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Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born into a world of gross injustice in 1931. Like most black South Africans his family had little money. They lived in a small hut without electricity or running water. All blacks were required to carry a passport containing all their details and this included Tutu's father, who was a respected teacher. The white police force often stopped blacks and asked them to produce their passports. This was only one consequence of white political policy in South Africa which had been aimed at maintaining white supremacy in South Africa since 1910. In 1948 the situation for coloreds deteriorated dramatically in South Africa: Elections were held in which only white South Africans were entitled to vote. The National Party, whose declared aim was apartheid, that is, segregation of the races, emerged as the winners of the election. They had promised to introduce laws against blacks in order to secure white rule. South Africa's new ruling party made segregation, discrimination and suppression of coloreds its top priority. The first laws to be passed by the new government were targeted at achieving systematic segregation of the different races in daily and in political life. All of South Africa's citizens were categorized according to the color of their skin: People were categorized as white, colored (mixed), Asians and natives (blacks). This was an extremely complicated task, for there were seven sub-groups for coloreds and eight sub-groups for blacks depending on the language spoken. Relationships and marriage between whites and non-whites were forbidden and made illegal. Non-whites were suppressed politically by banning all gatherings. This was intended to prevent the possibility of a political opposition arising. Set against this background, it is clear that coloreds were at an economic disadvantage. They were exploited for their labor, were paid much less, were banned from forming trade unions and had no right to strike. Among one of the worse laws, which directly affected Tutu - who was working as a teacher at the time - and which awoke his political awareness, was the Bantu Education Act. The aim of this law was to ensure that black children received an inferior education to their white counterparts. The then Prime Minister Verwoerd believed that South Africa didn't need any well-educated blacks. Instead, he believed that they should be taught to serve whites.
But things were not going to be made easy for the government in Pretoria. Resistance to the changes grew up quickly, firstly in the form of the African National Congress (ANC), Nelson Mandela's party, and the ruling party in South African today under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki. The ANC called for civil disobedience among South Africa's population. This civil disobedience was crushed by police violence and ended with the ANC being banned in 1960 and its leader, Nelson Mandela, being arrested with his friend in 1964. A new resistance movement grew up under the leadership of the student Steve Biko and was called the Black Consciousness Movement. Its aim was to encourage black self-confidence. This movement was not averse to using violence in order to achieve its aims. On his return to Johannesburg in 1975 as the Dean of the Anglican Church following a long stay abroad, Tutu was horrified at the degree to which the situation in South Africa had changed in his absence: A situation close to civil war was characteristic of South Africa during the 70s and 80s. Shops and cars were set on fire, hundreds of people were killed, children were at the forefront instead of going to school and even black "informers" were being hung. South Africa had become a police state and the black youth had become radical. Change had to come quickly, if disaster was to be averted. The government in Pretoria also became fearful of the situation. Black resistance had spread out from small groups that could be easily eliminated to become a powerful force that could only be tamed with concessions. The international pressure on South African had also increased thanks to the work of Desmond Tutu among others. By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Tuto in 1984, the international community made a political statement that it regarded the apartheid regime in South Africa as a threat to peace and unjust.
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Subjects: Human
Rights I Democracy I Parties
I Examples I
Europe
I
Globalisation
I United Nations
I Sustainability
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