apartheid, (Afrikaans: “apartness”) policy that governed relations between South Africa’s white minority and nonwhite majority for much of the latter half of the 20th century, sanctioning racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against nonwhites. Although the legislation that formed the foundation of apartheid had been repealed by the early 1990s, the social and economic repercussions of the discriminatory policy persisted into the 21st century.

Apartheid legislation

Racial segregation, sanctioned by law, was widely practiced in South Africa before 1948. But when the National Party, led by Daniel F. Malan, gained office that year, it extended the policy and gave it the name apartheid. The implementation of apartheid, often called “separate development” since the 1960s, was made possible through the Population Registration Act of 1950, which classified all South Africans as either Bantu (all Black Africans), Coloured (those of mixed race), or white. A fourth category—Asian (Indian and Pakistani)—was later added. One of the other most significant acts in terms of forming the basis of the apartheid system was the Group Areas Act of 1950. It established residential and business sections in urban areas for each race, and members of other races were barred from living, operating businesses, or owning land in them—which led to thousands of Coloureds, Blacks, and Indians being removed from areas classified for white occupation. In practice, this act and two others in 1954 and 1955, which became known collectively as the Land Acts, completed a process that had begun with similar Land Acts adopted in 1913 and 1936: the end result was to set aside more than 80 percent of South Africa’s land for the white minority. To help enforce the segregation of the races and prevent Blacks from encroaching on white areas, the government strengthened the existing “pass” laws, which required nonwhites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas.

Other acts also led to physical separation of the races. Under the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, the government reestablished tribal organizations for Black Africans, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 8 (later expanded to 10 )African homelands, or Bantustans. The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 made every Black South African, irrespective of actual residence, a citizen of one of the Bantustans, which were organized on the basis of ethnic and linguistic groupings defined by white ethnographers. Blacks were stripped of their South African citizenship and thereby excluded from the South African body politic. The South African government manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Four of the Bantustans—Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei—were later granted independence as republics, though none was ever recognized by a foreign government, and the remaining Bantustans had varying degrees of self-government. Regardless of their independence or self-governing status, all the Bantustans remained dependent, both politically and economically, on South Africa. The dependence of the South African economy on nonwhite labour, though, made it difficult for the government to carry out this policy of separate development.

Although the government had the power to suppress virtually all criticism of its policies, there was always some opposition to apartheid within South Africa. Black African groups, with the support of some whites, held demonstrations and strikes, and there were many instances of violent protest and of sabotage. One of the first—and most violent—demonstrations against apartheid took place in Sharpeville on March 21, 1960; the police response to the protesters’ actions was to open fire, killing about 69 Black Africans and wounding many more. An attempt to enforce Afrikaans language requirements for Black African students led to the Soweto riots in 1976. Some white politicians called for the relaxation of the minor “petty apartheid” restrictions or for the establishment of racial equality.

Apartheid also received international censure. South Africa was forced to withdraw from the Commonwealth in 1961 when it became apparent that other member countries would not accept its racial policies. The United Nations General Assembly denounced apartheid in 1973; four years later the UN Security Council voted unanimously to impose a mandatory embargo on the export of arms to South Africa. In 1985 both the United Kingdom and the United States imposed selective economic sanctions on South Africa. In response to these and other pressures, the South African government abolished the “pass” laws in 1986, although Blacks were still prohibited from living in designated white areas and the police were granted broad emergency powers.

In a more fundamental shift of policy, however, the government of South African Pres. F.W. de Klerk in 1990–91 repealed most of the social legislation that provided the legal basis for apartheid, including the Population Registration Act. Systematic racial segregation remained deeply entrenched in South African society, though, and continued on a de facto basis. A new constitution that enfranchised Blacks and other racial groups was adopted in 1993 and took effect in 1994. All-race national elections, also in 1994, produced a coalition government with a Black majority led by antiapartheid activist Nelson Mandela, the country’s first Black president. These developments marked the end of legislated apartheid but not the end of its entrenched social and economic effects.

African National Congress (ANC), South African political party and Black nationalist organization. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, it had as its main goal the maintenance of voting rights for Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and Black Africans in Cape Province. It was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. From the 1940s it spearheaded the fight to eliminate apartheid, the official South African policy of racial separation and discrimination. The ANC was banned from 1960 to 1990 by the white South African government; during these three decades it operated underground and outside South African territory. The ban was lifted in 1990, and Nelson Mandela, the president of the ANC, was elected in 1994 to head South Africa’s first multiethnic government.

