Nelson Mandela

Background Information

Important Dates

1918
Mandela born, prince of the Thembu people in Transkei, South Africa.

1942
Enrols for a law degree at Witwatersrand University.

1944
Joins the African National Congress (ANC).

1947
Becomes general secretary of the ANC.

1952
Non-violent defiance campaign started by the ANC. Mandela and other leaders 'banned'.

1956
Freedom Charter: 156 ANC leaders arrested.

1957
Marries Winnie Madzikela.

1960
Sharpeville Massacre: 60 Africans killed.

1961
Mandela tried and acquitted; he goes underground.

1962
Caught, tried and sent to Robben Island.

1968
Forbidden to attend his mother's funeral.

1969
Winnie Mandela banned from political activity for five years.

1977
All-Black political groups banned.

1987
Wembley concert to celebrate Mandela's seventieth birthday.

1989
US threatens to extend sanctions if Mandela not released.

1990
Released.

1992
Separates from Winnie Mandela.

1993
Mandela and President F.W. de Klerk win the Nobel Peace Prize.

1994
Mandela elected president of South Africa.

Key Terms, People and Events

• Apartheid
• Pass Laws
• Bantustans
• Afrikaners
• National Party
• Banning
• Coloureds

Apartheid
Separation. While segregation existed under British rule, as in other colonially-ruled countries in Africa, it was often fairly informal. After the National Party gained power in South Africa, a series of acts passed between 1950 and 1952 gave it legal form:

Group Areas Act: designated race areas

Coloured Voters Act: disenfranchised Africans

Bantu Authorities Act: set up puppet authorities on reserves

Population Registration Act: classified people by colour (White, Native or Coloured) Suppression of Communism Act: defined communism as any anti-parliamentary activity

Pass Laws
Main instrument of apartheid. All Africans aged over 16 years old had to carry pass-books outside Bantustans. Ensured that only Africans with jobs could enter White areas.

Bantustans
Separate African 'states' within South Africa. In principle, independent. In practice, disproportionately small, economically unviable tribal 'homelands' where Africans were forced to live.

Afrikaners
White South Africans of Dutch origin who settled South Africa from the seventeenth century onwards.

National Party
Afrikaner party of apartheid.

Banning
Various forms of house arrest, more or less severe, usually involving lack of contact with friends and relatives.

Coloureds
South Africans of mixed race.

Background Information

South Africa had been created as a state in 1910 but the history of the White settlers in the region went back to the 1600s. These early settlers were Dutch, and were known as Boers. In 1815 the territory of South Africa was handed over to the British. For almost a century the Boers and British argued with each other over land, the rights of Black Africans and the gold and diamonds in the mines of South Africa.

After a bitter fight the Boers were defeated in 1902 and South Africa became part of the British empire. Although there were still Boer extremists the country remained loyal and sent troops to help Britain in the First World War. Through the 1920s and 1930s South Africa remained loyal to Britain but it was noticeable that extreme Boer Nationalist groups grew more important. From 1924 to 1939 the Afrikaner Nationalist Party tried to close the economic gap between the 'British' Whites (who owned most of the businesses and industries) and the 'Boer' Whites. At the same time the ANP pointed constantly to the Black threat as a warning to all Whites.

Discrimination against Black Africans was a fact of life. In 1913 the government passed a Land Act which restricted the areas where Black people could buy, lease or own land. The amount of land available to Blacks was less than 10% of the area of South Africa - the rest belonged to Whites. The result was that Black African landowners virtually disappeared. They were driven from their land and forced to live in reserves. More often they were forced to work as labourers for White bosses. Worse still, the White bosses were usually able to stop workers leaving for other work which might be better paid because Blacks needed a special pass to travel around.

Opposition to the oppression began in a small way. The few highly educated Black people in a position to protest about White policies set up the Native National Congress in 1912. This later became the ANC (African National Congress) and its aims were clear - it did not want Black supremacy but it also did not want White supremacy - it wanted a South Africa where Black or White made no difference.

The ANC tried to get the British government to enforce a fairer system in South Africa but without much success. In 1926 the ANC came to represent South Africa's Asian community as well. This did not help its cause. As a result the struggle began to change. The growth of South Africa's industries meant that many Blacks moved to the towns and cities. In 1923 the government passed a number of laws (the Natives Act) to control the number of Black people in the towns but the factories needed their labour. They were forced to live in separate areas but this helped to spread new ideas. The Communist Party grew rapidly among Blacks in the 1920s and in the 1930s Black trade unions began to grow as well.

During the Second World War Black workers became even more vital for South Africa's industries. This gave them a strong position to demand changes in the conditions of Black people. In 1942 the ANC Youth League (including a young Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo) began to campaign for changes. The wartime situation did bring fewer controls on Blacks and the wartime leader Jan Smuts seemed to suggest that after the war Blacks would gain greater freedom in South Africa.

