R1.6 Developments in South Africa (1867–2020)

Between 1867 and 2020 South Africa changed from a collection of British colonies, Boer republics and independent African kingdoms into an industrial state ruled by a white minority, and then into a constitutional democracy. Its history shows how economic development, colonial conquest and racial ideology combined to create one of the most systematic forms of racial rule of the twentieth century, and how that system was resisted and dismantled.

The timeline of South Africa from 1867 to 2020 divides the period into five phases. Resistance and international opposition do not fit a single phase: both ran through the whole apartheid era and are treated as themes of their own.

South Africa before the minerals, c. 1867

In the 1860s the region that became South Africa was divided. Britain ruled two colonies, the Cape Colony and Natal. Inland lay two independent republics founded by Boers (Dutch-speaking farmers of mainly Dutch, German and French Huguenot descent, later called Afrikaners): the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, usually called the Transvaal. Many Boers had left the Cape in the Great Trek of the 1830s and 1840s to escape British rule. Powerful African kingdoms, among them the Zulu, Pedi, Sotho and Swazi, still held much of the land.

The economy was mainly agricultural: wool, wine and sugar in the colonies, cattle and subsistence farming in the republics and the African kingdoms. Britain was interested in the region chiefly because the Cape sea route led to India. Britain claimed paramountcy (supreme authority) over the whole region, but it was unwilling to pay for governing the interior.

The Mineral Revolution, 1867–1899

The Mineral Revolution is the name historians give to the economic and social transformation that followed the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886. Within thirty years it made South Africa the world’s largest producer of both, and changed every aspect of life in the region.

Diamonds at Kimberley

In 1867 a child found a diamond near Hopetown on the Orange River; it was identified as a 21-carat stone and named the "Eureka". In 1869 a much larger stone, the "Star of South Africa", was found. By 1871 tens of thousands of diggers had rushed to the area around a hill called Colesberg Kopje, which became the Big Hole of Kimberley. The land was claimed by the Orange Free State and by the Griqua leader Nicolaas Waterboer. In 1871 Britain annexed the diamond fields as Griqualand West, which angered the Boers and showed that Britain would act when the interior became valuable.

The engraving of the Kimberley diggings in 1872 shows the industry in its first phase, when thousands of small claims were worked by individual diggers. As the pit deepened, the claims became too expensive to work alone: shafts collapsed, water flooded the workings and machinery was needed. Ownership was concentrated into companies, and in 1888 Cecil Rhodes, backed by the financier Alfred Beit and the Rothschild bank, merged the mines into De Beers Consolidated Mines, which controlled almost all South African diamond production.

Gold on the Witwatersrand

In 1886 gold was found on the Witwatersrand ("ridge of white waters") in the Transvaal. Johannesburg was laid out the same year and grew faster than any town in Africa: a census of 1896 counted about 100,000 people. The Witwatersrand held the largest gold deposits in the world, but the ore was low-grade and lay deep underground. Deep-level mining needed huge investments of capital, heavy machinery and very large numbers of workers.

The mining companies were therefore large and closely linked to European banks. Their owners, men such as Rhodes, Beit, Julius Wernher and J. B. Robinson, became known as the Randlords. In 1889 they formed the Chamber of Mines to act together on wages, labour recruitment and relations with the Transvaal government. Because the price of gold was fixed on the world market, the mines could not raise prices to cover costs; profits depended on keeping costs, above all wages, as low as possible.

Social and economic effects

Mining transformed the economy. Railways were built from the Cape and Natal ports to Kimberley and then to Johannesburg; the line from Delagoa Bay in Portuguese Mozambique gave the Transvaal its own route to the sea in 1895. Farmers found new markets for food, banks and engineering firms grew, and foreign investment, mostly British, poured in. By the late 1890s the Transvaal produced over a quarter of the world’s gold, and its wealth outweighed that of the Cape.

The diagram of the consequences of the Mineral Revolution groups them into economic, labour and political effects. The labour system matters most for the later history of South Africa, because it set patterns of control that segregation and apartheid extended to the whole country.

African migration and the labour system

The mines needed hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers, and most came from African societies. At first many men came willingly to earn cash to buy guns, cattle or ploughs, and then returned home. The mine owners wanted a larger, cheaper and more reliable supply, and the colonial states helped them to get it.

• Taxes. Hut taxes and poll taxes had to be paid in cash, forcing men into wage labour. The Glen Grey Act of 1894 in the Cape, passed while Rhodes was prime minister, introduced a labour tax on men who had not worked outside their district and limited African landholding to individual plots, so that younger sons had to seek work.

• Passes. Pass laws obliged African men to carry documents showing who employed them and where they could be. The Transvaal introduced a pass law for the mining districts in 1895, drafted with the Chamber of Mines.

• Compounds. From 1885 the Kimberley companies housed African workers in closed compounds for the length of their contracts, officially to prevent diamond theft. Workers were searched on leaving; the compounds also controlled workers and kept them from organising.

• Recruitment. The Chamber of Mines set up central recruiting organisations, the Rand Native Labour Association (1896) and its successor the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (1900), which brought in workers from Mozambique and elsewhere and cut out competition between mines that would have pushed wages up.

• The colour bar. Skilled and supervisory jobs were reserved for white workers, many of them immigrants from Britain, who were paid many times more than African miners.

The result was a system of migrant labour in which African men worked on contracts of six to eighteen months, lived in single-sex compounds and returned to rural homes that were increasingly unable to feed their families. The Chamber of Mines cut African wages in 1897, and the economist Francis Wilson later calculated that the real wages of Black gold miners were no higher in 1969 than in 1911. A colour bar divided white skilled workers from Black unskilled workers.

The conquest of the African kingdoms

The mineral discoveries made control of African land and labour more valuable, and the period 1867–1899 saw the final conquest of the independent African kingdoms. The Xhosa were defeated in the Ninth Frontier War (1877–1878). The Zulu kingdom was invaded by Britain in 1879; after a Zulu victory at Isandlwana in January, Britain defeated the army of King Cetshwayo at Ulundi in July and broke up the kingdom. The Pedi under Sekhukhune were conquered later in 1879, and the Sotho resisted Cape attempts to disarm them in the Gun War of 1880–1881, after which Britain took Basutoland back under direct imperial rule in 1884. The conquests of this period are treated in the study of European imperialism in Africa; for South Africa their main effect was that African societies lost land and independence and became reserves of labour for the mines and farms.

The beginnings of segregation

Historians see the mining towns as one of the origins of segregation. Compounds and passes separated African workers from the rest of the population; urban "locations" housed Africans outside the white towns; and the colour bar kept the best jobs for whites. In the Cape, where property-owning men of any race could vote, the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892 raised the property qualification and added a literacy test, reducing the number of new African voters.

Uitlanders, Kruger and Boer nationalism

The gold rush brought tens of thousands of white immigrants, mostly British, into the Transvaal. The Boers called them uitlanders ("outsiders"). By the mid-1890s they may have outnumbered Boer men in the republic, though contemporary estimates were disputed. The Transvaal president, Paul Kruger, a veteran of the Great Trek, feared that if they were given the vote the republic would fall under British control. In 1890 the residence qualification for the full franchise was raised to fourteen years.

The uitlanders and the mine owners had other grievances. Kruger’s government sold monopolies (concessions) to raise revenue: the dynamite concession made the mines pay high prices for explosives, and the Netherlands railway company charged high tariffs. Mine owners complained that the government was corrupt and inefficient and failed to enforce the pass laws or stop the sale of liquor to African workers. Kruger’s government, for its part, depended on taxing the mines to fund a modern state.