In the late 1920s the ANC’s leaders split over the issue of cooperation with the Communist Party (founded in 1921), and the ensuing victory of the conservatives left the party small and disorganized through the 1930s. In the 1940s, however, the ANC revived under younger leaders who pressed for a more militant stance against segregation in South Africa. The ANC Youth League, founded in 1944, attracted such figures as Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Mandela, who galvanized the movement and challenged the moderate leadership. Under the presidency of Albert Luthuli, the ANC after 1952 began sponsoring nonviolent protests, strikes, boycotts, and marches against the apartheid policies that had been introduced by the National Party government that came to power in 1948. Party membership grew rapidly. A campaign against the pass laws (Blacks were required to carry passes indicating their employment status) and other government policies culminated in the Defiance Campaign of 1952. In the process ANC leaders became a target of police harassment: in 1956 many of its leaders were arrested and charged with treason (known as the Treason Trial, 1956–59).

In 1960 the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), which had broken away from the ANC in 1959, organized massive demonstrations against the pass laws during which police killed 69 unarmed demonstrators at Sharpeville (south of Johannesburg). At this point the National Party banned, or outlawed, both the ANC and the PAC. Denied legal avenues for political change, the ANC first turned to sabotage and then began to organize outside of South Africa for guerrilla warfare. In 1961 an ANC military organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), with Mandela as its head, was formed to carry out acts of sabotage as part of its campaign against apartheid. Mandela and other ANC leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964 (the Rivonia Trial). Although the ANC’s campaign of guerrilla warfare was basically ineffective because of stringent South African internal security measures, surviving ANC cadres kept the organization alive in Tanzania and Zambia under Tambo’s leadership. The ANC began to revive inside South Africa toward the end of the 1970s, following the Soweto uprising in 1976, when the police and army killed more than 600 people, many of them children. About 1980 the banned black, green, and gold tricolour flag of the ANC began to be seen inside South Africa, and the country descended into virtual civil war during the 1980s.

The administration of F.W. de Klerk lifted the ban on the ANC in 1990, and its leaders were released from prison or allowed to return to South Africa and conduct peaceful political activities. Nelson Mandela, the most important of the ANC’s leaders, succeeded Oliver Tambo as president in 1991. Mandela led the ANC in negotiations (1992–93) with the government over transition to a government elected by universal suffrage. In April 1994 the party swept to power in the country’s first such election, winning more than 60 percent of the vote for seats in the new National Assembly. Mandela, who headed a government of national unity, was inaugurated as South Africa’s first Black president on May 10, 1994. After the withdrawal of the National Party from the government in 1996, the ANC entered into an alliance with its previous rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Mandela stepped down as ANC president in 1997, and in June 1999 his successor, Thabo Mbeki, became the second Black president of South Africa. The party celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2002 and continued its domination of South African politics.

Signs of dissent began to appear within the ANC leading up to the party’s 2007 national conference, where the next president of the ANC—and, most likely, the next president of the country—was to be selected. Although Mbeki was barred by South Africa’s constitution from serving a third term as president of the country, securing a third term as party president would have guaranteed him considerable influence in choosing the country’s next president in 2009. His bid for leadership of the party was challenged by Jacob Zuma, the former deputy president whom he had dismissed in 2005 amid charges of corruption; the next year Zuma also stood trial for an unrelated charge of rape. He was acquitted of rape in May 2006, and the corruption charges were dropped later that year. Despite repeated allegations of wrongdoing—which his supporters claimed were politically motivated—Zuma remained a popular figure within the ANC and, in what was one of the most contentious leadership battles in the party’s history, was selected over Mbeki in December 2007 to be party president.

The animosity between the two camps continued to escalate in the next year and came to a head in the fall. In September 2008, following an allegation by a High Court judge that there had been high-level political interference in Zuma’s prosecution on corruption charges, the Zuma-led ANC asked Mbeki to resign from the South African presidency. Mbeki did so, reluctantly. The request for Mbeki’s resignation angered part of the ANC membership base, and several high-ranking ANC officials resigned from their government positions in protest.

Another source of tension within the party was Zuma’s close ties to the South African Communist Party and to the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Although both organizations had long been allies of the ANC, there was growing concern among many ANC members that those groups were exerting too much influence on the ANC under Zuma’s leadership.

