Colloquium: Apartheid and the Anti-Apartheid Movement

This colloquium examines the rise and fall of apartheid (“separateness”), the infamous regime of racial separation and inequality that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994. We consider how apartheid built upon and differed from other regimes of colonialism and segregation in 19th and 20th century Africa. We focus on both popular resistance to oppression within South Africa and the making of a powerful international anti-apartheid movement. We examine anti-apartheid activism around issues of education, gender, health, housing, land, labor, and militarism. We conclude by debating the legacies of apartheid and the long anti-apartheid struggle for South Africa and the world. The course will hinge upon readings of both recent and classic scholarship—as well as in-class work with an array of primary sources from the anti-apartheid struggle, including archival documents, journalism, oral histories, art, literature, music, and film. 

The goals of this colloquium are to refine students’ skills as historians: as readers, researchers, and writers, using evidence to create narratives about the past, and to make arguments about change and continuity over time. Apartheid and the anti-apartheid movement offer rich material through which to develop our craft, for three reasons. First, the events that we will explore have been deeply important to modern African and global history. The stakes of this history are high. Second, narratives of these events have been deeply contested. Apartheid has inspired a vast body of research and writing, rife with lively debates. Third, this history is recent. The proximity of this past offers both distinctive challenges and opportunities. Scholars are still struggling to fit apartheid within a longer narrative of African history. The opportunity to engage with participants in the historical events we describe is a double-edged sword: while we can use oral historical methods, we often struggle to disentangle popular memories from what really happened. Generational differences amongst scholars matter to a greater extent in this field of history than in others. Young historians came of age after apartheid’s end—which can both blind us and offer critical distance, from which we are free to ask new questions about South Africa’s past, present, and future.