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South African activist and former president who advocated for human rights.
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large-scale removals of Africans, Indians, and Coloureds were carried out to implement the Group Areas Act, which mandated residential segregation throughout the country. More than 860,000 people were forced to move in order to divide and control racially-separate communities at a time of growing organized resistance to apartheid in urban areas; the removals also worked to the economic detriment of Indian shop owners
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In 1952, the government enacted an even more rigid law that required all African males over the age of 16 to carry a “reference book” containing personal information and employment history. Africans often were compelled to violate the pass laws to find work to support their families, so harassment, fines, and arrests under the pass laws were a constant threat to many urban Africans.
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Protest against the Pass Laws
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Protest against the Pass Laws
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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.
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The Bantustans (also known as “homelands”) were a cornerstone of the “grand apartheid” policy of the 1960s and 1970s, justified by the apartheid government as benevolent “separate development.”
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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—a step toward the government’s ultimate goal of having no African citizens of South Africa.
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Between 1976 and 1981, four homelands—Transkei, Venda, Bophuthatswana, and Ciskei—were declared “independent” by Pretoria, and eight million Africans lost their South African citizenship. None of the homelands were recognized by any other country.
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By the time the increasingly expensive and ineffective pass laws were repealed in 1986, they had led to more than 17 million arrests.
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Released in 1990, he participated in the eradication of apartheid and in 1994 became the first Black president of South Africa, forming a multiethnic government to oversee the country’s transition.
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Limiting African political rights to the homelands was widely opposed, and, in 1986, South African citizenship was restored to those people who were born outside the four “independent” homelands.