Why did apartheid end?
Apartheid ended because of sustained internal resistance (the ANC, labor unions, student movements, and township uprisings), international economic sanctions and cultural isolation, the Cold War's end removing the regime's strategic value to the West, the growing economic unsustainability of racial segregation, and the pragmatic recognition by white South African leaders — particularly F.W. de Klerk — that reform was preferable to revolution.
Apartheid's end was not the result of any single factor but a convergence of internal resistance, international pressure, economic reality, and strategic calculation that made the system's continuation untenable.
Internal resistance never ceased. The African National Congress, despite being banned in 1960, maintained organizational networks underground and in exile. The Soweto Uprising of 1976 radicalized a new generation. Township revolts in the 1980s made parts of South Africa effectively ungovernable. The United Democratic Front coordinated mass resistance domestically. Labor unions, particularly the Congress of South African Trade Unions, organized strikes that hit the economy directly. The constant cost of maintaining apartheid through force — states of emergency, mass detentions, military deployments in townships — was escalating.
International isolation intensified through the 1980s. Economic sanctions, though incomplete, restricted trade and investment. Major corporations divested from South Africa under pressure from anti-apartheid campaigns. South Africa was expelled from international sporting events and cultural exchanges. The country became a global pariah, its regime compared to Nazi Germany. Banking sanctions and the refusal of international banks to roll over South African debt created a financial crisis in 1985.
The Cold War's end removed apartheid's strategic shield. Throughout the Cold War, Western governments — particularly the United States and Britain — had tolerated apartheid because the South African government was a reliable anti-communist ally in a strategically important region. With the Soviet Union's collapse, this rationale disappeared, and Western pressure on South Africa intensified.
Economic reality made apartheid increasingly irrational. The system required an elaborate bureaucracy of racial classification and enforcement while excluding the majority population from full economic participation. As South Africa's economy grew more sophisticated, the costs of racial barriers — in skilled labor shortages, international isolation, and internal instability — outweighed any benefits to the white minority.
F.W. de Klerk's decision to unban the ANC and release Nelson Mandela in February 1990 reflected a calculation that negotiated transition was preferable to the alternatives — either violent revolution or permanent siege. De Klerk was not a moral convert to racial equality but a pragmatist who recognized that the system was unsustainable. The negotiations that followed — tense, protracted, and repeatedly threatened by violence from extremists on both sides — produced the democratic constitution and the 1994 election that brought Mandela to power.