Maybe, during a year when this nation celebrates the sesquicentennial of important milestones from the Civil War and the golden anniversary of pivotal events of the Civil Rights Movement, it is fitting that, just before it ends, Nelson Mandela died. Rightly heralded as one of the world’s greatest leaders of this century and the last one, Mandela helped usher in freedom in South Africa and made real a democratic government, just as President Abraham Lincoln did 150 years ago and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did 50 years ago. Mandela’s passing provides a time of reflection, not just for political leaders around the world, but for lawyers and everyone else who care about the rule of law anywhere.
After all, apartheid in South Africa was a system of laws. While a distant memory now, the era of apartheid – the word for separateness in the Afrikaans language – began in earnest in 1948 with the election of the Afrikaner National Party, which ran on this policy of state-sanctioned racial segregation. Not at all novel to South Africa, the policy of apartheid built on earlier decades of legalized racial oppression, such as South Africa’s 1913 Land Act, limiting the land rights of black South Africans within their own country. Not long after the 1948 election, the Population Registration Act of 1950 became law, requiring the classification of all South Africans by race. A series of additional Land Acts allocated the vast majority of the country’s land to whites. The South African government forcibly removed black South Africans from rural areas and sold their land at low prices to white farmers.
