Apartheid

The racist attitudes that had prevailed at the high point of European colonialism were, in much of the world, eroded in the late 1950s and the 1960s with the creation of independent Black African states and the movement for Civil Rights in the U.S.A. The first postcolonial African state was Ghana, which became independent in 1958 under President Kwame Nkrumah.

Recognition of the legitimate aspirations of African Nationalism was signalled by the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1960, in a speech given in Cape Town that got the name "The Winds of Change" (even though the phrase he actually used was "a wind of change" - click here for an extract). By the end of the 1960s, Britain's imperial presence in Africa had become negligible.

In Southern Africa, however, racist attitudes became more entrenched and institutionalized. In 1961 South Africa (which then included Namibia) broke away from the Commonwealth to preserve minority White rule, and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), did the same in 1963. What had been known in British English as the "colour bar", and in American English as "segregation", reached its furthest development in the Republic of South Africa under the Afrikaans name "Apartheid". While African Nationalists were calling for Black rule in Africa, the first president of the Republic of South Africa held that it was only fair that white people should be in charge because they were more civilized.

Almost every facet of life in Southern Africa was dominated by the institutionalized racial classifications, separations, and inequalities of the Apartheid system, an injustice that put South Africa increasingly at odds with international opinion throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The symbolic face of the struggle against Apartheid was Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress militia, who was in prison from 1964 to 1990, and served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.