Was Nelson Mandela's decision to support the move to armed struggle justified - Essay Example

Totally within and entirely dependent on South Africa is the small independent nation of Lesotho. Colonization in South Africa In the 1870s, the British operating from their main base in Cape Colony attempted to try and bring about a total political unification of the various states that they ruled in the region. The Anglo-Boer South African war that was fought between 1899-1902 allowed the entire South Africa to come completely under the rule of the British for the first time and with this, the movement by the British to try and secure the total unification of the four colonies was considerably intensified.

Despite the union having a constitution that was heavily white supremacist and the region being mainly dominated by Afrikaners, the British were seen to welcome the formation of the new union (Page, 2003). After 1910, the South African government was seen to mostly be in the hands of several advocates who were advocating for a general policy of conciliation in South Africa. In 1948 the “Purified” Nationalists party finally managed to come into power in South Africa and managed to hold on to power for over 40 years, until 1994.

It was during this period that the party oversaw the creation and general implementation of the South African apartheid policy (Page, 2003). The Apartheid System in South Africa To a large extent, the South African National Party was seen to largely seen to build on a general principle of racial segregation that had been largely existent even before the establishment of the Union of South Africa. Various legislation governing urban and land in the country that had been established during 1923 and 1913 had for the most part set the necessary frame work that was needed for the successful formation of a segregationist society.

In 1943 and 1946, the government formed legislation that helped it segregate Natal Indians with 1926 seen the extension of the job color bar (Riccucci, 1995). All the Individuals who came into power in South Africa in the year 1948 were all seen to believe that they had an actual formula that would aid them in ensuring the successful future of white minority rule in South Africa. Some of the measures implemented during this period in South Africa included the removal of blacks from the common voters’ roll, the continual tightening of the job color bar, the provision of an extremely inferior and separate education system for black in the country.

To further advance these segregationist policies, all persons in the country were forced to live in specific racially defined “group areas” while various black African territories that were referred to as “Bantustans” were also created. These Bantustans were designed to allow black Africans to exercise their political rights strictly within the confines of these areas. The apartheid’s government Population Registration Act was seen to arbitrarily classify all South African’s based on their race, while the 1953 Reservation of separate Amenities Act was also seen to considerably tighten “petty apartheid” so as to try and eliminate any possible contact between different races (Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis, 1995).

Malan’s Successor, H. F. Verwoerd believed that these Bantustan areas could be lead to some form of independence and in time, four of these Bantustan a