Apartheid is voted out in South Africa

March 17th, 1992

(Note: While the image is AI generated, the research and writing was carried out by a human, me).

Today 32 years ago, almost 69% of participants in a referendum limited to white voters in South Africa voted to end the Apartheid laws which had been in place since 1948. The laws, which formalized an essentially complete racial segregation between black and white South Africans, included prohibitions against using the same public transportation and many public and private facilities, including schools, hotels, restaurants and more. Interracial intimate relations were also prohibited, as was, in many locales, voting in national elections, as well as running for parliament, for black South Africans. The laws were enforced by violent crackdowns on those opposed to it, including several events in which protesters were shot en masse, which, in turn, steered the opposition toward armed resistance.

The effort to end apartheid was decades in the making. Factors which contributed to it were the shrinking proportion of white South Africans, with an increasing share of those among them who were opposed to Apartheid, especially young people; the increasing delegitimization of the South African government on the world stage, with a corresponding legitimization of the opposition; the rise of white South Africans to leadership positions who were willing to change the system, particularly state president De Klerk,; and, perhaps surprisingly, the fall of communism.

The last factor is worth considering further. Much of the Western world substantially supported the Apartheid regime for most of its history. The ostensible reason was that the staunchly anti-communist regime was regarded as a bulwark against the spread of the ideology during the Cold War. As happened numerous times all over the world, the efforts to contain communism came at a heavy price for the local population. Ronald Reagan praised South Africa in several interviews and unsuccessfully vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid act (it seems relevant to mention that in a private but recorded 1971 phone call with a chuckling Richard Nixon, he had called African diplomats “monkeys still uncomfortable wearing shoes”). Nelson Mandela was regarded by the US government as a terrorist until 2008. Understanding the past stance of Western countries and how it has changed over generations helps evaluating their stance on current events.