66 Fun Facts About Apartheid

Which Communist Party leader's 1993 assassination pushed negotiators to agree a date for South Africa's first democratic election?

Chris Hani's killer was quickly caught because an Afrikaner woman who saw him called the police.

Which South African prime minister lost power in the 1948 election that began apartheid?

Jan Smuts had written the first draft of the UN Charter's preamble three years before he lost to the apartheid campaign.

Which 1949 law was among the first pieces of apartheid legislation?

The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act was followed in 1950 by the Immorality Amendment Act, which banned sex across the colour line too.

Apartheid officials sometimes classified race by pushing which object into a person's hair and telling them to shake?

A pencil that stayed put in the hair marked a person for the lower classification, such as Black rather than Coloured.

Which 1950 law carved cities into zones where only one race could own property or live?

The Group Areas Act was used to force many people of colour out of neighbourhoods declared white.

What is the title of Trevor Noah's memoir about his childhood under apartheid?

Born a Crime: his parents' relationship was illegal when he was born in 1984, and it was decriminalised only a year later.

Which chief minister of the KwaZulu homeland founded the Inkatha movement in 1975?

Mangosuthu Buthelezi called for a boycott of the 1994 election, then brought his party into the vote just days before polling.

Which homeland was the first that South Africa declared 'independent'?

Transkei's first leader, Kaiser Matanzima, was related to Nelson Mandela but split with him over working with the apartheid government.

Johannesburg's Soweto takes its name from an abbreviation of what?

South Western Townships became Soweto after the city council ran a competition for a collective name, adopting it in 1963.

Which Johannesburg suburb was demolished from 1955, its black residents moved to Meadowlands in Soweto?

Sophiatown's removals began on 9 February 1955, when 2,000 police armed with rifles moved out the first families.

Which Cape Town neighbourhood did the government declare whites-only in 1966, then demolish?

District Six's homes were bulldozed and its people scattered to townships, while much of the cleared land stayed empty for decades.

What nickname did black South Africans give the passbook they had to carry at all times in white areas?

Dompas checks meant anyone caught without one could be arrested and jailed, and the pass laws led to millions of arrests.

In 1956, women marching on Pretoria against the pass laws sang that touching the women meant striking what?

A rock, the song said; the marchers also left thousands of petitions at Prime Minister Strijdom's office and stood in silence for 30 minutes.

Which PAC leader was detained under a clause named after him?

Sobukwe's three-year sentence ended in 1963, but the clause kept extending his detention, and he was held in solitary confinement on Robben Island until 1969.

Which schools nearly all closed when the 1953 Bantu Education Act ended their state support?

Mission schools shut almost everywhere, and the state system that replaced them enrolled more children but in badly overcrowded, ill-equipped schools.

Which post did Hendrik Verwoerd hold from 1950 while crafting the laws that made him 'Architect of Apartheid'?

As minister of native affairs, Verwoerd also took charge of African education, shaping it to prepare black pupils for labouring jobs rather than higher study.

In which country was Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister assassinated in 1966, born?

The Netherlands was his birthplace in 1901, and his father moved the family to South Africa in 1903 out of sympathy for the Boers after their war with Britain.

Who fatally stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd during a sitting of South Africa's House of Assembly in September 1966?

A parliamentary messenger, Dimitri Tsafendas, was ruled insane and detained indefinitely, and he died still in detention in 1999.

In 1996, South Africa's national football team hosted and won which tournament?

The Africa Cup of Nations was won by a racially mixed South African side, after decades in which the country's football had been split by race.

On 21 March 1960, police opened fire on pass-law protesters in which township, killing 69 people?

Sharpeville's crowd had answered the Pan-Africanist Congress's call to leave passbooks at home and offer themselves for arrest.

21 March, anniversary of the 1960 police shootings of pass-law protesters, is which South African public holiday?

Human Rights Day shares 21 March with the UN's International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which commemorates the same shootings.

Which British prime minister delivered the 'Wind of Change' speech in Cape Town in 1960?