The mineral discoveries also strengthened Afrikaner nationalism. The British annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 provoked the First Anglo-Boer War (also called the Transvaal War) of 1880–1881, in which the Boers defeated British forces at Majuba Hill on 27 February 1881. The Pretoria Convention (1881) and the London Convention (1884) restored the Transvaal’s self-government, although Britain kept control of its foreign treaties. At the same time a language movement, the Genootskap van Regte Afrikaners (Society of True Afrikaners, 1875), promoted Afrikaans as a written language, and the Afrikaner Bond (1880) organised Afrikaner farmers politically in the Cape.

The causes of the South African War, 1895–1899

The South African War of 1899–1902 (also called the Second Anglo-Boer War or the Boer War) was fought between the British Empire and the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The name "South African War" is now preferred by many historians because Black South Africans also fought, worked and died in it.

The Jameson Raid, 1895–1896

By the mid-1890s Cecil Rhodes, prime minister of the Cape and head of the British South Africa Company, wanted to bring the Transvaal into a British-led South Africa. He planned an uitlander uprising in Johannesburg, to be supported by an armed force from Bechuanaland under his associate Dr Leander Starr Jameson. The uprising never happened, but Jameson invaded anyway with about 600 men on 29 December 1895 and was forced to surrender on 2 January 1896.

The Jameson Raid had large consequences. Rhodes was forced to resign. The German emperor, Wilhelm II, sent Kruger a telegram congratulating him, which alarmed Britain because it suggested German interest in the Transvaal. Above all, the raid convinced many Afrikaners, including those in the Cape and the Orange Free State, that Britain intended to destroy the republics. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State made a military alliance in 1897, and the Transvaal bought modern German rifles and artillery.

Milner, Chamberlain and the franchise

In 1897 Chamberlain appointed Sir Alfred Milner as High Commissioner for South Africa and governor of the Cape. Milner believed in British imperial unity and thought that a confrontation with the Transvaal was necessary to secure British supremacy in the region. He chose the uitlanders’ lack of political rights as the issue on which to press Kruger, because it could win support in Britain. In a despatch to Chamberlain, intended for publication, he wrote:

The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances, and calling vainly to Her Majesty’s Government for redress, does steadily undermine the influence and reputation of Great Britain, and the respect for the British Government within the Queen’s dominions.

Sir Alfred Milner, despatch to Joseph Chamberlain (the "helots despatch"), 4 May 1899, reproduced in W. Basil Worsfold, Lord Milner’s Work in South Africa (1906). The helots were the unfree labourers of ancient Sparta, so the comparison deliberately exaggerated the position of the uitlanders, many of whom were prosperous. Milner wrote to build public support for pressure on the Transvaal; the source shows how he framed the conflict as a question of British prestige and rights, not of gold.

At the Bloemfontein Conference (31 May – 5 June 1899) Milner demanded the vote for uitlanders after five years’ residence. Kruger offered seven years, with conditions, and Milner broke off the talks. Over the summer the Transvaal made further offers, but Britain sent troops to South Africa and added new demands. On 9 October 1899 Kruger issued an ultimatum demanding that British troops be withdrawn from the borders. Britain rejected it, and the war began on 11 October 1899.

Why did war break out?

The diagram of the causes of the war groups them into long-term, economic and short-term causes. The central debate is about how far the war was fought for gold.

• Economic interpretation. Gold had made the Transvaal the economic centre of southern Africa. The mine owners wanted a government that would supply cheap labour, end the concessions and run the state efficiently. The Liberal journalist J. A. Hobson, in The War in South Africa (1900), argued that a small group of international financiers had pushed Britain into war for their own profit.

• Strategic and political interpretation. Britain feared that a rich, independent Transvaal, perhaps allied with Germany, would draw the Cape’s Afrikaners into a United States of South Africa outside the empire, threatening the Cape route and British paramountcy. In this view gold mattered because it shifted the balance of power, not because Britain went to war on behalf of the Randlords.

• The role of individuals. Milner pursued confrontation deliberately, and Chamberlain backed him. Kruger, for his part, saw any concession on the franchise as the end of Boer independence and issued the ultimatum when he judged war inevitable.

Historians have weighed these explanations differently. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido ("Lord Milner and the South African State", 1979) argue that Milner aimed to create a modern state that would serve the needs of the gold industry, so economic and political aims cannot be separated. Iain R. Smith (The Origins of the South African War, 1899–1902, 1996) argues that the British government went to war to assert its supremacy in southern Africa, and that the mine owners were divided and did not direct policy. Thomas Pakenham (The Boer War, 1979) stresses the close links between Milner and some of the Randlords.

The war, 1899–1902: from Boer offensive to guerrilla war

At the start of the war the two republics put about 35,000 to 40,000 men into the field in their commandos (mounted citizen militia units), against about 27,000 British troops in South Africa. They struck first, invading Natal and the northern Cape and besieging Mafeking, Kimberley and Ladysmith. In "Black Week" (10–15 December 1899) British forces were defeated at Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso, and in January 1900 at Spion Kop.

The vertical timeline of the war shows the three phases. Britain responded to the early defeats by sending Lord Roberts with Lord Kitchener as his chief of staff and a far larger army; in all about 450,000 British and imperial troops served, including volunteers from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Roberts relieved Kimberley in February 1900 and forced the surrender of about 4,000 Boers under General Piet Cronjé at Paardeberg on 27 February. Bloemfontein fell in March, Mafeking was relieved in May and Pretoria was taken on 5 June 1900. Britain annexed both republics, and Kruger left for Europe.

The guerrilla war and the concentration camps

The capture of the capitals did not end the war. Boer commandos under leaders such as Christiaan de Wet, Koos de la Rey, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts turned to guerrilla warfare, raiding railways, supply lines and isolated garrisons and relying on farms for food, horses and information. Kitchener, commander from November 1900, answered with three methods:

• Blockhouses. About 8,000 small forts linked by barbed wire divided the countryside into sections that columns could sweep.

• Scorched earth. British troops burned about 30,000 Boer farms, destroyed crops and killed or seized livestock so that commandos could not live off the land.

• Concentration camps. Boer women, children and older men from the cleared areas were moved into camps, as were Black Africans living on Boer farms, who were held in separate camps and often made to work for the army.

Conditions in the concentration camps were very poor: tents were overcrowded, rations were low (and at first lower for families of men still fighting), and measles, typhoid and dysentery spread quickly. The British humanitarian Emily Hobhouse visited camps in the Orange River Colony in early 1901 and published a report in June 1901 that caused outrage in Britain. The Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman called Kitchener’s methods "methods of barbarism". The government sent a committee of women under Millicent Fawcett, which confirmed many of Hobhouse’s findings; death rates fell from early 1902 as its recommendations on food, water and medical care were applied.

The bar chart of deaths shows how the war fell on civilians. About 26,000 to 28,000 Boer civilians died in the camps, most of them children: more than twice as many as Boer fighters killed in the war. The camps for Black Africans, which held about 115,000 people, received less attention at the time and less food; at least 14,000 deaths were recorded there, and historians such as Stowell Kessler estimate the true figure at over 20,000.

Black South Africans in the war

Both sides called it a "white man’s war" and promised not to arm Africans, but neither kept to this fully. Bill Nasson (The South African War, 1899–1902, 1999) and Peter Warwick (Black People and the South African War, 1983) show that tens of thousands of Africans served the British as scouts, guards, wagon drivers and labourers, and that the British armed perhaps 10,000 or more. The Boers used African servants (agterryers) on commando. In the besieged town of Mafeking, the court interpreter Sol Plaatje kept a diary of the siege, and Africans defended the town, while some starved because food was given first to white residents. Many Africans hoped that a British victory would bring them the rights enjoyed by Black voters in the Cape.

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The impact of the war, 1902–1910

The Treaty of Vereeniging, 1902

By 1902 the commandos were exhausted and their families were suffering in the camps. Boer leaders met at Vereeniging, and the peace was signed in Pretoria on 31 May 1902. Under the Treaty of Vereeniging the Boers accepted British sovereignty. In return Britain promised self-government in the future, gave £3 million towards rebuilding farms, allowed Dutch in schools and courts, and agreed not to punish most fighters. Article 8 dealt with African political rights.

