A Decade of Enforced Disappearances in Bangladesh. Get updates on human rights issues from around the globe. Join our movement today. Help us continue to fight human rights abuses. Please give now to support our work. Human Rights Watch. Donate Now. Take Action. By , 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 provided the basic framework for apartheid by classifying all South Africans by race, including Bantu black Africans , Coloured mixed race and white. A fourth category, Asian meaning Indian and Pakistani was later added. In some cases, the legislation split families; parents could be classified as white, while their children were classified as colored. 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.
Separating black South Africans from each other enabled the government to claim there was no black majority and reduced the possibility that blacks would unify into one nationalist organization. From to , more than 3.
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 , during which attendees burned their pass books. The group had arrived at the police station without passes, inviting arrest as an act of resistance.
At least 67 blacks were killed and more than wounded. Sharpesville convinced many anti-apartheid leaders that they could not achieve their objectives by peaceful means, and both the PAC and ANC established military wings, neither of which ever posed a serious military threat to the state.
By , most resistance leaders had been captured and sentenced to long prison terms or executed. In , when thousands of black children in Soweto, a black township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the Afrikaans language requirement for black African students, the police opened fire with tear gas and bullets. The protests and government crackdowns that followed, combined with a national economic recession, drew more international attention to South Africa and shattered all illusions that apartheid had brought peace or prosperity to the nation.
In , 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 Botha was pressured to step aside in favor of F. 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.
By , when Njiokiktjien was interning at the Star Newspaper in Johannesburg, that idea for her book blossomed. 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 , 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 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.
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. 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 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. In some ways, Tshabalala says, post-apartheid is still a struggle. My parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, they suffered.
And the consequences are still coming to me as a young black South African. 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. 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. Supreme Court ruling. I believe they will create a positive future for South Africa. All rights reserved.
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