Harold Macmillan told South Africa's Parliament a 'wind of change' was blowing through Africa as colonies sought self-rule, and spoke frankly against apartheid.

On 31 May 1961, the day it became a republic, South Africa withdrew from which organisation?

South Africa was readmitted to The Commonwealth in 1994, after its first multiracial election, 33 years after leaving.

Where was the Freedom Charter adopted at the 1955 Congress of the People?

Police broke up the Kliptown gathering, and more than 150 activists were later charged with treason.

The Black Sash, formed in 1955, was an anti-apartheid organisation made up of whom?

White women in the Black Sash wore black sashes at vigils, first protesting the government's plan to strip Coloured voters from the common roll.

Nelson Mandela co-founded which armed wing of the ANC in 1961?

Umkhonto we Sizwe launched its sabotage campaign on 16 December 1961, striking at the apartheid government's installations.

The Rivonia Trial followed a 1963 police raid on which Johannesburg-area property?

Papers seized at Liliesleaf Farm incriminated Mandela, already serving a prison term, so he was put on trial with the others.

What sentence did Judge Quartus de Wet give Mandela at the end of the Rivonia Trial in 1964?

Life imprisonment spared Mandela the death sentence his own lawyers had feared.

Mandela's prisoner number, 466/64, later named his global campaign against what?

HIV/AIDS was the target: Mandela turned his old prison number into the name of a campaign and concerts raising money and awareness.

Robben Island takes its name from the Dutch word for which animal?

Seal Island is what Robben Island means, and the Dutch were already sending political prisoners there in the 17th century.

Which later South African president served ten years on Robben Island from 1963?

Jacob Zuma helped rebuild ANC underground structures in Natal after his release in 1973, then went into exile.

From which prison did Mandela walk free on 11 February 1990?

Victor Verster Prison held Mandela for his last 14 months, not in a cell but in a house in the prison grounds.

What does Mandela's Xhosa forename, Rolihlahla, colloquially mean?

Troublemaker is the colloquial sense of Rolihlahla; the English name Nelson came later, from his primary-school teacher, Miss Mdingane.

Sam Nzima's photograph of which dying 12-year-old became the symbol of the Soweto uprising?

Hector Pieterson became the face of the uprising, yet 15-year-old Hastings Ndlovu is also recognised as among the first students killed that day.

Steve Biko led which anti-apartheid movement of the late 1960s and 1970s?

Black Consciousness urged black South Africans to shed any sense of inferiority and organise independently, as Biko did by co-founding SASO.

How did Steve Biko die in September 1977?

Brain injuries in custody killed Biko after police drove him naked 740 miles to a Pretoria prison hospital, and the officers were cleared.

Who played Steve Biko in Richard Attenborough's 1987 film about him and Donald Woods?

Denzel Washington played Biko in a film built on books by Donald Woods, the editor who escaped to Lesotho months after Biko's death.

The 1984 Tricameral Parliament had houses for whites and which two other groups?

Coloureds and Indians got their own chambers, but the black majority was still excluded from Parliament altogether.

Which cricketer's selection for England's 1968-69 tour of South Africa did PM Vorster refuse to accept?

Basil D'Oliveira was called up as a replacement for an injured player, and the tour was then called off.

In 1970, which sporting body formally expelled South Africa over its racist sports policies?

The International Olympic Committee had invited South Africa to the 1968 Games, then reversed course and kept it out.

Which London stadium hosted the televised 1988 concert marking Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday?

Wembley Stadium's concert launched the Anti-Apartheid Movement's 'Nelson Mandela: Freedom at 70' campaign, broadcast around the world.

Who wrote 'Free Nelson Mandela', the Special AKA's 1984 protest single?

Jerry Dammers got the idea for the song at a 1983 London concert marking Mandela's 65th birthday.

Which E Street Band guitarist wrote the 1985 protest single 'Sun City'?

Steven Van Zandt's song urged a cultural boycott, using Sun City, a luxury resort in the Bophuthatswana homeland, as a symbol of apartheid.

