South Africa is a country of about 62 million people with twelve official languages, and its politics for most of the twentieth century were organised around the legal classification of people by race. That system ended in 1994, within living memory of most adults you will meet.
Before 1948
Segregation predated apartheid. The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted African land ownership to seven percent of the country, later thirteen, and forced millions into labour migration. The mining economy was built on that arrangement.
Apartheid
The National Party won the 1948 election on the platform of apartheid, meaning separateness, and legislated it comprehensively: the Population Registration Act classifying every person by race, the Group Areas Act determining where each group could live, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, and the Bantu Education Act designing a school system for subordinate roles. District Six in Cape Town and Sophiatown in Johannesburg were declared white and bulldozed, displacing tens of thousands. The District Six Museum, run by former residents, tells that story from the inside.
Resistance
The Defiance Campaign of 1952, the Freedom Charter of 1955, the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 in which police killed 69 people at a pass protest, and the Soweto uprising of 1976 mark the escalation. The ANC and PAC were banned and turned to armed struggle. Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rivonia Trial in 1964.
Robben Island
Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years on an island 7 km off Cape Town, in a cell measuring roughly two by two and a half metres, breaking limestone in a quarry whose glare permanently damaged his eyes. The island is now a museum and World Heritage site, and the tours are led by former political prisoners. Ferries leave from the V and A Waterfront and are cancelled in rough weather, so book early in your stay and go on a calm day.
Transition
F W de Klerk unbanned the ANC in February 1990 and Mandela was released nine days later. Negotiations continued through severe violence until the first non-racial election on 27 April 1994, now Freedom Day. Mandela was inaugurated at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. Archbishop Desmond Tutu coined the phrase Rainbow Nation, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he chaired heard testimony from victims and perpetrators in public between 1996 and 1998, offering amnesty in exchange for full disclosure.
Now
The constitution of 1996 is among the most progressive in the world. Political equality has not delivered economic equality: South Africa records some of the highest measured inequality anywhere, unemployment is severe, and the spatial geography of apartheid is still visible in every city. Visitors are welcome to ask about this; South Africans discuss it openly and without euphemism.