Anti-Apartheid Movement

Some movements win by force and some by negotiation; the anti-apartheid movement won largely by isolation, a decades-long campaign of protest, boycott and international pressure that made South Africa's system of racial segregation too costly for its own governing party to sustain.

Inside South Africa, organisations including the African National Congress led decades of resistance to apartheid, from the 1950s Defiance Campaign through underground organising after the ANC itself was banned in 1960. Internationally, the movement built a sustained campaign of economic sanctions, sporting boycotts and cultural isolation that turned apartheid South Africa into a global pariah state through the 1970s and 1980s, coordinated by exiled ANC leadership and sympathetic governments and organisations well beyond South Africa's own borders.

That combined pressure, domestic resistance the government could not fully suppress and international costs it could not indefinitely absorb, brought F.W. de Klerk's government to the negotiating table by 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison and the ANC was unbanned. The Convention for a Democratic South Africa talks that followed, and the country's first fully democratic election in 1994, were the movement's outcome rather than a separate development: the negotiated transition this atlas's own entry on South Africa describes became possible only once the anti-apartheid movement had made the old system too expensive to keep.