Endgame

Television was also run on apartheid lines - TV1 broadcast in Afrikaans and English, TV2 in Zulu and Xhosa and TV3 in Sotho, Tswana and Pedi, and TV4 mostly showed programmes for an urban-black audience Despite the government's efforts to shore up traditionalism and re-tribalise them, black people became more fully integrated into the urban and industrial society of 20th-century South Africa than happened elsewhere on the continent. An educated elite of clerics, teachers, business people, journalists and professionals grew to be a major force in black politics. A series of popular uprisings and protests against Apartheid were met with the banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders. As unrest spread and became more violent, state organs responded with increasing repression and state-sponsored violence. During the states of emergency which continued intermittently until 1989, anyone could be detained without a hearing by a low-level police official for up to six months. Thousands of individuals died in custody, frequently after gruesome acts of torture, including in 1977 Steve Biko, a writer and activist whose Black Consciousness Movement attempted to empower black people.

In the 1960s, the Anti-Apartheid Movements began to campaign for international artists not to present or let their works be hosted in South Africa. Sporting and cultural boycotts did not have the same impact as economic sanctions, but they did much to lift consciousness amongst normal South Africans of the global condemnation of apartheid.

By 1985, it had become the ANC's aim to make black townships "ungovernable" (a term later replaced by "people's power") by means of rent boycotts and other militant action. Township councils were overthrown or collapsed, to be replaced by unofficial popular organisations, often led by militant youth. People's courts were set up, and residents accused of being government agents were dealt extreme and occasionally lethal punishment. Black town councillors and policemen, and sometimes their families, were attacked with petrol bombs, beaten, and murdered by necklacing, where a burning tyre was placed around the victim's neck a tactic controversially endorsed by Nelson Mandelas militant wife Winnie, although the ANC officially condemned the practice.

By 1980 international opinion turned decisively against the apartheid regime. To outside observers, and also in the eyes of growing numbers of white South Africans, apartheid stood exposed as morally bankrupt, indefensible and impervious to reforms.

During the 1980s the government, led by P.W. Botha, became increasingly preoccupied with security. The 1980s became a period of considerable political unrest, with the government becoming increasingly dominated by Botha's circle of generals and police chiefs (known as securocrats), who managed the various States of Emergencies.

Reforms to apartheid in the 1980s failed to quell the mounting opposition, and in 1990 President Frederik Willem de Klerk began negotiations to end apartheid, culminating in multi-racial democratic elections in 1994, which were won by the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela. The vestiges of apartheid still shape South African politics and society.

Apartheid was dismantled in a series of negotiations from 1990 to 1993, culminating in elections in 1994, the first in South Africa with universal suffrage.