The time during which the apartheid system of government was allowed to exist in South Africa was one of the most shameful periods in world history. Throughout the twentieth century, apartheid was used to eliminate all civil and human rights of the non-white inhabitants of South Africa. The white minority used apartheid in order to maintain their elite economic, political, and social stature. In the process, they degraded, brutalized, and murdered thousands of native Africans.

Finally, the era of inhumanity ended with the dismantling of the apartheid system and the interim non-apartheid constitution in 1993. There were many factors involved in ending apartheid. There were the courageous internal struggles, protests, strikes, boycotts, and physical confrontations, which lead to the numerous beatings and deaths of both adults and children. There were also the larger, economic, worldwide pressures initiated by various governments and multinational corporations. All of these certainly affected the decision to end apartheid, but to what extent? In this paper, I will examine the different types of external pressure used against the South African government and try to determine the amount of influence they had on the government’s decision to end apartheid.

In order to understand how much influence world sanctions had on the South African government’s decision to end apartheid, you must first understand what apartheid is, and how it came about. The situation leading to the call for sanctions against South Africa began with the introduction of apartheid in the early twentieth century. Prior to the introduction of apartheid, the indigenous Bantu people, which included the Zulu and Xhosa, inhabited the southern tip of Africa until the middle of the seventeenth century (Jones 32). The Dutch were the first Europeans to create a permanent settlement in South Africa, called Cape Town, originally established to be a midway restocking point for merchants in 1652 (Jones 32). Business was better than expected, and the Cape soon began expanding, needing more land and cheap labor. As a solution to the labor problem, the first slaves were imported six years later, in 1658, by the Dutch East India Company (Thompson 36).