Quotes About Apartheid

Before 1994, many South Africans used theater as a voice of protest against the government. But with the end of apartheid, like the artists who watched the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe, theater had to find new voices and search for new issues.

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

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.

We have got to move away from the concept of race and color because that is what apartheid is. We cannot end apartheid if we retain these concepts.

We cannot have policies that punish people for taking action. Imagine the further harm it would have caused if the federal government banned civil rights leaders from boycotting buses in Montgomery, Alabama, or banning divestment from Apartheid South Africa.

The apartheid people were actors, and they had to act out their part in their beliefs every day. That's why we always saw them as being comedic.

With hindsight, it is easy to understand why Nelson Mandela became a heroic symbol to an entire generation as he used his newly gained freedom to lead South Africa out of the shackles of apartheid.

Mariah and I had never thought so much about race and racism in our lives. It was the great underlying obsession of the Mississippi delta. The elephant in every room. Almost every charming, gracious, hospitable, generous white landowner we met came from a family that had profited from an American version of apartheid. Or more accurately a blueprint for the South African version.

Every generation has its hottest of all hot-button issues, the issue that becomes the litmus test of everyone's orthodoxy and provokes conflicts sometimes leading to schism. In earlier generations it was slavery, or segregation, or apartheid, or Nazism, or abortion, or temperance, or Sabbath or tongue-speaking

Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much a disgrace as Joseph Begun's imprisonment and Ida Nudel's exile. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

I would wear the blue overalls of the fieldworker and often wore round, rimless glasses known as Mazzawati teaglasses. I had a car, and I wore a chauffeur's cap with my overalls. The pose of chauffeur was convenient because I could travel under the pretext of driving my master's car.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

Abhorrence of apartheid is a moral attitude, not a policy.

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.

I've been offered jobs by companies that supported apartheid many times in the 25 years of my modeling career, but I have never taken one of them. I have to refuse that money, because I'm not going to work against my people. They've suffered enough.

Public washrooms and water fountains were rigidly demarcated to prevent contaminating contact with the same people who cooked the white South's meals, cleaned its houses, and tended its children.

Jews and Muslims 'dialoguing' has nothing to do with Palestine. The problem is settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation, not religion.

And then there are the events of more recent history, beginning with the victory over apartheid, an analogy particularly popular in conjunction with divestment. 'Just as apartheid was the moral issue' of the late twentieth century, 'climate change is the moral issue of our time', McKibben has said, alluding to suffering in non-white peripheries of the world, and 'the same kind of tactic is what's necessary to face it'.

I was first imprisoned in Pretoria, and then, thereafter, I was taken to Robben Island. I stayed there for a couple of weeks. I was taken back to Pretoria when I was charged in the Rivonia trial, when I was then sent to Robben Island for life.

'A Just Defiance' has been a huge success in South Africa. While reading at times like a well-written thriller, its significance is to reveal apartheid to have been far more brutal, ruthless, and self-serving even than we had suspected.

When I talk about the end of apartheid, I prefer not to claim the honor that I have ended it.

Our target is not negotiations, it is the end of the apartheid system. There can be no compromise about that.

There are people in our society who should be separated and discarded.

Historically, Apartheid's failure to secure, once and for all, impenetrable frontiers between a plurality of different fleshes demonstrated a posteriori the limits of the colonial project of separation. Short of its total extermination, the Other is no longer external to us. It is within us, in the double figure of the alter ego, each mortally exposed to the other and to itself.