HIST-412 – Apartheid
Wednesdays 2:00 PM-4:30 PM
This course fulfills elective certificate requirement
In 1948, South African voters – a minority of the country’s population – elected a government on the platform of apartheid, a radical form of racial segregation. For much of the next half century, apartheid was official government policy in South Africa and a symbol of unreconstructed evil in much of the rest of the world. This seminar delves into the historical roots of apartheid and its effects on South African life. We also will examine the resistance of South Africans of all races to apartheid, as well as the international anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s. We conclude by exploring what might be called “apartheid’s afterlives” – the persistence of its social and economic structures in contemporary South Africa. Class readings will include a variety of historical documents, novels, and memoirs, and students will write an original research paper for their final assignment.