However, Smuts was not given the opportunity to pass any reforms to the South African system. The White majority watched developments during the Second World War and after with alarm. Throughout Africa they saw independence movements spring up and African peoples demanding the right to rule themselves. In 1947 they saw Britain hand India and Pakistan back to the people who lived there. Worse still, in South Africa itself they saw Blacks as a threat to their own jobs and prosperity. All of these factors made them find the Afrikaner Nationalist Party extremely attractive.

The Nationalists won an overwhelming victory and from 1948 to 1953 passed a series of apartheid laws which separated the races as far as possible. In practice this amounted to severe restrictions on the freedom of non-Whites.

• In the towns, Blacks had to live in separate townships away from the White population. They were of course allowed to travel into the towns to work.
• Everyday facilities such as shops, toilets, public transport, beaches and even hospitals and ambulances were segregated.
• Sex and marriage between the races became illegal.

• Every South African was classified by race. Identity cards and pass laws meant that non-Whites were not free to move around their own country.

• Later (in 1956) the Black Africans who did have the vote had this privilege taken away.
• Any group, individual, book, play or song which criticised apartheid was considered to be communist. As a result it was illegal under the Suppression of Communism Act. The police had wide powers to search and arrest anyone. At the same time the Bureau of State Security could censor any publication or radio/TV programme which it objected to.
• Education was to be segregated - not surprisingly Blacks received a very poor standard of education.
• Blacks were banned from the highest paid jobs.
• Whites doing the same work were paid many times more than Blacks.

Through the 1950s and 1960s South Africa was stung by the criticism from all around the world for its policies. The newly independent state of India was bitterly critical of the treatment of Indians in South Africa. Within the British Commonwealth many of the newly independent nations criticised South Africa and demanded that it should be expelled (in the end South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1961).

Although there was fierce international criticism it was not enough to force the National Party to change its policies. In the first instance South Africa was hugely wealthy in minerals, precious metals and diamonds. It was also virtually self sufficient in food. In fact, it was only oil that South Africa needed from abroad.

More important was the attitude of the major western countries. The USA, France, Britain and West Germany all loudly condemned apartheid. However, they did little to really put pressure on South Africa. In fact Britain and the USA remained South Africa's biggest trading partners. As well as regular trade they also supplied South Africa with massive shipments of arms. The Americans in particular were deeply concerned about the spread of communism in Africa. As a result South Africa was able to ignore international pressure to remove apartheid until matters began to change in the mid-1970s.

Nevertheless, South Africa could not ignore the world completely. In 1959 the new prime minister Henrik Verwoerd announced the creation of Bantustans or homelands for the Black peoples. These homelands were to be self governing and independent from South Africa. The Nationalists argued that Black South Africans in fact represented many different nations and when this was taken into account, Whites were in fact the largest single group.

The response of the ANC was a campaign of protest and civil disobedience. Under its new leader Chief Albert Luthuli the ANC joined with the SAIC (South African Indian Congress) in breaking apartheid laws, particularly burning pass books.

The government responded with beatings, arrests and further harsh laws. By 1960 most of the ANC leaders were in jail and the ANC itself was declared illegal. None of this stopped the protests, however, and matters came to a head with the Sharpeville Massacre of 1961. On 21st March 1961 peaceful protesters were shot at by the Sharpeville police and 69 were killed. Strikes and protest broke out and condemnation flooded in from all over the world. The UN Security Council officially condemned South Africa for the first time.

At least one African was shot dead and four Africans and several policemen were injured when rioting broke out in two locations as a result of ... the anti pass campaign which started this morning ... Incidents led to Africans stoning the police and on both occasions the police were compelled to open fire ... The Africans returned the fire, causing casualties among the policemen.

Sharpeville convinced the ANC leaders who were still free that non-violence would never succeed. Whilst Oliver Tambo went abroad to raise support and money for the ANC, Mandela built up the military wing of the ANC called Spear of the Nation. They began a campaign of sabotage - destroying power lines for example - still aimed at avoiding deaths.

The ANC were no match for the South African security forces, however. Mandela was arrested in 1962 and was joined by thousands of his colleagues. Mandela himself remained in prison for another twenty-seven years. Many other ANC fighters fled South Africa and went into training camps in the countries which bordered it.

The South African government had weathered this storm. By the time the new premier John Vorster came to power in 1966 the government was firmly in control and foreign countries began to invest in South Africa again.

This was by no means the end of the protests, however. Within South Africa, Black trade unions grew up again as the South African economy picked up in the early 1970s. At the same time a new generation of protesters wrote books, sang songs and published pamphlets about the evils of apartheid. ANC activists quietly made their way into South Africa - more cautiously than they had done in the 1960s.

