The Anti-Apartheid Movement

On March 21, 1960, South African police opened fire on a crowd of Black protesters in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people and wounding over 180. The massacre drew immediate international condemnation and led the UN General Assembly to call for sanctions against South Africa. It is widely considered the turning point that transformed the anti-apartheid struggle into a global movement.

Grassroots divestment campaigns on college campuses and in city governments across the US and Europe pressured institutions to pull billions of dollars in investments from companies doing business in South Africa. The comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, passed by the US Congress over President Reagan's veto, imposed sweeping economic sanctions. These financial pressures are credited with forcing the South African government to the negotiating table.

South Africa was excluded from the Olympic Games from 1964 onward and was formally expelled from FIFA in 1976, depriving the country of international rugby, cricket, and soccer competition. Rugby, a pillar of Afrikaner national identity, was particularly hard hit by tours being cancelled. The sports boycott was one of the most emotionally resonant forms of international isolation for white South Africans.

The ANC, founded in 1912, was the primary political organization fighting apartheid, led for decades by figures like Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. After the Sharpeville Massacre, the ANC formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) in 1961 as its armed wing to conduct sabotage campaigns against government infrastructure. Mandela was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment at the 1963–64 Rivonia Trial.