The question of granting the franchise to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.

Treaty of Vereeniging, Article 8, 31 May 1902. An earlier draft had said that the franchise would not be given to Africans until after self-government, which implied that it would be given then; the final wording left the decision to the future white electorates of the two colonies. The clause shows that Britain, to win the peace with the Boers, gave up the idea of extending the Cape’s non-racial franchise to the north.

Reconstruction under Milner

Milner governed the new Transvaal and Orange River Colonies until 1905 with a group of young Oxford-educated officials known as his "Kindergarten". His aims were to restore the gold industry quickly and to make South Africa British by encouraging British immigration and teaching in English (anglicisation). To solve a shortage of African labour after the war, the mines brought in about 63,000 indentured Chinese workers between 1904 and 1910, a policy that was unpopular both with white workers in South Africa and with voters in Britain.

Anglicisation failed. Few British settlers came, and Afrikaners organised to defend their language and political rights. In 1905 Louis Botha and Jan Smuts founded Het Volk ("The People") in the Transvaal. The Liberal government elected in Britain in 1906 granted self-government to the Transvaal (1906) and the Orange River Colony (1907), and Het Volk won the first Transvaal election in 1907 with Botha as prime minister. Within five years of their defeat, Boer generals governed both former republics.

The Union of South Africa, 1910

A National Convention of white delegates from the four colonies met in 1908–1909 and drew up a constitution, which the British parliament passed as the South Africa Act of 1909. The Union of South Africa came into being on 31 May 1910, eight years to the day after Vereeniging, as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire with Louis Botha as prime minister.

Only white men could sit in the Union parliament. The Cape kept its qualified non-racial franchise for men, protected by an "entrenched clause" that needed a two-thirds majority of both houses to change, but Africans and Coloureds in the other three provinces had no vote. African leaders sent a delegation to London in 1909 to protest, without success.

The table of the war’s results shows why historians often say that Britain won the war but the Afrikaners won the peace. Britain secured its imperial aims, while Afrikaner leaders gained political control of the new state. Black South Africans gained least: their hopes of British protection were disappointed, and this disappointment led directly to the formation of the South African Native National Congress in 1912.

The war and Afrikaner identity

The war, and the camps above all, became central to Afrikaner national memory. The Vrouemonument (Women’s Monument) in Bloemfontein, unveiled on 16 December 1913, commemorated the women and children who had died. Not all Afrikaners accepted Botha and Smuts’ policy of reconciliation with Britain: when South Africa joined the First World War on Britain’s side and invaded German South West Africa, some former Boer generals, including De Wet, led a rebellion (1914–1915), which the government crushed. In 1914 J. B. M. Hertzog founded the National Party to defend Afrikaner interests and the equal status of Dutch (later Afrikaans) with English.

Segregation in the Union, 1910–1948

Between Union in 1910 and the National Party victory of 1948, South Africa was governed by white parties that disagreed about relations with Britain and between English-speaking and Afrikaner whites, but broadly agreed on the segregation of Africans. The laws they passed created most of the structure that apartheid later extended and hardened.

Governments and parties

The table of governments shows that the main division in white politics was between those who accepted a place within the British Empire (Botha, Smuts) and Afrikaner nationalists who wanted full independence (Hertzog until the 1930s, then D. F. Malan). Hertzog’s two-stream policy held that English-speaking and Afrikaner whites should develop as two equal cultural communities, each with its own language and traditions, while Botha and Smuts hoped to merge them into a single white South African nation within the empire. When Hertzog merged his party with Smuts’ in the Fusion of 1934, Malan and his followers broke away to form the Purified National Party. In 1939 Hertzog wanted South Africa to stay neutral in the Second World War; parliament voted narrowly to join Britain, Smuts became prime minister, and Hertzog left the government.

The segregation laws

The most important law of the period was the Natives Land Act of 1913. It set aside "scheduled areas", about 7 per cent of the land, as reserves for African ownership, and made it illegal for Africans to buy or rent land outside them. It also outlawed sharecropping, under which many African families farmed white-owned land in return for a share of the crop, so that they had to become labour tenants or wage workers.

Sol Plaatje, journalist and first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress, travelled the countryside in 1913 recording the evictions that followed the Natives Land Act. His book about the Act opens with this sentence:

Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.

Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, written in 1914–1915 and published in London in 1916. Plaatje wrote while in Britain with a deputation of the SANNC asking the imperial government to overturn the Act, so the book was meant to persuade British readers; its accounts of evicted families are vivid and selective. Its value lies in the evidence it records of the Act’s immediate effects and in showing how educated African leaders still appealed to British justice.

The bar chart of land and population shows the scale of the inequality: Africans, about two-thirds of the population, were confined to a small fraction of the land. The reserves became overcrowded and eroded, and could not support the families living there. That made migrant labour a necessity, which suited the mines and white farmers.

Data: the Acts as passed by the Union parliament.

Why segregation? Smuts and Hertzog

White politicians gave different reasons for segregation. Smuts presented it, in lectures at Oxford in 1929, as a way of allowing Africans to develop separately in their own areas, under white guidance: a language of trusteeship that served white interests. Hertzog’s Pact government was driven by the "poor white problem": in 1932 the Carnegie Commission estimated that about 300,000 whites, mostly rural Afrikaners driven off the land, were "very poor", and the civilised labour policy protected them from competition with Black workers. Hertzog’s long campaign to remove Cape Africans from the common voters’ roll, achieved in 1936 with Smuts’ support, showed that both main white parties accepted that Africans should have no real political power.

Segregation also had economic causes. Mining and farming wanted cheap, controlled African labour, and the reserves and passes supplied it. White workers wanted protection from cheaper Black labour: in the Rand Revolt of 1922, white miners struck against a plan to let Africans do some semi-skilled work, and Smuts used troops, artillery and aircraft to defeat them; more than 150 people died. The revolt led to the defeat of Smuts in 1924 and the Pact government’s protection of white workers. How far segregation served capitalism and how far it expressed racial ideas is the central question in the liberal and radical interpretations of South African history.

African protest before 1948

African resistance to segregation took several forms. In Natal the Bambatha rebellion of 1906, against a new poll tax, was crushed with the loss of between 3,000 and 4,000 African lives. Most early protest, however, was led by mission-educated men who used petitions and delegations. On 8 January 1912 they founded the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) in Bloemfontein, with John Dube as president, Sol Plaatje as secretary and the lawyer Pixley ka Isaka Seme as a leading founder. It was renamed the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923. Deputations to London in 1914 and 1919 failed to win British support.

Other movements reached more people. The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), founded in 1919 by Clements Kadalie, a migrant from Nyasaland, claimed about 100,000 members by the late 1920s, many of them farm workers, before it split. At Bulhoek in the eastern Cape in 1921, police killed more than 160 members of a religious group, the Israelites, who refused to leave common land. Mohandas Gandhi, a lawyer in South Africa from 1893 to 1914, led Indian campaigns of passive resistance, which he called satyagraha, against pass and registration laws in the Transvaal and Natal (1906–1914): an early example of mass non-violent civil disobedience that later influenced the ANC.

From the mid-1930s protest grew more organised. The All African Convention (1935) opposed Hertzog’s 1936 laws. During the Second World War, inspired by the Atlantic Charter, the ANC under Dr Alfred Xuma issued Africans’ Claims in South Africa (1943), demanding full citizenship and the vote. In 1944 younger members, among them Anton Lembede, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, formed the ANC Youth League, which called for African nationalism and mass action. In August 1946 between 60,000 and 100,000 African miners went on strike for higher wages; police drove them back to work, and at least nine were killed.

