Topic summary
History of South Africa (1948–1994)
From top to bottom; left to right:
- President Pieter Willem Botha at a public appearance in 1989, the old South African flag is being held up in the background.
- Photograph of segregational signs at a South-African train station.
- Funeral of the Cradock Four.
- Nelson Mandela burns his passbook in 1960 as part of a civil disobedience campaign against apartheid.
- Anti-Apartheid Movement sign on a London double-decker bus in 1989.
- F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela in Philadelphia during their negotiations to end apartheid in 1993.
South West Africa (today Namibia)
In the history of South Africa, the Apartheid era (1948–1994) was the period of white-minority rule established with the promulgation of the Apartheid system of racial segregation in 1948. The Apartheid era began with the election of the National Party (NP) in the 1948 South African general election whose governments established white minority rule of a majority black African country. In the 1990s, formal negotiations to end apartheid and the white-minority government of the National Party culminated in the 1994 South African general election, wherein all South Africans of every race were free to vote for their government.