It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Apartheid was a system of racial segregation and deeply entrenched social, political, geographical, and environmental racism that affected South Africa between 1948 and 1994. Trevor Noah calls apartheid “perfect racism” (19). In the early 20th century, South Africa’s white minority leaders traveled and observed governments founded upon systemic racism all over the world, including the United States, to avoid their mistakes and take inspiration from their so-called successes. Both the establishment and the dissolution of apartheid were enacted via a series of gradual laws, rather than distinct beginning and end dates.

Though ideological precedents for apartheid were present all throughout the history of colonialism in South Africa, legal apartheid began after World War II. “Apartheid” means “apartness” in Afrikaans, the language of the white, Dutch-descended South African colonists. The Afrikaners’ National Party won the election in 1948 by using the concept of apartheid as a slogan. They soon began passing a series of racist laws to oppress Black and indigenous South African people, as well as other non-white immigrants to South Africa. They made interracial relationships illegal and designated parts of the country as “white-only.” Cities like Johannesburg became “white-only,” and the government forcibly relocated non-white people. Laborers needed to keep wealth coming into the city were relocated to all-Black “ghettos” like Soweto, while other people were relocated to lands the government considered their “homelands”: the original geographical locations of their respective tribes. People from different non-white races were relocated to different areas. This served to foster animosity between them and prevent them from uniting in solidarity against their common oppressor. Both the ghettos and the homelands were impoverished, overpopulated, under-resourced and environmentally exploited by the government.

Enforcement of apartheid was violent and often bloody. Any resistance, whether violent or nonviolent, was met with the force of the police state. For instance, in 1960, a group of Black South Africans protested without their ID passes outside a police station in the Black township of Sharpeville. It was illegal for Black South Africans to move around without identification, so the demonstrators left them behind as a form of protest. In what came to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre, police used machine guns to kill almost 70 people and wound almost 200 more. This is the incident that “convinced anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela to abandon his nonviolent stance and organize paramilitary groups to fight South Africa’s system of institutionalized racial discrimination” (“Massacre in Sharpeville.” The History Channel, 2021). Many resistance leaders were either imprisoned or executed. The most famous of them, Nelson Mandela, was imprisoned in 1963 on charges of treason and conspiracy to overthrow the government. After Sharpeville, he had founded the paramilitary group uMkhonto we Sizwe, which tried to sabotage the apartheid government.

Only in the late 1970s did other countries begin to admit that apartheid was a brutal and untenable civil rights violation. The United Nations General Assembly denounced apartheid in 1973. Very slowly, apartheid’s National Party began to lift some of their most oppressive laws in the early 1990s. Due to his international popularity, Nelson Mandela was freed on February 11, 1990, after serving 27 years in prison. This marked a large win for the anti-apartheid movement. Mandela negotiated with the white, pro-apartheid president to have the first multiracial election in 1994. This led to a broad coalition government that had representatives from many major parties. This Government of National Unity elected Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first Black president. This is generally considered the official end of apartheid, although many markers of its legacy remain.