The emergence of apartheid: the 1948 election

Apartheid (Afrikaans for "apartness" or "separateness") was the policy of the National Party governments that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The word was used by Afrikaner nationalist intellectuals from the 1930s and became the party’s slogan in the 1948 election.

Why the National Party won in 1948

The election of 26 May 1948 was won by the Herenigde (Reunited) National Party of D. F. Malan, a former minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, in alliance with the small Afrikaner Party. Most observers had expected Smuts, a world statesman who had helped draft the preamble of the UN Charter, to win.

Data: official results of the general election of 26 May 1948 (the three Native Representatives elected separately are not shown). The National Party and its ally won a majority of five seats with a minority of the votes, because rural constituencies, where Afrikaner support was strongest, were allowed to have fewer voters than urban ones.

Several factors explain the result:

• Fear of African urbanisation. Wartime industry drew hundreds of thousands of Africans to the cities, and squatter camps grew around Johannesburg. The Smuts government’s Fagan Report (1948) accepted that urbanisation could not be reversed. The National Party’s Sauer Report (1947) promised to reverse it through apartheid, and the party campaigned on swart gevaar ("black danger"), a fear of being swamped.

• Afrikaner nationalism. The centenary re-enactment of the Great Trek in 1938 had stirred Afrikaner national feeling, and the secret Broederbond (Brotherhood, founded 1918) linked nationalist churchmen, teachers and businessmen. Many Afrikaners had opposed fighting for Britain in the war.

• Economic grievances. Afrikaner workers and farmers resented wartime controls, shortages and competition from African labour; the National Party promised to protect them.

• The weaknesses of the United Party. Smuts was 78, focused on world affairs, and seen as unclear on racial policy. His deputy Jan Hofmeyr was attacked by nationalists as a liberal who would give Africans rights.

• The electoral system. The weighting of rural seats turned a minority of votes into a majority of seats.

The National Party’s programme of 1948 set out what apartheid was supposed to mean.

We can act in only one of two directions. Either we must follow the course of equality, which must eventually mean national suicide for the White race, or we must take the course of separation (apartheid) through which the character and the future of every race will be protected and safeguarded with full opportunities for development and self-maintenance in their own ideas …

National Party, statement on its colour policy, 29 March 1948, issued for the general election of that year (English translation in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook). As an election document it was written to win white, mainly Afrikaner, voters, and it presents apartheid as fair "separate development" and as a matter of survival for whites. The text shows how the party justified its policy; it says nothing of the inequality in land, wealth and power between the "separate" communities.

Petty and grand apartheid, 1948–1978

The leaders of apartheid

Apartheid was built by a succession of National Party prime ministers: D. F. Malan (1948–1954), J. G. Strijdom (1954–1958), Hendrik Verwoerd (1958–1966), B. J. Vorster (1966–1978) and P. W. Botha (prime minister 1978–1984, then State President until 1989). Verwoerd, a former professor of applied psychology and Minister of Native Affairs from 1950, was its chief architect: he turned a set of segregation laws into an ideology of "separate development". He was assassinated in parliament on 6 September 1966.

The diagram of the apartheid system shows how the laws depended on one another. Historians distinguish between petty apartheid and grand apartheid.

Petty apartheid: separation in daily life

• The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) banned marriages between whites and people of other races, and the Immorality Amendment Act (1950) extended the ban on sex across the colour line to all "non-whites".

• The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every person as White, Native (later Bantu or Black), Coloured or (from 1959) Asian/Indian. Classification boards used appearance, descent and "general acceptance"; families could be split when members were classified differently.

• The Group Areas Act (1950) gave each racial group its own residential and business areas. Mixed communities were destroyed: Sophiatown in Johannesburg was cleared from 1955, and District Six in Cape Town was declared a white area in 1966, after which about 60,000 people were removed to the Cape Flats.

• The Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act (1952), despite its name, replaced the various passes with a single reference book that all African men, and from the late 1950s women, had to carry. Hundreds of thousands of people were prosecuted under the pass laws each year.

• The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) allowed separate public facilities (beaches, buses, parks, toilets) and stated that they need not be equal.

The Durban beach sign shows petty apartheid as Black South Africans met it every day. It was photographed in 1989, near the end of the system, when such signs were beginning to come down.

Grand apartheid: separate development and the homelands

From 1951 the government built a structure of "separate development" for Africans. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) replaced elected African councils with chiefs answerable to the government. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) divided Africans into eight (later ten) ethnic "national units", each with a homeland, or Bantustan, carved out of the old reserves. The homelands were to move towards "self-government" and then "independence". Transkei was declared independent in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979 and Ciskei in 1981. No foreign government recognised them, and about 8 million people assigned to them lost their South African citizenship.

Grand apartheid was presented as giving each "nation" self-determination, but the homelands were fragmented (Bophuthatswana was made up of seven separate pieces), poor and dependent on South African money. Their real function was to keep Africans out of "white" South Africa except as temporary workers, and to give the government an answer to international criticism. To make the map work, the state carried out forced removals: the Surplus People Project estimated that about 3.5 million people were moved between 1960 and 1983, from "black spots" in white areas, from white farms and from towns to the homelands.

Bantu Education

The Bantu Education Act (1953) took control of African schools from the missions, which had educated most of the African elite, and placed it under the Department of Native Affairs. The curriculum stressed practical skills, mother-tongue teaching and obedience, and spending per African pupil was a fraction of that per white pupil. In a speech to the Senate in 1954 Verwoerd said that there was no place for Africans in the European community "above the level of certain forms of labour". The policy produced generations of under-educated young people, and in 1976 it provoked the Soweto uprising.

Removing the Coloured vote and creating the Republic

Coloured men in the Cape still had the vote on the common roll, protected by an entrenched clause. The government passed the Separate Representation of Voters Act in 1951, but the courts struck it down because it lacked a two-thirds majority. The government then enlarged the Senate with its own supporters (1955) and removed Coloured voters from the common roll in 1956. In a whites-only referendum in October 1960, about 52 per cent voted for a republic, and South Africa became a republic on 31 May 1961, leaving the Commonwealth when other members criticised apartheid.

Subjugation and violence: the apartheid state

Apartheid was enforced by a growing body of security laws and by the police and army. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined "communism" so widely that it could be used against almost any opponent of apartheid; it allowed the government to ban organisations and to "ban" individuals, restricting where they could go, whom they could meet and what they could publish. After 1960 the powers grew:

• the Unlawful Organizations Act (1960), used to ban the ANC and PAC;

• the General Law Amendment Act (1963), allowing detention without trial for 90 days, renewable;

• the Terrorism Act (1967), allowing indefinite detention without trial;

• the Bureau for State Security (BOSS, 1969), a secret intelligence service.

Detention without trial led to torture and deaths in custody: at least 73 people died in security police detention between 1963 and 1990, among them the teacher Ahmed Timol (1971) and Steve Biko (1977). States of emergency in 1960 and from 1985 to 1990 gave the police and army almost unlimited powers. In the 1980s police death squads, based at a farm called Vlakplaas, murdered opponents, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission later established.

P. W. Botha: reform and "total strategy", 1978–1989

By the late 1970s apartheid faced economic problems (a shortage of skilled workers, which the colour bar made worse), the Soweto uprising, and the independence of Mozambique and Angola (1975), which brought hostile governments to South Africa’s borders. P. W. Botha, prime minister from 1978, told white South Africans that they must "adapt or die". His policy had two sides.

• Reform. After the Wiehahn Commission (1979), African trade unions were legalised. Some petty apartheid was relaxed. A new constitution in 1983 created a Tricameral Parliament (1984) with separate houses for whites, Coloureds and Indians; Africans were excluded. In 1986 the pass laws were abolished.

• Repression. Botha described the challenge as a "total onslaught" by communism and answered it with a "total strategy" that co-ordinated the army, police, intelligence, economy and propaganda through the State Security Council. The army raided ANC bases in neighbouring states and backed rebel movements there.