The movement was known as Black Consciousness and like other protest movements it was dealt with harshly. Its leading figures were imprisoned and the government decided to take closer control of the Black education system. Led by Steve Biko, African students carried out huge demonstrations against government plans to make them learn in Afrikaans rather than English (most Blacks spoke English as their second language already and Afrikaans would have been a third).

In June 1976 over 500 demonstrators were shot dead in the township of Soweto, most of them schoolchildren. Soweto erupted into protests and riots for months. The security forces did not finally regain full control again until well into 1977.

In many ways Soweto was a turning-point. The world was outraged and calls for economic sanctions against South Africa began to be taken seriously. These calls were strengthened further when the news came out that the student leader Steve Biko had been killed while in police custody.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the South African government recognised that change was necessary. After Soweto the outside world began to increase pressure in the form of economic sanctions, although these were nowhere near as effective as they could have been. The most important sanctions were on oil from the mainly Arab OPEC countries which began in 1973.

More seriously the ANC began to increase its support in the countries which bordered South Africa, making frequent raids into South Africa itself. The ANC was able to do this mainly because Mozambique had become independent from Portugal in 1975 - the ANC now had a secure base. By 1978 the Whites in Rhodesia were losing the battle against the Black guerrilla forces fighting for majority rule. At the same time support for the ANC was increasing inside South Africa. Soweto was the most well known of the Black townships but outside all of the major cities in South Africa these townships existed to house the Black workers who did not live in Bantustans. These townships became a hotbed of ANC support.

The new South African leader in 1978 was the former minister of defence, PW Botha. Botha decided that there had to be some relaxation of the restrictions. He allowed Blacks to join free trade unions and in 1981 Blacks were allowed to vote for their own township councils. Botha also created new elected bodies to represent the Indian and coloured communities in a deliberate attempt to split the non-White opposition to apartheid. None of these measures threatened White rule.

While Botha tried reforms at home, he adopted much more aggressive policies with his neighbours. Using South African troops as well as sponsoring guerrilla forces, Botha tried to destabilise the frontline states of Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Zambia. At the same time he increased economic pressure on these countries and tried to force many of them to abandon their support for the ANC.

The new reforms failed in the face of overwhelming opposition. The UDF (United Democratic Front) represented all races and campaigned against the new constitution. In the first elections in 1984 only a fraction of eligible Indians and coloureds actually voted. The ANC boycotted the township council elections so that the councils became impossible to operate. In December 1985 COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) was launched and allied itself with the UDF.

The result of all of these tensions was violence and chaos. From September 1984 Black councillors and policemen became the target of violence. Students refused to attend classes and there were many strikes and demonstrations. The authorities began to hit back in 1985 and the townships across South Africa became the scene of appalling violence.

As violence raged in South Africa the world outside began to change. Banks and big corporations came under great pressure to withdraw support from South Africa and in 1985 international sanctions began. Western businesses were becoming concerned about the safety of their money in what was looking like an unstable country. The new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had made it clear to the West that he had no interest in spreading communism. As a result the USA saw South Africa as much less important as an ally against the spread of communism in Africa. In 1986 the USA passed an anti-apartheid act and the European Community imposed sanctions.

Botha's reaction was defiance. He declared a state of emergency in 1986. The security forces went to work with increased brutality and from late 1985 there was a total clampdown on the media.

The pressure continued to mount on South Africa from outside and, even inside, prominent Whites began to admit that Black majority rule would come eventually. It became a question of whether this would happen as a result of a revolution or whether the White minority could somehow control the process. Either way, it was clear by 1989 that a new approach was required. The man given the job was FW de Klerk.

De Klerk set about the process of change. In the 1989 elections a very large number of Whites had indicated that they wanted tougher apartheid policies but influential Whites in politics and business realised change had to come.

De Klerk removed the ban which made the ANC and other Black nationalist groups illegal in February 1990. Within months the key figure of the ANC, Nelson Mandela, was freed after 27 years in jail. Mandela and the ANC began to hold talks with the government.

The path was far from smooth. The Black rivals of the ANC were the Zulu party Inkatha. They demanded to be represented at the talks. As tensions rose, violence broke out between ANC and Inkatha supporters. Suspicions grew that de Klerk was involved in the violence and secretly supported Inkatha in order to weaken the ANC.

By 1991 the majority of apartheid laws had been repealed but apartheid attitudes and divisions remained. De Klerk and Mandela argued and clashed over many issues.

Throughout 1992 the ANC and the government negotiated against a background of strikes, monster demonstrations and violence. In September 1992, de Klerk and Mandela finally announced agreement on the way forward. In April 1994, South Africa held its first free elections and Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa in May of that year.

With threats of violence in the homelands, from Inkatha and from White extremists, he faced an enormous task. Added to this he had to face South Africa's huge divides of wealth and poverty as well as the economic damage caused by ten years of sanctions. Mandela had come a long way by 1994 but there was still a long way to go.