The discord in the ANC proved to be too great to overcome. High-ranking members and Mbeki supporters Mbhazima Shilowa, Mluleki George, and Mosiuoa Lekota broke away from the ANC and established a new party, Congress of the People (COPE). The new party, which pledged to reach out to minorities and women, was officially launched in December 2008 and attracted members from the ANC as well as other organizations. Despite the challenge from COPE and other parties, the ANC was victorious in the 2009 general election, finishing far ahead of its competitors, with almost 66 percent of the national vote. The party maintained control of all provinces except the Western Cape, which was won by the Democratic Alliance (DA).

As the ANC’s 2012 national conference grew near, signs of discontent within the party were evident, partly because of corruption scandals plaguing Zuma and the ANC-led government, as well as dissatisfaction with the general pace of progress being made in the country. Zuma, however, still appeared to have a majority of support. At the last minute he was challenged by Kgalema Motlanthe—the current deputy president of the party as well as of the country—for the party presidency, but Zuma handily defeated him.

In the 2014 elections the ANC’s status as the governing party was secured for another five years when the party won about 62 percent of the national vote. At the provincial level it remained the dominant party in all provinces except the Western Cape. The success of the party came even though its membership base had seen erosion from dissatisfaction with the performance of the ANC-led government and by other parties gaining in popularity. One such party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, was founded in 2013 by Julius Malema, the fiery former ANC Youth League leader who had been expelled from the ANC in 2012.

The ANC saw its worst performance yet in the 2016 municipal elections. It lost control of key urban areas and, for the first time since the ANC took power in 1994, won less than 60 percent of the total vote. The party’s loss of support was widely attributed to the electorate’s dissatisfaction with how the ANC-led governments at the municipal and national levels were handling the economy and delivery of services, as well as frustration with the persistent corruption and scandals associated with Zuma and the ANC.

Another closely fought battle for the party’s presidency played out at the ANC’s national conference in December 2017, with the polarization of Zuma’s supporters and critics at the fore. The two front-runner candidates were Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a physician, veteran politician, and former chairperson of the African Union Commission who also happened to be the president’s former wife, and Cyril Ramaphosa, a successful businessman and party stalwart who served as deputy president of both the ANC and the country. Dlamini-Zuma had the backing of Zuma and his supporters as well as party members drawn to her promise to tackle the racial inequality that still existed in the country. Ramaphosa, meanwhile, had the support of those believing that he would be the more business-friendly leader of the two as well as those who had been most vocal in criticizing the scandals that surrounded Zuma and thus supported Ramaphosa’s promise to fight corruption. Ramaphosa was narrowly elected party president.

Ramaphosa’s victory further weakened Zuma’s standing in the party, as did a December 2017 court ruling that held that the National Assembly had failed to fulfill its obligation to hold Zuma accountable for his actions as they pertained to the Nkandla scandal—which involved extensive upgrades made to Zuma’s home in Nkandla, ostensibly for security reasons, that were paid for by the state and the legal fallout from his initial disregard of a recommendation that he repay the government for a portion of the upgrades that were deemed unrelated to matters of security. Both events increased the likelihood that the ANC would pressure Zuma to step down as president prior to the 2019 elections in order to stem the damage to the party from the allegations of scandal and corruption that had swirled around him for so long. In early 2018 ANC officials engaged in several meetings and negotiation sessions regarding Zuma’s remaining time as president. The situation peaked on February 13, 2018, when the ANC announced that it had decided to recall Zuma from the presidency. The recall, however, did not legally compel Zuma to step down, so the party had to wait for him to offer his resignation. Zuma acquiesced, albeit somewhat defiantly, and offered his resignation the next day. He was succeeded as president of the country by Ramaphosa.

The 2019 elections were held on May 8. On the national stage, it was the party’s worst showing to date, a sign of the continuing dissatisfaction with the ANC-led government. Although the ANC still took a majority of the vote—about 58 percent—and secured a five-year term as president for Ramaphosa, it was the party’s smallest margin of victory since taking power in 1994. At the provincial level, the party was able to keep control of eight out of nine provinces it previously held, with the Western Cape once again going to the DA.

Apartheid, the Afrikaans name given by the white-ruled South Africa's Nationalist Party in 1948 to the country's harsh, institutionalized system of racial segregation, came to an end in the early 1990s in a series of steps that led to the formation of a democratic government in 1994. Years of violent internal protest, weakening white commitment, international economic and cultural sanctions, economic struggles, and the end of the Cold War brought down white minority rule in Pretoria. U.S. policy toward the regime underwent a gradual but complete transformation that played an important conflicting role in Apartheid's initial survival and eventual downfall.

