Apartheid — meaning separateness in Afrikaans (which is cognate to the English apart and -hood) — was a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government in South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times, but apartheid as an official policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. New legislation classified inhabitants people into racial groups (black, white, coloured, and Indian), and residential areas were segregated by means of forced removals. Blacks were stripped of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands or bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government segregated education, medical care, and other public services, and provided black people with services greatly inferior to those of whites.

Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance. A series of popular uprisings and protests were met with the banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders. As unrest spread and became more violent, state organs responded with increasing repression and state-sponsored violence.

Reforms to apartheid in the 1980s failed to quell the mounting opposition, and in 1990 President Frederik Willem de Klerk began negotiations to end apartheid, culminating in multi-racial democratic elections in 1994, which were won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela. The vestiges of apartheid still shape South African politics and society.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

South African Border War

By 1966, SWAPO launched guerilla raids from neighbouring countries against South Africa's occupation of South-West Africa/Namibia. Initially South Africa fought a counter-insurgency war against SWAPO. This conflict deepened after Angola gained its independence in 1975 under the communist leadership of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) when South Africa and the United States sided with the Angolan rival UNITA party against the MPLA's armed force, FAPLA (People's Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola). By the end of the 1970s, Cuba had joined the fray, in one of several late Cold War flashpoints throughout Southern Africa. The Angolan civil war developed into a conventional war with South Africa and UNITA on one side against the Angolan MPLA government, the Cubans, the Soviets and SWAPO on the other.
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