The United Nations has been concerned with the issue of racial discrimination since its inception. The UN General Assembly adopted on 19 November during its first session a resolution declaring that "it is in the higher interests of humanity to put an immediate end to religious and so-called racial persecution and discrimination", and calling on "Governments and responsible authorities to conform both to the letter and to the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations, and to take the most prompt and energetic steps to that end".
Racial discrimination became one of the main items on the United Nations agenda after African nations attained independence and after the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa on 21 March sensitized world opinion to the perils of apartheid and racial discrimination. The General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and the Commission on Human Rights have devoted thousands of meetings to the discussions on racial discrimination and adopted hundreds of resolutions.
Racial discrimination is now being condemned by all Governments, and racially discriminatory legislation has been abrogated by most Member States. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a body of independent experts monitoring the implementation of the International Convention, has had some success in persuading Governments to take further action.
The progress made by these efforts should not be minimized. Yet, the Durban Conference pointed out with grave concern that, despite all the efforts of the international community, countless human beings continued to be victims of racial discrimination. New developments worldwide, such as the greatly increased migration, have led to a resurgence of manifestations of racism.
Xenophobia has also caused violent conflicts and even genocide. Why is it that the international community, which achieved remarkable success in dealing with apartheid in South Africa, has been as yet unsuccessful in eliminating racial discrimination from Earth? And are there any further lessons to be learned from the struggle against apartheid? It must be recognized at the outset that apartheid was a unique case of blatant racism.
Although it was initially difficult to organise workers into a multiracial trade union, this was finally achieved in the s when the South African Congress of Trade Unions SACTU was formed in The formation of solid trade unions was influenced by the repressive industrial laws like the Native Labour Settlement of Disputes Act of and Industrial Conciliation Act of passed by the government.
Institutionalising Apartheid National Party leaders D. Here are a few of the pillars on which apartheid rested: Population Registration Act, - This Act demanded that people be registered according to their racial group. People would then be treated differently according to their population group, and so this law formed the basis of apartheid.
It was however not always that easy to decide what racial group a person was part of, and this caused some problems. Group Areas Act, - This was the Act that started physical separation between races, especially in urban areas.
The Act also called for the removal of some groups of people into areas set aside for their racial group. People from these areas were then placed in townships outside of the town.
They could not own property here, only rent it, as land could only be white owned. This Act caused much hardship and resentment. People lost their homes, were moved off land they had owned for many years and were moved to undeveloped areas far away from their place of work. Bantu Education Act, - established an inferior education system for Africans based upon a curriculum intended to produce manual laborers and obedient subjects. Similar discriminatory education laws were also imposed on Coloureds, who had lost the right to vote in , and Indians.
The government denied funding to mission schools that rejected Bantu Education, leading to the closure of many of the best schools for Africans. In the higher education sector, the Extension of University Education Act of prevented black students from attending "white" universities except with government permission and created separate and unequal institutions for Africans, Coloureds, and Indians respectively.
The apartheid government also undermined intellectual and cultural life through intense censorship of books, movies, and radio and television programs. The Suppression of Communism Act, originally introduced as the Unlawful Organisations Bill - The Act was introduced in an attempt to curb the influence of the CPSA and other formations that opposed the government's apartheid policy. The Act was progressively tightened up in , , and yearly from The Defiance Campaign Part of the large crowd that assembled at Fordsburg to protest.
Labour struggles The struggle was also extended to the labour community but the struggle in this section was crippled by a lack of unity among the working class, which was polarised along racial lines. Apartheid and reactions to it. A history of Apartheid in South Africa. Know something about this topic? The evolution of Nelson Mandela — Mandela sits with his wife, Graca Machel, and his grandchildren at his son's funeral on January 15, He disclosed that his son, Makgatho Lewanika Mandela, had died of AIDS and said the disease should be given publicity so people would stop viewing it as extraordinary.
Here, artists who performed at the event surround him. The evolution of Nelson Mandela — Former U. The 9-foot statue faces the Houses of Parliament. The evolution of Nelson Mandela — Then-U. Story highlights Apartheid was more than racial segregation It was a brutalizing regime of laws that ripped families apart and led to violence Nelson Mandela is revered for his role in helping bring down the system. Ellen Moshweu was just trying to go to church. A police officer shot her in the back on that November day in David Mabeka was at home in , sleeping through a newly declared South African government state of emergency, when police burst in to his home and took him away.
A young black man, just trying to get home, was thrown into the back of a police van and taken to jail despite the indignity of presenting a white police officer valid identity papers. The officer crumpled the pass at the man's feet and took him to jail anyway. Thaabo Moorsi, "severely tortured and detained. For many too young or too distant to remember, apartheid is little more than a distant historical fact, a system of forced segregation to learn about in history class, to condemn and to move on.
But for South Africans who survived the decades of punishing racial classification, humiliating work rules, forced relocation and arbitrary treatment by authorities, the end of apartheid was the birth of an entirely new world, midwifed in large part by Nelson Mandela. The country's National Party -- led by the descendants of European settlers known as Afrikaners -- ushered it into existence after sweeping into power on a campaign calling for stricter racial controls amid the heavy inflow of blacks into South African cities.
Between and , South African lawmakers passed a series of increasingly oppressive laws, beginning with prohibitions on blacks and whites marrying in and culminating with laws dividing the population by race, reserving the best public facilities for whites and creating a separate, and inferior, education system for blacks.
One of the laws, the Group Areas Act, forced blacks, Indians, Asians and people of mixed heritage to live in separate areas, sometimes dividing families. Like Dutch slave holders, they relied on intimidation and discrimination to rule over their Black workers. The mining companies borrowed a tactic that earlier slaveholders and British settlers had used to control Black workers: pass laws. As early as the 18th century, these laws had required members of the Black majority, and other people of color, to carry identification papers at all times and restricted their movement in certain areas.
They were also used to control Black settlement, forcing Black people to reside in places where their labor would benefit white settlers.
A woman shows the "interior passport" that she must have to enter Cape Town during work hours, circa The rest of the time, people of color were not allowed in the cities. Those laws persisted through the 20th century as South Africa became a self-governing dominion of the United Kingdom. Between and , Britain and the Dutch-descended Afrikaners fought one another in the Boer War, a conflict that the Afrikaners eventually lost.
Anti-British sentiment continued to foment among white South Africans, and Afrikaner nationalists developed an identity rooted in white supremacy.
Though apartheid was supposedly designed to allow different races to develop on their own, it forced Black South Africans into poverty and hopelessness. Pass laws and apartheid policies prohibited Black people from entering urban areas without immediately finding a job.
It was illegal for a Black person not to carry a passbook. Black people could not marry white people. They could not set up businesses in white areas. Everywhere from hospitals to beaches was segregated.
Education was restricted. And throughout the s, the NP passed law after law regulating the movement and lives of Black people.
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