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The South African activist and former president Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) helped bring an end to apartheid and has been a global advocate for human rights. A member of the African National Congress party beginning in the 1940s, he was a leader of both peaceful protests and armed resistance against the white minority’s oppressive regime in a racially divided South Africa.(https://www.history.com/topics/africa/nelson-mandela)
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Nelson Mandela’s commitment to politics and the ANC grew stronger after the 1948 election victory of the Afrikaner-dominated National Party, which introduced a formal system of racial classification and segregation—apartheid—that restricted nonwhites’ basic rights and barred them from government while maintaining white minority rule. (https://www.history.com/topics/africa/nelson-mandela)
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Pass laws were designed to control the movement of Africans under apartheid. These laws evolved from regulations imposed by the Dutch and British in the 18th and 19th-century slave economy of the Cape Colony. In the 19th century, new pass laws were enacted for the purpose of ensuring a reliable supply of cheap, docile African labor for the gold and diamond mines. (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XlAnE0wcRauiJhtNwS7HgGJpnD8VRVS0-nEHalpEEBU) -
On December 5, 1956, Mandela and 155 other activists were arrested and went on trial for treason. All of the defendants were acquitted in 1961, but in the meantime tensions within the ANC escalated, with a militant faction splitting off in 1959 to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). -
In 1964, an amendment to the 1913 Land Act is introduced, which allowed for black tenants on white farms to be classified as squatters. (https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/laws-of-the-land-apartheid-south-africa-laws-1948-1993/)
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The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 declared that all Africans were citizens of “homelands,” rather than of South Africa itself. This was a step toward the government’s ultimate goal of having no African citizens in South Africa. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tp1PTODV8A1ViV1O4e6BYtLm-qzL9c52vIX2fpis-yg/edit) -
From 1960 to 1983, the apartheid government forcibly moved 3.5 million black South Africans in one of the largest mass removals of people in modern history. There were several political and economic reasons for these removals. (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1H_2ephw3hcO89Fc-cv0yfd6to1bOLmPVymxXoGR3P7M/edit) -
An agreement to restore land to its rightful owners was reached, certain communities returned to their ancestral land. (https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/laws-of-the-land-apartheid-south-africa-laws-1948-1993/)
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In 1995, the community returned to their land in Tsitsikamma, where they started a community farming project. (https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/laws-of-the-land-apartheid-south-africa-laws-1948-1993/).