Apartheid

Apartheid was the system of institutionalized racial segregation and stratification enforced by law in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s, formally classifying the entire population into racial categories, principally White, Black, Coloured, and Indian, and using that classification to determine where a person could live, work, own property, attend school, and exercise political rights, with the White minority reserving political power and the most favorable economic and social status for itself. Central mechanisms included the Population Registration Act, which assigned every individual a legal racial classification, the Group Areas Act, which enforced residential segregation and forcibly relocated millions of people, and the Bantustan or homeland system, which stripped Black South Africans of South African citizenship by nominally assigning them to one of several notionally self-governing ethnic territories. Sustained internal resistance, led substantially by the African National Congress and allied organizations, combined with growing international economic and diplomatic isolation, including sporting and cultural boycotts and sanctions, placed increasing pressure on the system from the 1970s onward. Apartheid was formally dismantled between 1990 and 1994 under President F. W. de Klerk, culminating in South Africa's first fully democratic, multiracial elections in 1994, and it remains one of the most extensively studied cases in comparative sociology and political science of a legally codified racial caste system imposed by a modern state.