Word: anc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Like other observers, the CIA now realizes the ANC is about to reach a critical point in its 70-year history. From peaceful origins, the ANC has grown into a popular movement whose political and military strength may approach the proportions needed to end white minority rule in South African permanently. And shocking though such a strike would be, the ANC's long history and the current tottering state of the regime make that overthrow seem not only inevitable but desirable...
Formed in 1912 as an exclusive organization of educated African elites seeking moderate social and political concessions for themselves, the ANC was sparked to activism just one year later, when the white ruling regime enacted the Natives Land Act. The act forbade Africans from buying or living on land in designated "white" areas. To enforce it, a massive program of national eviction shove J African residents out of entire regions. Meanwhile, a model for resistance presented itself when South Africa's Indian population organized a partly successful effort to combat the discrimination to which they were subjected. A young lawyer...
...South African government used--and today continues to use--a pass system to regulate the movement of the completely disenfranchised, and often homeless. African majority. In 1919, following Gandhi's lead, the ANC launched a year-long passive resistance anti-pass movement and publicly burned hundreds of passes. Crushed brutally by the government, the demonstrations didn't last long...
When World War II broke out in 1939, the ANC felt itself gradually pressed towards more radical mass action. Some Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch and German colonists, launched a fervent master race movement, which almost awayed the country to Nazism. Although a close and bitter battle in the South African Parliament brought the country into the war on the Allied side, a few Afrikaner paramilitary splinter groups continued to fight for a republic similar to Nazi Germany. The last South African prime minister, John Vorster, was jailed during the war as a Nazi sympathizer...
...DURING this period and shortly after that the white supremacist apartheid doctrine became embodied in South African law. The ANC and the South African Indian Congress launched massive peaceful demonstrations against apartheid in 1952, initiatives which ended in more than 8000 arrests and violent government retaliation. In 1960, police fired on an unarmed crowd of anti-pass demonstrators in Sharpeville. They killed 67 Africans within minutes, shooting many in the back. The ANC was banned, and its leadership went underground. It was only then that leaders reluctantly abandoned peaceful resistance in favor of sabotage against property...