Quotes & Sayings About Apartheid

I've never doubted that apartheid - because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil - was going to bite the dust eventually. — Desmond Tutu

We're building what I call 'software apartheid.' We're in the process of creating a divided society: those who can use technology on one side, and those who can't on the other. And it happens to divide neatly along economic lines. — Alan Cooper

It must not be forgotten in fairness to the National Government that apartheid is not just a policy of oppression but an attempt - in my opinion an attempt doomed to failure - to find an alternative to a policy of racial integration which is fair to both white and black. — Harry Oppenheimer

How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist purges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people. — Walter E. Williams

Imagine if your kids had to carry a ladder to climb an apartheid wall to get to school everyday. — Omar Suleiman

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States. — Jonathan Kozol

Mr. Chairman, when I contemplate the evils of apartheid, my heart bleeds and I am sure the heart of every true blooded African bleeds. — Murtala Mohammed

There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stalinist past), police and communications are all die-hard Zuma loyalists. Whatever their line functions, they will also play the role they have played so ably to date: keeping Zuma out of court - and making sure the state serves Zuma as it once did Mbeki. — Mark Gevisser

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion. — Damon Galgut

Being a journalist, being exposed to the world, to social injustice, to intolerance, growing up here, under apartheid, benefitting from that, has all shaped who I am and what my passions are, and of course that's going to come through in my writing. — Lauren Beukes

And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you? — Antjie Krog

The deep inequalities that persist are visible reminders of the effects of apartheid and colonialism. Until these scars are healed, the vision of our Constitution will not have been achieved. — Kate O'Regan

We are in a strange kind of time, where the kind of liberation movements such as anti-apartheid movements and freedom struggles in India need to be reinvented. We need to retool them so that all the gains that our generation has made can be passed on to future generations. — Vandana Shiva

I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort. — Cornel West

My mother's husband Harry Bloom was a writer, a novelist, a reporter, and an anti-apartheid activist. — Orlando Bloom

When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school. — St. Lucia

Apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare. — Dervla Murphy

Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity. — Cornel West

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid. — John Pilger

The problem with the Bible, the Qur'an, the Torah - or any sacred text - as an authority is that so much depends on how the text is read and the interests of the reader. The Bible has been used to justify slavery, apartheid, the suppression of women, the 'evils' of sexuality, the 'evils' of homosexuality, a male-only priesthood, the denial of any priests at all, the supremacy of the Pope, the irrelevance of the Pope, the authority of the Church, a denial of the authority of the Church, a feminist agenda, war, pacifism and almost every other position that people may wish to hold. — Peter Vardy

In general, Iranians believe that all Palestinians have the right to return home and that there is no chosen people on this earth, whether Jewish, Muslim, Christian. Iran had the same policy towards apartheid South Africa and at the time when it was supporting and funding the ANC [African National Congress] among other groups in South Africa, these groups were also considered to be terrorist organizations by many western governments. — Mohammad Marandi

I liberate minds with my music. That's more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever. — Kanye West

I mean, this political correctness! It's worse than apartheid — Fredrik Backman

I was 15 years old when I first heard the name Mandela, or Madiba, as he is fondly known in Africa. In apartheid South Africa he was public enemy number one. Shrouded in secrecy, myth and rumour, the media called him 'The Black Pimpernel'. — Kumi Naidoo

The truth is that the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Movement caused a reaction that stripped Brown of its power, severed the jugular of the Voting Rights Act, closed off access to higher education, poured crack cocaine into the inner cities, and locked up more black men proportionally than even apartheid-era South Africa. — Carol Anderson

The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue. — Athol Fugard

I have made the most profound apology in front of the Truth Commission and on other occasions about the injustices which were wrought by apartheid. — F. W. De Klerk

I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time. — Tom Morello

When black fury meets white denial, you have the combustible and fundamentally changed race relations we live in today. — Ferial Haffajee

