By the 1970s and 1980s, apartheid was not just a South African problem. It had become a global one.
Governments, sports bodies, banks and ordinary consumers around the world had to decide: keep dealing with South Africa, or cut it off?
Cause and consequence — pressure from outside: This section is about external causes of change: things happening outside South Africa's borders that made apartheid harder and harder for the National Party government to defend.
- Sporting boycotts — from 1970, South Africa was banned from the Olympics, and most countries refused to play rugby or cricket against it. Sport mattered hugely to white South Africans, so exclusion stung.
- The Gleneagles Agreement (1977) — Commonwealth countries agreed to discourage sporting contact with South Africa, formalising the boycott across dozens of nations.
- Cultural boycotts — musicians, actors and academics were urged not to perform or work in South Africa. The UN kept an official blacklist of artists who broke the boycott.
- The 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand — mass protests and pitch invasions showed how apartheid sport now provoked global outrage, not just polite disapproval.
These boycotts did not topple the government on their own. But they chipped away at white South Africans' sense of belonging to the wider world — and that psychological isolation mattered.
Why sport hit so hard: Rugby was almost a religion for many Afrikaners. Being shut out of international sport was one of the few forms of pressure that reached ordinary white voters directly, not just the government — which is why historians see it as unusually effective.
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Economic pressure went further than sport. It aimed straight at the thing the apartheid state depended on most: money.
Trade sanctions
From the 1960s the UN called for trade bans; by the mid-1980s the US, UK and EEC had imposed partial sanctions on South African goods, oil and arms.
Divestment
Universities, cities and pension funds — especially in the US — sold off shares in companies doing business in South Africa, pressuring those firms to pull out.
The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986)
The US Congress overrode President Reagan's veto to pass tough sanctions — a sign that even a Cold War ally of South Africa's government had run out of patience.
Capital flight
Foreign banks stopped renewing loans after 1985, and the South African economy went into a real crisis, pushing business leaders to demand political change.
Trade bans, divestment, the 1986 US Act, then the banks pulled the plug.
The debate: did sanctions actually work?: This is a classic Paper 3 argument. A strong essay weighs both sides rather than picking one.
Sanctions were decisive
- They forced a frightened business class to pressure the government toward negotiation
Sanctions mattered less
- They were patchy: many states ignored them
- They hurt poor Black South Africans as much as the regime
- Internal resistance (covered in 10.6.2) mattered more
Then in 1989–1991, the world itself changed. The Cold War, which had shaped South African politics for decades, was ending.
Why the end of the Cold War mattered so much: The apartheid government had long defended itself as the last barrier against Soviet-backed communism in Africa. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, that excuse disappeared.
What changed for each side
- The West: Western governments no longer needed South Africa as a Cold War ally, and could pressure it freely.
- The ANC: it lost its main external backer, making it more willing to negotiate rather than fight on.
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South Africa's own continent had been squeezing it for years, in ways less visible than Western sanctions but just as damaging.
- Frontline States — Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and others gave the ANC bases, training camps and diplomatic support, keeping resistance alive even when its leaders were jailed or exiled.
- Organisation of African Unity (OAU) — coordinated African diplomatic pressure and symbolically expelled South Africa from African bodies.
- Destabilisation backfired — South Africa raided neighbouring states and backed rebel movements (like RENAMO in Mozambique) to punish them for helping the ANC. This was costly, made South Africa a regional pariah, and could not be sustained forever.
- Namibia's independence (1990) — South Africa finally withdrew from Namibia (which it had ruled illegally since WWI), removing one more prop of apartheid-era regional control and signalling change was coming.
By 1989, President P.W. Botha had been weakened by a stroke and party pressure. His successor, F.W. de Klerk, made a stunning move.
2 February 1990 — the turning point: De Klerk unbanned the ANC, the PAC and the Communist Party, and announced that Nelson Mandela would be released after 27 years in prison. Nine days later, Mandela walked free. Negotiations to end apartheid could now begin openly.
Mandela's contribution
- Chose reconciliation over revenge, calming white fears of civil war
- Kept the ANC united behind negotiation despite internal anger at the slow pace
- Built trust across racial lines through personal diplomacy and symbolism
De Klerk's contribution
- Took the political risk of unbanning liberation movements and freeing Mandela
- Accepted that white minority rule had no long-term future
- Had to manage right-wing Afrikaner backlash and violence from within his own side
From 1991, the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) brought together the government, the ANC and other parties to negotiate a new constitution.
Talks nearly collapsed several times — violence between the ANC and the Zulu-based Inkatha Freedom Party, some of it secretly encouraged by state security forces, killed thousands in the early 1990s.
Perspectives concept — whose story is this?: Don't tell this as "Mandela and de Klerk fixed it" alone. CODESA succeeded because ordinary South Africans, both Black and white, were exhausted by violence and economic decline — and because grassroots ANC activists kept pressure on negotiators not to sell out majority rule. Leadership mattered, but so did pressure from below.