The role of the international community towards dismantling the apartheid regime in South Africa: 1960-1990.
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Date
2018
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Publisher
University of Zululand
Abstract
This research study delves into the role of the international community towards dismantling the apartheid regime in South Africa during the period 1960-1990. It argues that racial discrimination in apartheid South Africa came into being gradually over the centuries of white settlement that began when the Dutch East India Company founded a colony on the Cape in 1652. Dutch settlers were joined by English colonials who fought and won control of South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. White control followed independence from Britain and the descendents of Dutch setters regained political power when the Afrikaner-dominated National Party (NP), which governed South Africa until 1994, won all-white elections in 1948. One of the National Party’s main goals was to codify centuries of de facto white domination. The legislative cornerstones of apartheid – including the Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 (prohibiting marriage between people of different races), the Population Registration Act and Group Areas Act, both of 1950, the Reservation of Separate Amenities and Bantu Education Bills both of 1953 – constructed distinct racial categories, and sought to ensure that racial groups were kept physically separate; and that black, Asian, and coloured South Africans receive inferior education and remain weak in political and economic terms. This research study posits that collective action against apartheid came out of, and involved, a number of different historical experiences, related to different historical processes and structural contexts. The reaction of the outside world to the development of apartheid was widespread and posed a sustained challenge to the South African regime, which, facing myriad internal and external threats, eventually capitulated to make way for a new, democratic dispensation during the 1990s. Central to the argument in this research study is that while countries throughout the world took various measures to weaken and topple apartheid, it was particularly the anti-apartheid movements in the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (USA), support from the Soviet Union, pressure by the United Nations (UN), the OAU and the Frontline States that mounted the most serious of these challenges to the apartheid state.
Description
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the academic requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of History, Faculty of Arts at the University of Zululand, 2018.
Keywords
Apartheid, History -- South Africa