"I Am Prepared To Die": Nelson Mandela’s Speech That Shook Apartheid And the World.

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There are a couple of African leaders who have given passionate speeches regarding one issue or another but there is one who outshines them all, and that is Nelson Mandela, who delivered one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century. This speech titled “I am Prepared to Die”, shook not just Africa but the whole world and it set the stage for putting an end to Apartheid: a political system that upheld segregation against non-white citizens of South Africa. But it all began in 1948 after the National Party gained power in South Africa and its all-white government immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation. Even before 1948, segregation between whites and blacks was already rampant but 1948, saw the government making this segregation also called apartheid a state law. The goal of the government at the time was to separate South Africa's white minority from its non-white majority and to divide Black South Africans along tribal lines in order to decrease their political power.

By 1950, the government had banned marriages between whites and people of other races, and prohibited sexual relations between Black and white South Africans. Black South Africans were required to carry identification with them at all times, which they needed to enter areas designated for whites and they were removed from the voter rolls and eventually fully disenfranchised. In addition, a Registration Act was passed into law in 1950 which classified all South Africans by race, including Bantus who were the Black Africans, Coloured which were those who had mixed race, and of course, the whites. This legislation sometimes led to a separation among families with a parent classified as white while their children were classified as colored. The government also passed a series of Land Act into law which gave more than 80 percent of the country’s land for the white minority. And in order to limit contact between the races, the government established separate public facilities for whites and non-whites, limited the activity of nonwhite labor unions, and denied non-white participation in national government.