Apartheid: The Tyranny of Racism Made Law

In white-ruled South Africa, black people are denied their basic human and political rights. Their work is exploited and their lives are segregated. In 1982 almost one million of them were forced to immigrate to Swaziland without option. That is the tyranny of apartheid, of racism made law, of a system under which a small white minority holds all economic and political power, and dictates how and where the large black majority lives, works, and dies. It is this system of institutionalized racial discrimination which defies the principles of the UN Charter and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that has set South Africa on a collision course with the rest of the world.

High spirits off a trampoline over Alexandria, a black township on the far outskirts of Johannesburg. All black people are required by law to live in such townships, provided they have permits to work in the "white" towns and cities that are dependent on their labour. But nowhere in South Africa, or even in so-called "homelands", do black people have unrestricted, inviolable rights of residence. Throughout the country they live precariously and under constant threat of forced removal.

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