The term apartheid refers to a racial policy implemented in South Africa. Under this regime, the white minority, the only ones with the right to vote, held all political power and economic in the country, while the immense black majority was left with the obligation to strictly comply with the legislation. separatist.
The racial segregation policy was made official in 1948, with the arrival of the New National Party (NNP) to power. Apartheid did not allow blacks access to the polls and prohibited them from acquiring land for the most part. of the country, forcing them to live in segregated residential areas, a kind of confinement geographical. Marriages and sexual relations between people of different ethnicities were also prohibited.
Opposition to apartheid began most intensely in the 1950s, when the African National Congress (ANC), a black organization created in 1912, launched civil disobedience. In 1960, police killed 67 blacks participating in a demonstration. The Sharpeville Massacre, as it became known, provoked protests in different parts of the world. As a result, the CNA was outlawed and its leader, Nelson Mandela, was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life in prison.
Nelson Mandela
With the end of the Portuguese empire in Africa (1975) and the fall of the white minority government in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe (1980), white rule in South Africa went into crisis. These facts intensified popular demonstrations against apartheid. The United Nations (UN) tried to end the policy practiced in the country. President Piter Botha promoted reforms but kept the main aspects of the racist regime.
With the inauguration of Frederick de Klerk as president in 1989, several changes occurred. In 1990, Mandela was released and the ANC regained its legal status. Klerk repealed the racial laws and started a dialogue with the ANC. His policy was legitimized by a white-only referendum in 1992, in which 69% of (white) voters voted to end apartheid.
Klerk and Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. In April 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa in the country's first multiracial elections.
Parliament approved the Land Rights Law, restoring properties to black families affected by the 1913 law, which allocated 87% of the territory to the white minority.
The 1999 parliamentary elections were won by Nelson Mandela's nominated candidate Thabo Mbeki, ruling out any attempt to return to a segregationist policy in the country.
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*Image credits: nephthali / shutterstock
By Wagner de Cerqueira and Francisco
Graduated in Geography