The Tricameral Parliament was meant to win Coloured and Indian support and divide the opposition. It had the opposite effect. Turnout in the Coloured and Indian elections of 1984 was very low, and the campaign against the new constitution led to the formation of the United Democratic Front. In his "Rubicon" speech of 15 August 1985, Botha had been expected to announce major reforms, perhaps the release of Mandela; instead he refused, and the value of the rand fell sharply in the following days.

Resistance to apartheid, 1948–1964: from defiance to armed struggle

Resistance to apartheid changed in its methods, its leadership and its ideas over four decades. Its development can be followed through four phases: mass non-violent protest in the 1950s; armed struggle and exile after 1960; Black Consciousness in the 1970s; and mass internal revolt in the 1980s.

The ANC turns to mass action

In 1949 the ANC, under pressure from its Youth League, adopted a Programme of Action calling for boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. In June 1952 the ANC and the South African Indian Congress launched the Defiance Campaign: volunteers deliberately broke apartheid laws, entering "whites only" facilities, ignoring curfews and refusing to carry passes, and accepted arrest. More than 8,000 were imprisoned. Nelson Mandela was national volunteer-in-chief. ANC membership grew from about 7,000 to around 100,000.

The government responded with harsher penalties for protest (the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1953 made breaking a law in protest punishable by flogging) and with bans on leaders. The ANC’s new president from 1952, Chief Albert Luthuli, was banned and confined to his district for much of the next fifteen years; he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1960, presented to him in December 1961.

The Congress Alliance and the Freedom Charter

The ANC worked with the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People’s Organisation, the white Congress of Democrats and the South African Congress of Trade Unions in the Congress Alliance. In 1955 the Alliance collected demands from across the country and presented them to a Congress of the People of about 3,000 delegates at Kliptown, near Johannesburg, on 25–26 June 1955. Police broke up the meeting on its second day, but the delegates had already approved the Freedom Charter.

We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.

The Freedom Charter, adopted at the Congress of the People, Kliptown, 26 June 1955. The Charter was drafted from thousands of demands but finally written by a small committee, including the white communist Rusty Bernstein. Its non-racial vision ("all who live in it, black and white") became the ANC’s guiding statement; the same phrase led Africanists inside the ANC to object that it gave away the land of the African majority, and its call for the nationalisation of mines and banks led the government to call it communist.

Women played a leading part. The Federation of South African Women (1954), led by Lilian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph, organised a march of about 20,000 women to the Union Buildings in Pretoria on 9 August 1956 against the extension of passes to women. Their song, "Wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo" ("You strike the women, you strike a rock"), became a symbol of women’s resistance; 9 August is now National Women’s Day.

In December 1956 the government arrested 156 leaders of the Congress Alliance and charged them with high treason, claiming that the Freedom Charter was a communist plot to overthrow the state by violence. The Treason Trial lasted until March 1961, when the last 28 accused were acquitted. It failed in court but kept the leadership tied up in legal proceedings for more than four years.

The Pan Africanist Congress and Sharpeville

Africanists in the ANC rejected the Freedom Charter’s non-racialism and the influence of white and Indian communists in the Alliance. In April 1959 they formed the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), led by Robert Sobukwe, a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, who in his opening address of April 1959 called for "government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans". In March 1960, ahead of a planned ANC campaign, the PAC called on African men to leave their passes at home and present themselves for arrest at police stations.

On 21 March 1960 a crowd of several thousand gathered outside the police station at Sharpeville, a township near Vereeniging. The police opened fire, killing 69 people and wounding about 180, many of them shot in the back as they fled. On the same day police killed protesters at Langa in Cape Town, and on 30 March about 30,000 people marched from Langa into central Cape Town.

The Sharpeville massacre was a turning point. The government declared a state of emergency, detained about 18,000 people and on 8 April 1960 banned the ANC and the PAC under the Unlawful Organizations Act. Foreign investors withdrew capital, the UN Security Council passed its first resolution against South Africa (Resolution 134, April 1960), and the massacre became a symbol of apartheid around the world.

The vertical timeline of resistance from 1949 to 1964 shows how quickly the legal space for protest closed. Within four years of Sharpeville the main organisations were banned, the internal leaders were in prison, and the movement had moved into exile.

The turn to armed struggle

After the bannings, a group of ANC leaders led by Nelson Mandela, together with members of the South African Communist Party (SACP), argued that non-violence had failed. In June 1961 the ANC leadership allowed the formation of a separate military organisation, Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), known as MK, with Mandela as its first commander. It began a campaign of sabotage against government buildings, power lines and railways on 16 December 1961, and issued a manifesto.

The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom.

Manifesto of Umkhonto we Sizwe, leaflet distributed on 16 December 1961, the anniversary of the Boer victory at Blood River in 1838, which Afrikaner nationalists celebrated as the Day of the Covenant. Written to announce MK and justify violence to supporters at home and abroad, it presents armed struggle as a last resort forced on the movement by government violence. Its choice of date answered Afrikaner nationalist commemoration with a claim to African national history.

MK at first chose sabotage of property to avoid killing people and to leave the way open for negotiation. The PAC’s armed wing, Poqo ("alone" or "pure"), used more indiscriminate violence, including attacks on whites and on Africans seen as collaborators, in 1962–1963. On 11 July 1963 police raided Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia, north of Johannesburg, MK’s secret headquarters, and arrested most of its leaders. Mandela, already in prison for leaving the country illegally, was tried with them in the Rivonia Trial. In his statement from the dock on 20 April 1964 he explained why the ANC had turned to violence and ended:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Nelson Mandela, statement from the dock at the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial, Pretoria Supreme Court, 20 April 1964. Mandela spoke expecting a death sentence, so the statement was addressed as much to the world and to history as to the court; it presented the accused as principled democrats, not terrorists. On 12 June 1964 Mandela and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment, and most were sent to Robben Island.

Exile, Black Consciousness and Soweto, 1964–1979

The ANC in exile

With its internal leaders in prison, the ANC was led from abroad by Oliver Tambo, based first in Tanzania and later in Zambia. MK built camps in Tanzania and later Angola, with support from the Soviet Union and its allies. Its early attempts to infiltrate South Africa failed: in the Wankie campaign of 1967, MK fighters marching with Zimbabwean guerrillas through Rhodesia were defeated. At the Morogoro Conference in Tanzania (1969) the ANC opened membership of its external mission to non-Africans and stressed political organisation alongside armed struggle. Later inquiries, including the ANC’s own commissions in the 1990s, found that dissidents in ANC detention camps in Angola, notably the Quatro camp, were tortured and some executed.

Steve Biko and Black Consciousness

Inside South Africa a new movement filled the space left by the banned organisations. In 1968–1969 Black students led by Steve Biko, a medical student in Durban, broke away from the white-led National Union of South African Students to form the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO). Its ideas, known as Black Consciousness, held that Black people had to free themselves psychologically from the sense of inferiority taught by apartheid before they could free themselves politically. "Black" was used for all those oppressed by apartheid: Africans, Coloureds and Indians.

Biko argued that "the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed", a line he used in his writings of the early 1970s, collected after his death in I Write What I Like (1978). White liberals, in his view, could not lead the struggle, however sympathetic, because they benefited from the system. The movement set up the Black People’s Convention (1972) and Black Community Programmes of clinics and self-help projects.

The government banned Biko in 1973. He was arrested in August 1977, held naked and in chains, beaten in police custody in Port Elizabeth, driven unconscious to Pretoria and died there on 12 September 1977. The Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, said his death "leaves me cold"; the inquest found no one responsible. A month later, on 19 October 1977, the government banned nineteen Black Consciousness organisations (some accounts give eighteen) and the newspaper The World. Biko’s friend, the newspaper editor Donald Woods, escaped into exile and campaigned internationally.

