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Unrest continued. The promise of elections hung in the balance when, on April 10, a white racist assassinated the highly regarded ANC leader Chris Hani outside his home. Public anger ripped through the country. Many had lost patience with seemingly endless negotiations.
Would the country descend into civil war? Nelson Mandela stepped forward to try to bring the country together. “We want you to remember that as members of a government in waiting,” he said, “you have the responsibility to behave orderly and with dignity. ”
The ANC insisted the government set a firm date for free elections.
“If the negotiation process does not move forward purposefully and quickly,” they warned, “it will result in chaos. ”
Finally, the government committed to elections the following year, in 1994. Supporters of the ANC celebrated, but now the white minority launched protests. They were determined to put off an election they believed would end their way of life.
On June 25, 1993, 2,000 white supremacists demonstrated outside the Kempton Park World Trade Center near Johannesburg, where negotiations were taking place. The AWB, led by Eugene Terre’Blanche, stormed the negotiations chamber. “We’re not going to accept the negotiations of one man, one vote,” they shouted. South Africa remained on a knife’s edge.
Would the country be able to pull itself out of chaos to hold its first free election? Throughout the run-up, both parties continued to compromise to avoid civil war. “De Klerk’s skill was that he was able to bring his people with him,” one observer noted. “There’s a hardcore of the white population not happy about this, but I think the majority may have reservations, yet in a sense trust the National Party.
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After four years of negotiating and bloodshed, South Africa finally readied itself to hold democratic elections for the first time in its history. “There was this mix of euphoria, excitement, and among some whites, trepidation that there might be total chaos on election day,” one reporter recalled. On April 26, 1994, huge lines formed at the polling stations. For the very first time, all South Africans were voting.
The crowds were breathtaking and, to everyone’s relief, utterly peaceful. Three generations of South Africans had suffered, fought, and died for this moment. Before it was all over, 19 million South Africans, white and black, had cast their votes. The ANC won 62% of the vote, allowing it to form a government.
The evil system of apartheid was utterly dismantled. The National Assembly’s first act was to appoint Nelson Mandela as president of this new South Africa. “It was a new dawn in a sense,” said one South African. “This was a moment in which we could look forward to not being humiliated.
I would no longer be a second-class citizen. ”
“Never again,” Mandela declared, “shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another. ”
But the struggle wasn’t over. There’s a phrase in southern Africa: “Aluta continua,” the struggle continues.
Twenty-five years after apartheid fell, the shacks still stand. It’s how millions of black South Africans live. “South Africa is often described as the protest capital of the world,” one activist noted. “I’ve never seen a group of people more willing to get out and advocate for their rights.
That collective work is what led to the end of apartheid, and I think that’s what will lead to a better South Africa going forward. ”
“They’ve managed to dismantle political apartheid,” said another. “The next step is economic apartheid, and from there, social apartheid will follow. ”
Nelson Mandela once said, “We may have won freedom now, but if there is still injustice, I would encourage people to continue to keep fighting on.
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“When I look at the Black Lives Matter protests,” one observer reflected, “I see a similar movement where people have for generations been treated as second-class citizens for reasons as absurd as their race. The anti-apartheid struggle was victorious, so other struggles for human rights can be victorious. Battles are never won by people giving you the victory. Sometimes you have to fight for that victory and take it yourself.
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