Apartheid’s Long Fall

CHAPTER 10 · 1948–1990 · The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994

Now the map is red but for one charcoal country at the tip — the last and hardest case. South Africa had been under white-minority rule since 1910, but from 1948 the National Party built something more total: apartheid, a legal machine of racial separation that stripped the Black majority of citizenship, land, movement and vote, herding people into “homelands” and townships and reserving the country for a white fifth of the population. (Its architecture deserves — and will get — an atlas of its own; here it is the wall the whole liberation struggle finally reaches.) The resistance is a memoria

The turn: Mandela walks free, 11 February 1990.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.