The Soweto uprising, 1976

In 1974 the government ordered that half of the subjects in African secondary schools be taught in Afrikaans, a language most pupils and many teachers did not speak well and saw as the language of the oppressor. On 16 June 1976 thousands of students in Soweto (South Western Townships, near Johannesburg), organised by a students’ representative council influenced by Black Consciousness, marched in protest. Police opened fire; among the first killed was the schoolboy Hector Pieterson, whose photograph, taken by Sam Nzima, was seen around the world.

The Soweto uprising spread to townships across the country and lasted into 1977. The government first gave a figure of 176 deaths for the first days; the official Cillié Commission later counted 575 deaths by February 1977, most of them caused by the police, and other estimates are higher. Thousands of young people left the country, and many joined MK in exile, giving the ANC a new generation of fighters. The uprising showed that apartheid could not keep the loyalty of young urban Africans, and it led to renewed international pressure, including the UN arms embargo of 1977.

The 1980s: mass resistance and township revolt

The 1980s brought the largest and most sustained resistance in South African history. Two organisations led it. The United Democratic Front (UDF), launched on 20 August 1983 near Cape Town to oppose the Tricameral constitution, brought together about 600 civic associations, student groups, churches and unions; it broadly accepted the Freedom Charter and acted as a legal ally of the banned ANC. The idea of a united front was first proposed in January 1983 by Allan Boesak, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), formed in December 1985 from the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU, 1979) and other unions that had grown since the Wiehahn reforms, had about half a million members and used strikes for political as well as economic ends.

In September 1984, as the Tricameral Parliament opened, protests against rent increases in the Vaal Triangle south of Johannesburg turned into a township revolt that spread across the country. Residents organised rent and consumer boycotts, school boycotts and stayaways (general strikes). The ANC called on its supporters to make the townships "ungovernable". Township councillors and police seen as collaborators were attacked; some were killed by "necklacing", in which a burning tyre was placed around a victim’s neck. The government declared a partial state of emergency in July 1985 and a national one in June 1986, detaining tens of thousands, including many children.

The violence was not only between the state and the opposition. In Natal, and from 1990 on the Witwatersrand, supporters of the UDF and ANC fought supporters of Inkatha, the Zulu nationalist movement of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the KwaZulu homeland. Thousands died, and evidence later showed that sections of the police and army had secretly armed and trained Inkatha fighters.

The churches gave the movement moral authority. Desmond Tutu, Anglican bishop and general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 and called for sanctions. The Kairos Document (1985), signed by theologians and church leaders, declared that the apartheid state was illegitimate and that Christians had a duty to oppose it. In 1989 the Mass Democratic Movement launched a defiance campaign against segregated hospitals, beaches and buses, which the new government of F. W. de Klerk largely tolerated.

Women again took leading roles. Albertina Sisulu, a veteran of the 1956 march, was elected one of the UDF’s three co-presidents in 1983. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, banished by the government to the small town of Brandfort from 1977 to 1985, became an international symbol of defiance; her reputation was later damaged by violence committed by her bodyguards, the "Mandela United Football Club", for which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found her politically and morally accountable.

International opposition to apartheid

Apartheid was introduced just as decolonisation and the new United Nations made racial rule harder to defend in public. For forty years South Africa faced growing criticism, but powerful Western states also protected it as a source of minerals, a trading partner and an anti-communist ally. The effect of international opposition depended on the balance between these pressures.

Britain, the Commonwealth and the "wind of change"

On 3 February 1960 the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, addressed the South African parliament in Cape Town at the end of a tour of Africa.

The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

Harold Macmillan, speech to both houses of the South African parliament, Cape Town, 3 February 1960. Macmillan was preparing British opinion and the white settler governments for the rapid decolonisation of Britain’s African colonies, and he also told his audience that Britain could not support some aspects of their policy. Verwoerd answered him in parliament at once. The speech shows that South Africa’s most important ally would no longer defend apartheid in public, although Britain continued to trade with and invest in South Africa.

Seven weeks later came Sharpeville. When South Africa became a republic in 1961, it had to reapply for membership of the Commonwealth; faced with criticism from the African and Asian members, Verwoerd withdrew the application. The Commonwealth later agreed the Gleneagles Agreement (1977) to discourage sporting contacts, and sent an Eminent Persons Group in 1986 to explore negotiations, which ended when South Africa raided ANC targets in three neighbouring Commonwealth states during its visit.

The United Nations

The UN General Assembly condemned apartheid every year from 1952. Resolution 1761 (6 November 1962) called on member states to break diplomatic relations and stop trade with South Africa and set up a Special Committee against Apartheid, but the resolution was not binding, and Britain, the USA and other major trading partners ignored it. The UN declared apartheid a crime against humanity in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. After the Soweto uprising and the death of Biko, the Security Council passed Resolution 418 (4 November 1977), a mandatory arms embargo, the first imposed on a member state. South Africa responded by building up its own arms industry (Armscor) and, secretly, nuclear weapons.

Sporting and cultural boycotts

Sport mattered greatly to white South Africans, especially rugby and cricket, so the sports boycott was felt widely. South Africa was excluded from the Olympic Games from 1964 and expelled from the Olympic movement in 1970. In 1968 the South African government refused to accept the England cricket team if it included Basil D’Oliveira, a "Coloured" South African-born player who had moved to England; the tour was cancelled. The "Stop the Seventy Tour" campaign in Britain led to the cancellation of a South African cricket tour in 1970, and the rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981 caused mass protests there. South Africa organised "rebel" tours by players paid to break the boycott in the 1980s.

Musicians and writers organised a cultural boycott. Artists United Against Apartheid recorded "Sun City" (1985), refusing to play at the resort in the Bophuthatswana homeland; the song "Free Nelson Mandela" by The Special AKA (1984) and the Wembley concert for Mandela’s seventieth birthday in June 1988, broadcast around the world, made Mandela the most famous political prisoner in the world.

Economic sanctions, boycotts and divestment

The British Anti-Apartheid Movement, founded as the Boycott Movement in 1959, urged consumers not to buy South African goods, and student campaigns pressed Barclays Bank, which had a large South African business, until it sold its subsidiary there in 1986. In the USA the Sullivan Principles (1977) asked American companies in South Africa to treat workers equally, and a divestment campaign persuaded universities, churches, cities and states to sell shares in companies that did business there. By the late 1980s about 200 US companies had pulled out.

Governments acted only in the mid-1980s. In 1985 the US president, Ronald Reagan, defended a policy of constructive engagement, which argued that pressure on Pretoria would harm Black South Africans and help the Soviet Union. The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, also opposed sanctions. But in October 1986 the US Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over Reagan’s veto, banning new investment, loans and many imports; the European Community and the Commonwealth (without Britain) adopted narrower measures the same year.

The most damaging pressure came from private banks. In July 1985, after the state of emergency, Chase Manhattan refused to renew its short-term loans to South Africa, and other banks followed. On 1 September 1985 the government froze repayments on much of its foreign debt. The rand fell sharply, capital left the country, and growth slowed to about 1.5 per cent a year in the late 1980s, below the growth of the population.

The table of international measures shows that pressure grew slowly and was strongest in the late 1980s. Its limits were real: South Africa traded through intermediaries, Israel and Taiwan kept close links with it, and oil reached it despite an embargo. Many historians judge that sanctions alone did not end apartheid, but that, together with the financial crisis, they convinced business leaders and many in the government that apartheid had no economic future.

Other African states

Independent African states gave the liberation movements support, shelter and diplomatic weight. The Organisation of African Unity (founded 1963) set up a Liberation Committee in Dar es Salaam to fund and arm movements against colonial and white minority rule. The Frontline States (Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, and from 1975–1980 Mozambique, Angola and Zimbabwe) hosted ANC offices, camps and refugees, and formed the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference (SADCC, 1980) to reduce their economic dependence on South Africa.

