ABSTRACT
Institutionalized racial oppression, exploitation and discrimination in what is now South Africa began in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company sent a team to establish a food supply station in the Cape, at the southern tip of Africa. The black South Africans were the real losers, however: white political and economic settlements brought with them a policy of racial segregation, where black labor was used for white interests, and blacks increasing lost their land and their right to self-determination. The National Party government quickly began to set up a legal framework to discriminate against black South Africans. In 1949 and 1950, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act forbade inter-racial marriage and sex. Resistance to racism, exploitation and political repression were seldom far behind the laws and actions that defined the National Party's apartheid rule. By the early 1980s, popular protest against apartheid was beginning to be a defining feature of South African life.