My own electorate, which I represented for 36 years as an anti-apartheid politician, had a considerable number of Jewish voters supporting me throughout my career. — Helen Suzman

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. — Desmond Tutu

BDS is perhaps the most ambitious, empowering, and promising Palestinian-led global movement for justice and rights. BDS has the capacity to challenge Israel's colonial rule and apartheid in a morally consistent, effective, and, crucially, intelligent manner. — Omar Barghouti

I would say it is because the striving and the power keep you from realizing just how helpless you really are. It protects you from facing the fact that others are manipulating you, that regardless of what you might claim, your philosophy is simply a way to rationalize what you do for others too afraid to do their own dirty work; that you are in a way also a victim of the apartheid state. You — Chris Abani

Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again. — Ruth First

Jesus used small things to describe his kingdom: a sprinkling of yeast that causes the whole loaf to rise, a pinch of salt that preserves a slab of meat, the smallest seed in the garden that grows into a great bush in which the birds of the air come to nest. Practices that used to be common - human sacrifice, slavery, duels to the death, child labor, exploitation of women, racial apartheid, debtors' prisons, the killing of the elderly and incurably ill - have been banned, in large part because of a gospel stream running through cultures influenced by the Christian faith. Once salted and yeasted, society is difficult to un-salt and un-yeast. Many — Philip Yancey

Women have always struggled with their men-folk for the abolition of slavery, the liberation of countries from colonialism, the dismantling of apartheid and the attainment of peace. It is now the turn of men to join women in their struggle for equality. — Gertrude Mongella

It is very difficult now in South Africa to find anyone who ever supported apartheid. — Desmond Tutu

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. — Nelson Mandela

There is in our society a gulf opening up, a kind of cultural apartheid, between those who are brought up to feel our national culture is theirs, to take ownership of it, and enjoy the privileges of that, and those who are completely disfranchised, those - for example - who will never be taken to the theatre to see Shakespeare. — Richard Eyre

My time in prison only deepened my resolve against apartheid. Even while I was in prison, I fought against it, teaching my cellmates about white supremacy and how to fight against it. — Nelson Mandela

When I was a school kid in Coventry, I used to put up anti-apartheid stickers. — Jerry Dammers

Uninformed and yet open to appeals for justice as they are, Americans are capable of reacting as they did to the ANC campaign against apartheid, which finally changed the balance of forces inside South Africa. — Edward Said

Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil — Steven Biko

There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp. — Chris Abani

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme. — Damon Galgut

I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you. — Achmat Dangor

When I was growing up, it was still during Apartheid, so the country was very shielded from the outside artistic world. Anything that was too subversive was basically banned. All the music that we got from outside of South Africa was the poppiest, least subversive music that you could get. — St. Lucia

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country. — Nadine Gordimer

If it were in our national security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from other American soldiers, and say, 'It's just a cultural thing'? I don't think so. I would hope not. — Martha McSally

tried to understand what I'd seen. I felt as if I'd just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury's firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library. — Alena Graedon

All my grandfather ever wanted to do
was wake up at dawn and watch my grandmother kneel and pray
in a village hidden between Jaffa and Haifa
my mother was born under an olive tree
on a soil they say is no longer mine
but I will cross their barriers, their check points
their damn apartheid walls and return to my homeland
I am an Arab woman of color and we come in all shades of anger — Rafeef Ziadah

There must be an end to white monopoly on political power, and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that the inequalities of apartheid are addressed and our society thoroughly democratized. — Nelson Mandela

There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism. — Lawrence Wright

This was the winter of 2008/9. Work was ongoing to reinstate a tram system in the city. A lot of people couldn't see the point of trams and many more disliked the disruption. Streets were closed off. There was almost a sense of 'apartheid' as the roadworks made it difficult to move from New Town to Old Town and vice versa. Added to which, the weather was fairly grim. And the banks looked ready to implode. — Ian Rankin

