-
While he was born in the Eastern Cape village of Mvezo, the only son of his father's third wife, Nelson Mandela spend most of his early childhood in Qunu and later moved to Mqhekezweni after his father died.
-
Although many of the segregationist policies dated back to the early decades of the twentieth century, it was the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948 that marked the beginning of legalized racism's harshest features called Apartheid.
-
The Population registration Act (Act No 30 of 1950 ) was repealed by the South African parliament. The Act was a pillar of the Apartheid system. It required people to register from birth as belonging to one of four different racial groups, White, Black, Coloured and Indian.
-
Thousands of Coloureds, Blacks, and Indians were removed from areas classified for white occupation. The Group Areas Act and the Land Acts maintained residential segregation.
-
The Defiance Campaign was launched on 26 June 1952, the date that became the yearly National Day of Protest and Mourning. The South African police were alerted about the action and were armed and prepared. In major South African cities, people and organizations performed acts of defiance and civil disobedience.
-
The Sharpeville massacre occurred on 21 March 1960 at the police station in the township of Sharpeville in the then Transvaal Province of the then Union of South Africa. After demonstrating against pass laws, a crowd of about 7,000 protesters went to the police station.
-
Mandela is sentenced to five years imprisonment for incitement to strike and leaving the country without a passport. He was held for six months in Pretoria prison and then transferred to Robben Island.
-
He was released unconditionally on 11 February 1990, after spending 27 years in prison. This release happened after the Apartheid government had previously offered him conditional freedom in 1985.
-
Apartheid, the Afrikaans name given by the white-ruled South Africa's Nationalist Party in 1948 to the country's harsh, institutionalized system of racial segregation, came to an end in the early 1990s in a series of steps that led to the formation of a democratic government in 1994.
-
During his presidency, Mandela also worked to protect South Africa's economy from collapse. There was also a serious need to address the economic legacy of apartheid: poverty, inequalities, unequal access to social services and infrastructure, and an economy that had been in crisis for nearly two decades.