Congress overrode which president's veto to pass the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act?

The Republican-controlled Senate joined the override, a sign of how strong the anti-apartheid movement had become.

Which National Party leader announced the unbanning of the ANC in a speech to parliament on 2 February 1990?

F.W. de Klerk's speech also unbanned the Communist Party and the PAC, and nine days later Mandela walked free.

Who could vote in South Africa's March 1992 referendum on continuing talks to end apartheid?

Whites only took part, and almost 69% of them endorsed the government's reforms, so the talks to end apartheid went on.

Long before Mandela's 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, which ANC president had won it for 1960?

Albert Luthuli was honoured for leading non-violent resistance to racial discrimination while under a government ban confining him to his rural home.

The multi-party negotiations that opened in December 1991 were known by which acronym?

CODESA's second plenary in May 1992 deadlocked over how large a majority should be needed to write the new constitution.

South Africa's first all-race election, on 27 April 1994, is commemorated by which holiday?

Freedom Day marks the first election in which South Africans of every race could vote, and it brought Mandela to power.

Which power-sharing cabinet did Mandela lead from 1994?

The Government of National Unity gave cabinet seats to rival parties, but the National Party quit it in 1996.

Who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in 1996?

Perpetrators could apply for amnesty in exchange for full disclosure of their crimes.

Which phrase for post-apartheid South Africa did its famous Anglican archbishop popularise?

Rainbow Nation was taken up by Mandela, who pledged to build 'a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world'.

At the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, Mandela wore a Springbok jersey and gave the trophy to which captain?

Francois Pienaar's story became Clint Eastwood's 2009 film Invictus, with Matt Damon as the captain and Morgan Freeman as Mandela.

Perpetrators who testified before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission could apply for what?

Amnesty required full disclosure of politically motivated crimes, and a guarantee of it had been written into the interim constitution.

The 'crime of apartheid' is a crime against humanity under the 1998 Rome Statute that created which body?

The definition covers such policies anywhere, not only in South Africa.

What is the title of Nelson Mandela's 1994 autobiography?

Long Walk to Freedom grew from a manuscript Mandela wrote while imprisoned on Robben Island.

What name did the ANC give its programme of passive resistance launched in June 1952?

The Defiance Campaign's volunteers signed a pledge, then deliberately broke apartheid laws so that they would be arrested.

Which prime minister became South Africa's first executive state president in 1984?

P.W. Botha's reforms split his own party, whose right wing broke away in 1982 to form the Conservative Party.

What happened to the South African citizenship of black people assigned to a 'homeland'?

They lost it under a 1970 law, and in 1994 the homelands were reincorporated and their residents regained full South African citizenship.

Which house did the government enlarge in 1955 so it could remove Coloured voters from the Cape's common roll?

The Senate's new National Party members gave the government the two-thirds majority it needed in a joint sitting of both houses.

End Conscription Campaign activists opposed sending white conscripts to fight in which country's war?

Angola's war drew SADF conscripts, and the End Conscription Campaign also campaigned against sending troops into black townships.

In 1975, South Africa signed a secret security agreement with which country, revealed by declassified papers in 2010?

Israel's defence minister Shimon Peres signed it; the declassified minutes were said to show an offer of nuclear warheads, which he denied.

Through which body did apartheid South Africa's 1980s 'securocrats' shape government policy?

The State Security Council, the Truth Commission later found, had sanctioned violence against apartheid's opponents.

A Truth Commission hearing heard that apartheid's Project Coast had supplied beer laced with which element?

Thallium-laced beer was on the programme's supply list, yet its head, Wouter Basson, was found not guilty of all charges in 2002.

How did ex-minister Adriaan Vlok apologise to activist Frank Chikane in 2006?

Washing his feet was Vlok's act of seeking Christian forgiveness from Chikane, whom apartheid agents had tried to poison in 1989.

In 2019, a South African court classified public displays of which item as hate speech?

The 1928-1994 national flag's public display was classed as hate speech, and offenders now faced serious legal penalties.