On June 16th 1976, over 10,000 student protesters flooded the streets of Soweto, South Africa. For 28 years, South Africans had been living under Apartheid, a strict policy of segregation that barred the country’s Black majority from skilled, high-paying jobs, quality education, and much more. And in 1974, the government announced schools would be forced to teach many subjects in Afrikaans— a language used primarily by the nation’s white ruling elites.
But when protesters rose up to fight this injustice, the government's response was swift. Armed police officers turned their weapons onto the crowd, and over the following days they killed over 150 students, including victims as young as 13. Even before Apartheid, South Africa’s long history of racial violence had already cost countless Black Africans their jobs, homes, and lives.
Beginning in the 1600s, first Dutch and later British settlers colonized the nation, displacing local populations from their ancestral lands. Over the following centuries, Black Africans were segregated onto so-called native reserves; and by the 20th century, that meant 70% of the population was living on roughly 13% of the country’s land. Deprived of their traditional livelihoods and seeking to escape these overpopulated regions, Black Africans began migrating to white-controlled areas.
There, they worked for low wages on white-owned farms and mines, alongside the descendants of enslaved and indentured workers from across Africa and Asia. By 1948, this exploited labor force was a primary driver of South Africa’s booming economy. But economists argued that continued growth required a stable, educated, and urbanized African labor force.
The ruling United Party accepted this logic, but the rival National Party argued such a workforce would threaten the white ruling class. Naming their campaign Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for “separateness,” the National Party won the 1948 elections. And once in power, they began forcibly relocating millions of Africans back to the reserves.
Under Apartheid, Black workers were considered temporary visitors in white areas. They were restricted to specific zones, and their trade unions received no official recognition. The government also abolished mixed race universities, outlawed mixed marriages, segregated recreational spaces, and purged the non-white population from the voters’ roll.
Within parliament at this time, Apartheid only had a small group of outspoken opponents. But outside the government, three political groups were leading a popular resistance against the regime: the Communist Party, which was then legally banned in 1950, their allies in the African National Congress, and later, a splinter group called the Pan-Africanist Congress. Despite some ideological differences, all three groups worked to mobilize the masses against Apartheid by non-violent methods.
But the National Party wasn’t as restrained. On March 21st, 1960, policemen massacred demonstrators at a PAC rally, and within weeks, the ANC and PAC were outlawed. These events radicalized anti-Apartheid leaders, and in December of 1961, Nelson Mandela and other ANC and Communist Party activists established the resistance’s armed wing.
While the conflict grew increasingly violent, the 1960s saw consistent economic growth throughout South Africa. The National Party attributed this to the success of Apartheid, but it was actually due to further exploitation. Employers were illegally hiring Black laborers for positions affluent white workers didn’t want to fill.
And since this prosperity was flowing disproportionately to the ruling white minority, the government happily turned a blind eye. Meanwhile, the National Party leveraged global anti-communist sentiment to demonize its adversaries. In 1963, they tried Mandela and ten others for advancing communism and training recruits in guerrilla warfare.
Eight of the defendants were sentenced to life in prison, and many remaining anti-Apartheid leaders were forced into exile. Over the next decade, a generation of student activists rose up to continue the fight, led in part by Steve Biko and the South African Students Organization. Following the Soweto Massacre, student protesters spread nationwide.
But police violently smothered these demonstrations, killing over 600 protesters by early 1977. That same year, Biko was taken into police custody and killed in a brutal assault. In response to this violence, the international community finally called for an end to Apartheid, with some countries enacting trade embargoes against South Africa.
The state attempted to launch a reform process, creating separate parliaments for the country's white, non-white, and Indian populations. But the exclusion of the African majority led to more nationwide rioting. So when F.
W. de Klerk, a long-time supporter of Apartheid, came to power in 1989, he concluded the only way to ensure white survival was to end the policy. On February 2nd, 1990, de Klerk shocked the world by unbanning the ANC, releasing Mandela, and calling for constitutional negotiations.
Four years later, in the nation’s inaugural all-inclusive elections, Mandela became South Africa’s first Black president. But today, the national trauma of Apartheid can still be keenly felt, and many wounds from this period have yet to fully heal.
