"The meaning of the clothing I am wearing is to love and accept our culture," Vuma says. Police officers arrived in the middle of the night, using dogs to herd them into pickup trucks and dumping them - and their belongings, if they were lucky - sometimes hundreds of miles away in densely populated areas that offered little hope for making a living.Lee-Ann Olwage Mthulic Vee Vuma, a 21-year-old studying public management at West Coast College, wears traditional Xhosa clothing and jewelry in front of a shack in Khayelitsha. Thousands of blacks were forcibly removed from their homes. Though whites accounted for less than 20 percent of the population, they kept control of more than 80 percent of the land.
Blacks were assigned to small patches called “homelands” scattered around the country, largely based on tribal affiliation. Its aim was to divide the country by race under a separate but equal doctrine that was anything but. Officially, apartheid, which means apartness in the white settlers’ language of Afrikaans, was established in 1948, though racial discrimination had long been part of South Africa’s history. With the elections, the power that had belonged to whites since European settlers first arrived near Cape Town more than 300 years before passed to a newly elected Parliament as diverse as any in the world. Officials would later declare that there had not been a single election-related fatality. Millions of black South Africans, finally full citizens in the land of their ancestors, stood in line for hours, patiently waiting for the chance to vote for new leaders and end the brutal subjugation of the apartheid system. Yet, the final transfer of power was a remarkably peaceful, joyful four days. A mob stoned and stabbed an American volunteer to death, shouting “one settler, one bullet.” And in the black townships, political rivalries set off deadly attacks in which people were burned alive. White supremacists assassinated a young black leader in his driveway. Some expected the end of apartheid in South Africa to set off a civil war.Īs elections approached 25 years ago - the first in which citizens of all races were able to vote - horrific acts of violence threatened to undermine the hopes for a South Africa freed from white minority rule.
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