The so-called 'Palestinian autonomous areas' are bantustans. These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system. — Nelson Mandela

Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them - and that is what apartheid stole from us: time. — Trevor Noah

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. — Audre Lorde

The mistake the apartheid government made was they gave the black people nothing, so they had nothing to lose. But now a lot of the former freedom-fighters are big-time capitalists. They've been given directorships in every major company. They're billionaires! — Wilbur Smith

Slavery wasn't a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn't a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn't a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn't a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one. — Naomi Klein

We believe that the world, too, can destroy apartheid, firstly by striking at the economy of South Africa. — Oliver Tambo

I want my commitment to ending girl marriage to be equal to my commitment to ending apartheid. — Desmond Tutu

I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant. — Athol Fugard

I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman ... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland. — Trevor Noah

During the years I lived here, the people of Alexandra ignored tribal and ethnic distinctions. Instead of being Xhosas, or Sothos, or Zulus, or Shangaans, we were Alexandrans. We were one people, and we undermined the distinctions that the apartheid government tried so hard to impose. It saddens and angers me to see the rising hatred of foreigners. — Nelson Mandela

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid — Michelle Alexander

Encountering gender apartheid and waged slavery shook me to my roots more than half a century ago in Afghanistan. Oh, the women of Afghanistan, the women of the Muslim world. I was no feminist
but now, thinking back, I see how much I learned there, how clearly their condition taught me to see gender discrimination anywhere and, above all, taught me to see how cruel oppressed women could be to each other. They taught me about women everywhere. — Phyllis Chesler

Yet, thousands of africans and young african youths have failed to acknowledge the significant of what madiba gave them. To me, he be called the pride in black skin and the freedom we are enjoying — Victor Adeagbo

The majority of South Africans, black and white, recognize that apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. The mass campaign of defiance and other actions of our organization and people can only culminate in the establishment of democracy. — Nelson Mandela

The situation of women living in Islam-stricken
societies and under Islamic laws is the outrage
of the 21st century. Burqa-clad and veiled women
and girls, beheadings, stoning to death,
floggings, child sexual abuse in the name of
marriage and sexual apartheid are only the most
brutal and visible aspects of women's
rightlessness and third class citizen status in the Middle East — Maryam Namazie

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice. — Johnnetta B. Cole

Circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell - the strange inverse sense of apartheid. — Chris Abani

This sympathy is not translated into force against the British government because it is not like the anti- apartheid movement which had a high profile here and Mandela is a more engaging figure than Yasser Arafat. — Tom Paulin

It is bad religion to deify doctrines and creeds ... Doctrines, let's not forget, supported slavery and apartheid ... Moreover, doctrines can divide while compassion can only unite. — William Sloane Coffin

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States. — Malcolm X

To that, I say this: a few may not agree, but one of the greatest men to have walked the earth in my lifetime is Nelson Mandela. He and his people suffered tremendously under the apartheid regime, but when he took over the mantle of governing South Africa, he did not vindictively return the favour to the opposition, which would probably have sent South Africa into chaos and terminal decline. Instead he charted a way forward that started with forgiveness and inclusiveness, bringing about a smooth transition instead of possible revenge and bloodshed. Maybe some folk in cricket administration can learn something from the great man. — Michael Holding

I hadn't fought enough for the injustice of the Apartheid. — Arnon Milchan

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself. — Athol Fugard

Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different. — Adhir Kalyan

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories. — Alice Walker

As George Orwell said, it is not easy to become sane. For South Africa, perhaps it will take as many lifetimes as we have tried to put between the present and the Dutch East India Company. There are many minds if you take a good look. Eventually in the same way the measure of loss and grief does, karma will catch up with all of us. Post-apartheid South Africa is not more enlightened than her sister apartheid South Africa. You may know nothing but tell me what you feel when you think, see, act, respond and sense. What corresponds with thought, sight, action, response and your intuition? (The warrior plunders on) racism is especially a majority shareholder at all levels. We forget that it is a privilege to live in a post-apartheid South Africa. — Abigail George

