29 June
On this day in 1949, a year after assuming power in South Africa, the Nationalist Party introduced apartheid with the passage of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. The Group Areas Act, determining where people can live according to their race, was passed the following year.
On the same day in 1986, Zulu Chief Gatsha Buthelezi denounced a US bill proposing sanctions against the apartheid regime. His words, asserting that blacks ‘want more jobs, not less jobs. They want more investment, not less investment’, were seized upon by US president Ronald Reagan, who urged western governments to ‘resist this emotional clamour for punitive sanctions’. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher lined up alongside Buthelezi and Reagan, and against the ‘terrorist’ Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress.
Red Pepper in print
Subscribe to get the latest issue of the magazine
#233: Democracy on the Wing ● Thelma Walker on regional autonomy ● An interview with Clive Lewis ● The World Transformed ● Gender, sexuality and witchcraft ● The globalisation of ‘Asian horror’ ● A tribute to Dawn Foster ● Latest book reviews ● And much more!
And you choose how much to pay for your subscription...
Red Pepper by email
Get the latest articles and updates in your inbox
Morality tales
From cowardly men to wayward wives, pre-modern superstitions transmitted social norms as well as scares, writes Eleanor Janega
Playing on the dark side: An interview with Dawn Ray’d
Gerry Hart speaks to Simon Barr of Dawn Ray'd about black metal, its relationship with the far right and its radical potential
The global spectres of ‘Asian horror’
Bliss Cua Lim looks at how the female ghost subgenre illuminates efforts to globalise ‘Asian horror’
Rudolf Rocker: an anarchist ‘rabbi’ in London
David J. Lobina rediscovers a forgotten but fascinating figure in London’s radical and Jewish history
Review – Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain by Phil Burton-Cartledge
Sabrina Huck argues that a generational shift away from the Conservative Party can’t be taken for granted
The driver of dispossession
Tina Ngata explains the social and legal legacies of a 15th-century Christian principle that paved the way for imperial violence in, and far beyond, New Zealand
