The fact that White Dutch Colonizers were a significant minority in South Africa in the early 20th century didn’t stop them from running the government and enacting strict, racist laws in order to ensure they maintained power in the fledgling country. With its numerous diamond mines, South Africa represented enormous wealth, and the minority government wanted to hoard that wealth for themselves. An informal series of statutes and local rules designed to give native Africans second-class citizenship was codified into a national system in 1948 known as Apartheid. Blacks were not permitted to travel to certain areas of the nation without documentation, interracial marriages were forbidden, and many jobs were legally designated as “Whites Only.” Eventually Blacks would have their citizenship stripped and were forced to use passports to travel from their homes to White controlled areas. Peaceful resistance to the harsh classifications began almost immediately with sit-ins and demonstrations but leaders of these resistance efforts faced harsh penalties, and the law allowed for police to beat, jail and torture suspected dissidents at their own discretion and without trial.

In March of 1960, the white South African police force opened fire on protesters in the Black township of Sharpsville, killing 69 people. In response, the African National Congress, a revolutionary Black consciousness organization founded to resist Apartheid, made an official change of tactics, adopting a strategy of willful destruction of property through arson and other means, and ANC leader Nelson Mandela founded “uMkhonto we Sizwe” (MK) as an armed and militant wing of the party. In 1962, Mandela was arrested and jailed for conspiracy to overthrow the state and would remain imprisoned for 27 years. However, the battle raged on in his absence. In June 1976, residents of the Black township Soweto rose up in protest the adoption of Afrikaans, the White minority language, as the official language of education. Some 20,000 protesters, mostly students, joined in the action and police again opened fire on the unarmed crowd and engaged in acts of brutality. Though official numbers claim that 167 Africans were killed that day, unofficial estimates place the number at closer to 700. The following day, white students in Johannesburg marched in support of the protestors while riots and work strikes were sparked in townships across the nation. Even in the absence of Mandela, MK continued military actions against the ruling National Party, carrying out a series of bomb attacks on government targets between 1976 and 1987. Facing pressure both internationally and internally, as well as the threat of full-blown civil war, the South African government secretly entered into bi-lateral negotiations with Mandela to end apartheid. On February 11, 1980, Mandela was released from prison signaling an imminent end to the cruel and racist system. South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994 and on May 10th of that year Mandela was inaugurated as the country’s first Black president.

The movement to end Apartheid was not just a political one but one of global consciousness that encompassed art, film, theatre, and music across the African Diaspora and beyond. South African artists like jazz legend Hugh Masakela and singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba would directly address the plight of Black South Africans in their work, American musical artists formed the super group Artists United Against Apartheid, which consisted of dozens of performers from Miles Davis to Bob Dylan to Lionel Richie who released a song against Apartheid, and Paul Simon’s 1986 multi-platinum Graceland -- made in collaboration with Black South African musicians including the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo -- helped bring international attention the situation there.