Why go
This chapter helps connect places associated with resistance to the political transition they helped bring about. It also prevents 1994 from seeming like a sudden, uncomplicated ending: negotiations followed decades of organising, repression, international pressure and conflict. The change reached communities across the country.
The full story
Opposition to apartheid grew inside and outside South Africa through the 1980s. It included community action, organised political resistance, international campaigns and economic pressure. In 1990, President F. W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of the African National Congress and other movements and the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison. Negotiations followed amid continuing tension and violence. Apartheid laws were dismantled in the early 1990s, opening the way to the country’s first national election with universal adult suffrage in 1994. That election was a decisive political change, but it did not erase the spatial and economic effects of earlier policies. Sites tied to imprisonment, protest or forced removal therefore speak both to the struggle for voting rights and to questions that continued after democracy began. Treat the transition as a process involving many people and organisations, rather than a single speech or date.