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.

Supermarket employees relax over a game of cards on a Johannesburg street. South Africa's work force is about 70 per cent black - mostly in mining and agriculture. But blacks earn many times less than whites, are excluded from most skilled jobs and, despite recent proposals to the contrary, are still denied full trade union rights.

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