This Day in History: 11/06/1962 - U.N. Condemns Apartheid
On November 6, 1962, the United Nations General Assembly adopts a resolution condemning South Africa’s racist apartheid policies and calling on all its members to end economic and military relations with the country.
In effect from 1948 to 1993, apartheid, which comes from the Afrikaans word for “apartness,” was government-sanctioned racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against South Africa’s non-white majority. Among many injustices, Black South Africans were forced to live in segregated areas and couldn’t enter whites-only neighborhoods unless they had a special pass. Although white South Africans represented only a small fraction of the population, they held the vast majority of the country’s land and wealth.
Apartheid
Following the 1960 massacre of unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville near Johannesburg, South Africa, in which 69 Black people were killed and over 180 were injured, the international movement to end apartheid gained wide support. However, few Western powers or South Africa’s other main trading partners favored a full economic or military embargo against the country. Nonetheless, opposition to apartheid within the U.N. grew, and in 1973 a U.N. resolution labeled apartheid a “crime against humanity.” In 1974, South Africa was suspended from the General Assembly.
After decades of strikes, sanctions and increasingly violent demonstrations, many apartheid laws were repealed by 1990. Finally, in 1991, under President F.W. de Klerk, the South African government repealed all remaining apartheid laws and committed to writing a new constitution. In 1993, a multi-racial, multi-party transitional government was approved and, the next year, South Africa held its first fully free elections. Political activist Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison along with other anti-apartheid leaders after being convicted of treason, became South Africa’s new president.
In 1996, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established by the new government, began an investigation into the violence and human rights violations that took place under the apartheid system between 1960 and May 10, 1994 (the day Mandela was sworn in as president). The commission’s objective was not to punish people but to heal South Africa by dealing with its past in an open manner. People who committed crimes were allowed to confess and apply for amnesty.
Headed by 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the TRC listened to testimony from over 20,000 witnesses from all sides of the issue—victims and their families as well as perpetrators of violence. It released its report in 1998 and condemned all major political organizations—the apartheid government in addition to anti-apartheid forces such as the African National Congress—for contributing to the violence. Based on the TRC’s recommendations, the government began making reparation payments of approximately $4,000 (U.S.) to individual victims of violence in 2003.
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. The segregation began in 1948 after the National Party came to power. The party instituted policies of white supremacy, which empowered white South Africans, descendent's from Dutch and British settlers, while further disenfranchising black Africans.
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.
Racist fears and attitudes about “natives” colored white society. Many white women in South Africa learned how to use firearms for self-protection in the event of racial unrest in 1961, when South Africa became a republic.
Though apartheid was supposedly designed to allow different races to develop on their own, it forced black South Africans into poverty and hopelessness as they were restricted to certain areas. Children from the townships of Langa and Windermere seen here scavenged close to Cape Town, in February 1955.
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 racists laws, called the Defiance Campaign. Black workers boycotted white businesses, went on strike, and staged non-violent protests.
In 1960, South African police killed 69 peaceful protesters in Sharpeville, sparking nationwide dissent and a wave of strikes. In response to the protests, the government declared a state of emergency but that still didn't stop them. 30,000 protestors march from Langa into Cape Town in South Africa to demand the release of black leaders, arrested after the Sharpeville massacre.
Although they continued, they were often met with police and state brutality. South African marines troops stopped this man in Nyanga, near Cape Town, in April 1960 as black protestors tried to march to Cape Town. The state of emergency cleared the way for even more apartheid laws to be put in place.
A subgroup of protesters, tired of what they saw as ineffective nonviolent protests, embraced 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.
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. In response, police massacred over 100 protesters and chaos broke out. Despite attempts to restrain the protests, they spread throughout South Africa. In response, exiled movement leaders recruited more and more people to resist.
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 February 1990, de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC and other opposition groups and released Mandela. In 1994, Mandela became president of South Africa 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
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