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.
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