They paid a heavy price. Under "total strategy" South Africa raided ANC targets in Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, and supported rebel movements, RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, whose wars cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In March 1984 Mozambique signed the Nkomati Accord, agreeing to expel the ANC in return for an end to South African support for RENAMO, which South Africa did not fully honour. The case of the Frontline States shows both the strength of African solidarity and the power of South Africa to punish its neighbours.

The end of the Cold War

The apartheid government had long presented itself to the West as a bulwark against communism, pointing to the ANC’s alliance with the SACP and its Soviet support. South Africa occupied South West Africa (Namibia) and fought in Angola against the MPLA government and the Cuban troops supporting it. In 1987–1988 the battle around Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola ended in stalemate; both sides claimed victory, but the costs in white conscripts’ lives and in equipment, and Cuba’s build-up near the Namibian border, pushed South Africa to negotiate. The New York Accords of 22 December 1988 linked Cuban withdrawal from Angola to Namibian independence, which came in March 1990. Namibia’s struggle for independence is a separate study of its own; for South Africa the accords ended a costly war and showed that a negotiated transfer of power was possible.

Under Mikhail Gorbachev the Soviet Union reduced its support for armed struggle in southern Africa and encouraged the ANC to negotiate. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe weakened the National Party’s argument that the ANC was a communist threat, and made it easier for de Klerk to persuade white voters and Western governments that negotiation was safe.

The end of apartheid, 1985–1994

Talks before the talks

Negotiations began in secret years before they were announced. From 1985 the Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetsee, met Nelson Mandela, who had been moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison and in 1988 to a house at Victor Verster Prison. Mandela opened these talks on his own initiative, without first consulting the ANC leadership in exile, a risk he later defended on the ground that someone had to take the first step. From 1988 a team of officials and the head of the National Intelligence Service, Niël Barnard, held dozens of meetings with him. In July 1989 he met P. W. Botha himself.

Other contacts prepared the ground. In 1985 a group of South African business leaders met the ANC leadership in Zambia, and in July 1987 about fifty mainly Afrikaans-speaking intellectuals met ANC leaders in Dakar, Senegal. The ANC’s Harare Declaration of August 1989, adopted by the OAU, set out conditions for negotiations.

De Klerk’s decision

In January 1989 P. W. Botha had a stroke. F. W. de Klerk, a conservative National Party leader in the Transvaal, replaced him as party leader in February and as State President in September 1989. In October he released Walter Sisulu and other Rivonia prisoners. On 2 February 1990, in his opening speech to parliament, he announced that the ANC, the PAC and the SACP were unbanned, that political prisoners not convicted of violence would be freed, and that the state of emergency would be partly lifted. Nelson Mandela was released on 11 February 1990, after 27 years in prison. That evening, in Cape Town, he said:

I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.

Nelson Mandela, speech from the balcony of Cape Town City Hall on the day of his release, 11 February 1990. Speaking to supporters and a world audience, Mandela presented himself as a loyal servant of the ANC and the people, not an individual hero negotiating alone, and in the same speech he said that the armed struggle would continue until a climate for negotiation existed. The speech was meant to reassure his own movement, many of whose members distrusted the secret talks.

Why did de Klerk act? He himself argued that the collapse of communism had removed the danger of a Soviet-backed ANC and that a negotiated settlement could be reached while the government was still strong. Economic decline, the cost of the states of emergency and the end of the war in Angola and Namibia pointed the same way. Hermann Giliomee argues that Afrikaner leaders chose to negotiate from a position of relative strength, hoping to keep a share of power through minority protections; they did not foresee how much they would have to give up.

The diagram of the factors in the end of apartheid groups them into internal resistance, economic and external pressure, and changes in context and leadership. Weighing these groups against one another is the central debate among historians about why apartheid ended.

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Negotiations, violence and CODESA

The government and the ANC first agreed on the terms for talks. In the Groote Schuur Minute (May 1990) the government agreed to work towards releasing prisoners and allowing exiles to return; in the Pretoria Minute (August 1990) the ANC suspended the armed struggle. In 1991 parliament repealed the Land Acts, the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act.

The Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) opened on 20 December 1991, bringing together nineteen parties and organisations. The PAC and the white right-wing Conservative Party stayed away. The government wanted power-sharing with a veto for minorities; the ANC wanted majority rule through an elected constituent assembly. In a whites-only referendum on 17 March 1992, 68.7 per cent voted to continue the negotiations, which strengthened de Klerk. But at CODESA II in May 1992 the talks deadlocked over the majority needed to approve a new constitution.

Violence threatened the process throughout. Between 1990 and 1994 about 14,000 people died in political violence, more than in any comparable period of apartheid, much of it between ANC and Inkatha supporters. On 17 June 1992 Inkatha-supporting hostel dwellers killed about 45 people in the township of Boipatong; the ANC accused the police of complicity and withdrew from the talks. In September 1992 Ciskei homeland troops shot dead 28 ANC marchers at Bisho. The ANC’s campaign of mass action and the shock of these killings led both sides back to the table: the Record of Understanding of 26 September 1992 restored the talks.

Compromise followed. The SACP leader Joe Slovo proposed sunset clauses: a period of power-sharing in a Government of National Unity for five years, and guarantees for white civil servants’ jobs and pensions. The Multi-Party Negotiating Process, which began in April 1993, agreed an election date and an interim constitution. On 10 April 1993 Chris Hani, the popular leader of the SACP and former MK chief of staff, was assassinated by a Polish immigrant linked to the white right. Mandela appealed for calm on national television, a moment many historians see as the point at which he acted, in effect, as the country’s leader. The election date of 27 April 1994 was fixed soon afterwards.

Threats from the right and from the homelands continued to the end. In June 1993 armed members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) drove an armoured vehicle into the negotiating venue at Kempton Park. In March 1994 an AWB intervention in Bophuthatswana, in support of its homeland leader, collapsed, and the homeland was reincorporated. Inkatha, which had boycotted the process, agreed to take part in the election only a week before voting.

The vertical timeline of the transition shows that the process moved forward through crises. Each outbreak of violence weakened one side’s position or created pressure for compromise, and each was followed by an agreement.

The election of April 1994

South Africa’s first election under universal adult suffrage took place on 26–29 April 1994 (the main voting day was 27 April). Nearly 20 million people voted, many queueing for hours; for most it was the first vote of their lives.

Data: Independent Electoral Commission, national results, 1994. The ANC won just under the two-thirds majority that would have let it write the final constitution alone, an outcome that many observers saw as helping reconciliation. Mandela was inaugurated as president on 10 May 1994, with Thabo Mbeki of the ANC and F. W. de Klerk as deputy presidents. The Inkatha Freedom Party governed KwaZulu-Natal, and the National Party the Western Cape.

A Constitutional Assembly then wrote the final Constitution, signed by Mandela on 10 December 1996. It created a constitutional democracy with a Bill of Rights, among the most progressive in the world (including social and economic rights and protection against discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation), and an independent Constitutional Court, which had abolished the death penalty in 1995.

Mandela and de Klerk: how much did leaders matter?

The table comparing the two leaders shows why both shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and why their roles are judged differently. De Klerk made the decision that opened negotiations, but he did so under pressure and with the aim of keeping power for minorities. Mandela’s authority among Black South Africans, and his insistence on reconciliation, made it possible for the ANC to accept compromises. Historians who stress structure (economic decline, resistance, the end of the Cold War) argue that the system would have ended without them; those who stress agency argue that without them it might have ended in civil war.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The new government had to decide how to deal with the crimes of the apartheid era. The interim constitution had promised an amnesty, which the security forces demanded as a condition of the settlement. The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (1995) created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to investigate gross human rights violations committed between 1960 and 1994 by all sides.