Although many of the segregationist policies dated back to the early decades of the twentieth century, it was the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948 that marked the beginning of legalized racism's harshest features called Apartheid. The Cold War then was in its early stages. U.S. President Harry Truman's foremost foreign policy goal was to limit Soviet expansion. Despite supporting a domestic civil rights agenda to further the rights of black people in the United States, the Truman Administration chose not to protest the anti-communist South African government's system of Apartheid in an effort to maintain an ally against the Soviet Union in southern Africa. This set the stage for successive administrations to quietly support the Apartheid regime as a stalwart ally against the spread of communism.

Inside South Africa, riots, boycotts, and protests by black South Africans against white rule had occurred since the inception of independent white rule in 1910. Opposition intensified when the Nationalist Party, assuming power in 1948, effectively blocked all legal and non-violent means of political protest by non-whites. The African National Congress (ANC) and its offshoot, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), both of which envisioned a vastly different form of government based on majority rule, were outlawed in 1960 and many of its leaders imprisoned. The most famous prisoner was a leader of the ANC, Nelson Mandela, who had become a symbol of the anti-Apartheid struggle. While Mandela and many political prisoners remained incarcerated in South Africa, other anti-Apartheid leaders fled South Africa and set up headquarters in a succession of supportive, independent African countries, including Guinea, Tanzania, Zambia, and neighboring Mozambique where they continued the fight to end Apartheid. It was not until the 1980s, however, that this turmoil effectively cost the South African state significant losses in revenue, security, and international reputation.

The international community had begun to take notice of the brutality of the Apartheid regime after white South African police opened fire on unarmed black protesters in the town of Sharpeville in 1960, killing 69 people and wounding 186 others. The United Nations led the call for sanctions against the South African Government. Fearful of losing friends in Africa as de-colonization transformed the continent, powerful members of the Security Council, including Great Britain, France, and the United States, succeeded in watering down the proposals. However, by the late 1970s, grassroots movements in Europe and the United States succeeded in pressuring their governments into imposing economic and cultural sanctions on Pretoria. After the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, many large multinational companies withdrew from South Africa. By the late 1980s, the South African economy was struggling with the effects of the internal and external boycotts as well as the burden of its military commitment in occupying Namibia.

Defenders of the Apartheid regime, both inside and outside South Africa, had promoted it as a bulwark against communism. However, the end of the Cold War rendered this argument obsolete. South Africa had illegally occupied neighboring Namibia at the end of World War II, and since the mid-1970s, Pretoria had used it as a base to fight the communist party in Angola. The United States had even supported the South African Defense Force's efforts in Angola. In the 1980s, hard-line anti-communists in Washington continued to promote relations with the Apartheid government despite economic sanctions levied by the U.S. Congress. However, the relaxation of Cold War tensions led to negotiations to settle the Cold War conflict in Angola. Pretoria's economic struggles gave the Apartheid leaders strong incentive to participate. When South Africa reached a multilateral agreement in 1988 to end its occupation of Namibia in return for a Cuban withdrawal from Angola, even the most ardent anti-communists in the United States lost their justification for support of the Apartheid regime.

The effects of the internal unrest and international condemnation led to dramatic changes beginning in 1989. South African Prime Minister P.W. Botha resigned after it became clear that he had lost the faith of the ruling National Party (NP) for his failure to bring order to the country. His successor, F W de Klerk, in a move that surprised observers, announced in his opening address to Parliament in February 1990 that he was lifting the ban on the ANC and other black liberation parties, allowing freedom of the press, and releasing political prisoners. The country waited in anticipation for the release of Nelson Mandela who walked out of prison after 27 years on February 11, 1990.

The impact of Mandela's release reverberated throughout South Africa and the world. After speaking to throngs of supporters in Cape Town where he pledged to continue the struggle, but advocated peaceful change, Mandela took his message to the international media. He embarked on a world tour culminating in a visit to the United States where he spoke before a joint session of Congress.

After Prime Minister de Klerk agreed to democratic elections for the country, the United States lifted sanctions and increased foreign aid, and many of the U.S. companies who disinvested in the 1980s returned with new investments and joint ventures. In April 1994, Nelson Mandela was elected as South Africa's first black president.