No one can compare us to the apartheid regime. It's not like in South Africa between the blacks and the whites who belong to the same nation, or in Berlin where you find parents living on the eastern side and their children in the western side. — Silvan Shalom

Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa's apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral? — Walter E. Williams

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White. — J.R.R. Tolkien

We prayed earnestly that God would bless our land and would confound the machinations of the children of darkness. There had been so many moments in the past, during the dark days of apartheid's vicious awfulness, when we had preached, "This is God's world and God is in charge!" Sometimes, when evil seemed to be on the rampage and about to overwhelm goodness, one had held on to this article of faith by the skin of one's teeth. It was a kind of theological whistling in the dark and one was frequently tempted to whisper in God's ear, "For goodness' sake, why don't You make it more obvious that You are in charge? — Desmond Tutu

It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ... That's the world! On which hope sits! — Barack Obama

Israel is much worse than the original apartheid state. — Clare Short

We don't want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can't improve something that is intrinsically evil. — Desmond Tutu

But suffering from a life-threatening disease also helped me have a different attitude and perspective. It has given a new intensity to life, for I realize how much I used to take for granted-the love and devotion of my wife, the laughter and playfulness of my grandchildren, the glory of a splendid sunset, the dedication of my colleagues. The disease has helped me acknowledge my own mortality, with deep thanksgiving for the extraordinary things that have happened in my life, not least in recent times. What a spectacular vindication it has been, in the struggle against apartheid, to live to see freedom come, to have been involved in finding the truth and reconciling the differences of those who are the future of our nation. — Desmond Tutu

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church. — Nadine Gordimer

I was there during the first elections in South Africa. I watched them take down the apartheid flag and raise the new flag. — Al Sharpton

When people say it's a funny thing about them, you will probably be able to control your hysterics. They are only getting ready to announce the shattering fact that they don't like something. And it's not going to be something that's really quite awful, like suttee or apartheid; it's going to be something small. — Peg Bracken

Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children. — Nelson Mandela

Obama's not down for the civil rights struggle, and he certainly wasn't down for the apartheid struggle, but he's clearly gonna take advantage of it and insert himself in such a way as to make it look like he is single-handedly responsible for apartheid going by the wayside. — Rush Limbaugh

There is a word which sums up this 'separate but equal' mentality - Apartheid. And we all know how separate and how equal that was. — Christina Engela

There should be a class on apartheid. There should be a class on why people are hungry, but there are not. There are classes on ... gym. Physical Education. — Tupac Shakur

People are really beginning to see the mechanisms of imperialism. When colonialism existed people could see colonialism. When racial segregation existed in its apartheid form, people could see the "whites only" signs. But it's much more difficult to see the structures of neo-imperialism, neo-colonialism, neo-slavery. — Assata Shakur

White people found that freedom was indeed indivisible. We had kept saying in the dark days of apartheid's oppression that white South Africans would never be truly free until we blacks were free as well. Many thought it was just another Tutu slogan, irresponsible as all his others had been. Today they were experiencing it as a reality. I used to refer to an intriguing old film The Defiant Ones, in which Sidney Poitier was one of the stars. Two convicts escape from a chain gang. They are manacled together, the one white, the other black. They fall into a ditch with slippery sides. The one convict claws his way nearly to the top and out of the ditch but cannot make it because he is bound to his mate, who has been left at the bottom in the ditch. The only way they can make it is together as they strive up and up and up together and eventually make their way over the side wall and out. — Desmond Tutu

I discovered even before I went to jail that apartheid was not run by people who were monolithic in their approach. Some of them didn't even believe in apartheid. — Nelson Mandela

Jesus was not white, hey, he was a black man. Like our pig man, Mzwaki. All the Bible people were dark people. — Jonah Becker