The TRC had three committees: on human rights violations, which heard about 21,000 statements from victims, many in public hearings broadcast across the country from April 1996; on amnesty, which received about 7,100 applications and granted amnesty in about 850 cases; and on reparation and rehabilitation. Amnesty was given only to those who made full disclosure of acts with a political motive; it was an example of transitional justice that put truth and reconciliation before prosecution. The final report was presented in October 1998, with further volumes in 2003. It found the state responsible for most gross violations, but also criticised the ANC (for abuses in its camps and for civilian deaths) and Inkatha.

• Achievements. It established much of the truth about torture, killings and disappearances, including the deaths of Steve Biko and of activists killed by Vlakplaas death squads; it gave victims a public voice; and it helped make a peaceful transition possible by offering perpetrators an alternative to prosecution.

• Criticisms. Few senior figures applied for amnesty, and P. W. Botha refused to appear. Those who were refused amnesty or never applied were rarely prosecuted. The government paid reparations late and at a lower level than the TRC had recommended (a one-off grant of R30,000 per victim from 2003). Some victims’ families, including Biko’s, challenged the amnesty process in court. De Klerk obtained a court order to remove a finding against him from the report. Many Black South Africans felt that reconciliation asked more of them than of whites.

Democratic South Africa, 1994–2020: successes and challenges

The end of apartheid gave every South African equal political rights, but it did not by itself change the distribution of land, wealth, education and jobs built up over a century. The record of democratic South Africa to 2020 is therefore judged against two different standards: the peaceful working of a constitutional democracy, and the promise of a "better life for all" (the ANC’s 1994 slogan).

Economic policy: from the RDP to GEAR and BEE

The Mandela government began with the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP, 1994), which promised houses, electricity, water, schools and clinics for the poor. Over a million low-cost houses were built by the early 2000s, and millions of households were connected to electricity and clean water. In 1996, worried by debt and the need for foreign investment, the government adopted a more market-orientated policy, Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR), which cut the budget deficit, lowered tariffs and privatised some state assets. The economy grew, but GEAR did not create the jobs it promised, and the trade unions and the SACP, the ANC’s allies, criticised it.

To change the racial make-up of business and the professions, the government introduced Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), formalised in the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act of 2003, which rewarded companies for Black ownership, management and training. BEE created a new Black middle class and some very wealthy Black businesspeople, but critics argued that it mostly benefited a politically connected elite.

Mbeki, HIV/AIDS and Zuma

Thabo Mbeki succeeded Mandela as president in 1999. His government kept steady economic growth until 2008 and played a leading part in African diplomacy, but its response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic was a serious failure. Mbeki questioned the scientific consensus that HIV caused AIDS, and his health minister promoted garlic and beetroot instead of antiretroviral drugs. A Harvard study (Chigwedere and others, 2008) estimated that more than 330,000 lives were lost between 2000 and 2005 because treatment was not provided in time. Mbeki was forced to resign by the ANC in 2008.

Jacob Zuma, president from 2009 to 2018, presided over slowing growth and growing corruption. Public money was spent on his private home at Nkandla, and a report by the Public Protector, State of Capture (2016), found evidence that the Gupta family, businessmen close to Zuma, had influenced the appointment of ministers and the award of state contracts. The term state capture came to describe the use of state institutions for private gain. Zuma resigned under pressure from the ANC in February 2018 and was succeeded by Cyril Ramaphosa, a former trade union leader and chief ANC negotiator in 1990–1994. The Zondo Commission (2018–2022) later documented state capture in detail.

Inequality, unemployment and violence

By 2020 South Africa remained one of the most unequal countries in the world: the World Bank put its Gini coefficient at 0.63 in 2014, the highest of any country with reliable data. Unemployment was about 29 per cent at the end of 2019 (Statistics South Africa), and higher among young Black South Africans. Land reform was slow: by 2018 far less land had been redistributed than the 30 per cent target set in the 1990s, and in that year the ANC backed amending the constitution to allow expropriation without compensation, a proposal that was not adopted by 2020.

Several events showed the strains. On 16 August 2012 police shot dead 34 striking miners at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana, the deadliest use of force by the state since apartheid. Attacks on migrants from other African countries killed more than 60 people in May 2008 and recurred in 2015 and 2019. From 2007–2008 the state electricity company, Eskom, imposed rolling power cuts ("load-shedding"), the result of underinvestment and mismanagement. In March 2020 the government imposed one of the world’s strictest Covid-19 lockdowns, which deepened unemployment and poverty.

The bar chart of the ANC’s share of the vote shows that democratic politics remained stable but dominated by one party. Elections were free and regularly held, the courts and the press remained independent (the Constitutional Court ruled against Zuma over Nkandla in 2016), and power passed peacefully between presidents. But the ANC’s falling vote after 2004 reflected disappointment with corruption and the slow pace of economic change.

Data for social grants: South African Social Security Agency, 2020. The table of successes and failures shows that judgements about the end of apartheid depend on which goal is used as the measure. The political settlement achieved most of what its makers intended, while the economic transformation that many supporters of the liberation movements expected had, by 2020, only partly happened.

Perspectives and debates

Race or class? Interpreting segregation and apartheid

The most important historical debate about South Africa concerns the causes and nature of segregation and apartheid.

The liberal view explains why apartheid was so rigid and ideological, but struggles to explain why business prospered under it for decades. The radical view explains the system’s economic logic, especially in the mining era, but not why the state kept apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s when it was harming business through skills shortages and sanctions. Many historians now accept a version of Posel’s argument: economic interests shaped segregation, but apartheid also had its own ideological drive, and it changed over time.

Why did apartheid end?

These perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Internal resistance and economic decline created the pressure; the end of the Cold War removed the government’s main justification abroad and its fear of a communist takeover at home; and leadership turned a stalemate into a settlement. The debate is about weighting: the relative importance of pressure from below, pressure from outside, and choices at the top.

Contemporary perspectives

Contemporaries saw these events very differently. To National Party leaders, apartheid was "separate development" that would give each nation its own future, as the 1948 programme claimed. To the ANC it was a system of national oppression; Black Consciousness saw it also as psychological oppression; and to the PAC it was the latest stage of colonial dispossession. Western governments in the 1980s were divided between those who argued that engagement would bring reform (Reagan, Thatcher) and those who believed that only pressure would. Since 1994 some South Africans, especially younger activists in movements such as Rhodes Must Fall (2015), have criticised the negotiated settlement itself for leaving economic power largely in white hands.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: international pressure and the end of apartheid

Paper 3: the radicalisation of resistance

Paper 3: segregation and apartheid

Paper 3: the causes of the South African War

Paper 3: democratic South Africa

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain the social and economic effects of the discovery of diamonds and gold, including the migrant labour, compound and pass systems.

• To do:

  I can explain how the Mineral Revolution affected the uitlanders, Kruger’s government and Afrikaner nationalism.

• To do:

  I can weigh the economic, strategic and political causes of the South African War, including the Jameson Raid and the roles of Milner, Chamberlain and Kruger.

• To do:

  I can describe the guerrilla war, scorched earth and the concentration camps, and their impact on Boer and Black civilians.

• To do:

  I can explain the political, economic and social impact of the war, the Treaty of Vereeniging and the Union of 1910.

• To do:

  I can describe the main segregation laws of 1910–1948 and explain why they were passed.

• To do:

  I can explain why the National Party won the 1948 election.

• To do:

  I can distinguish petty and grand apartheid with named laws, and explain the homelands and forced removals.

• To do:

  I can describe the methods of repression used by the apartheid state, and explain Botha’s reforms and "total strategy".

• To do:

  I can trace the changing methods of resistance: the Defiance Campaign, the Freedom Charter, the PAC, armed struggle, Black Consciousness and the township revolt.

• To do:

  I can assess the significance of Sharpeville, Soweto and the township violence of the 1980s.