Decolonized South Africa

Human rights are one of the basic rights that people are born with regardless of their gender, race, religion, nationality, and social status. Nowadays, people take human rights as granted; however, history shows that human rights are earned instead of given. Many bloody and costly conflicts occurred in the past were actually caused by discriminations against race, religion and sex. Without being too sensitive about contentious topics, one has to admit the fact that Africans suffered the most from violations against humanity. Not only they were treated as slaves, but also their motherland was exploited. Early travelers from the Europe to Africa described Africans as a less free people (Byrnes, 18). Such disrespectful and barbarous thought gave the self-righteous whites a wrong sense of superiority and left the native Africans with endless isolation and mistreat in the past centuries. In order to better understand how colonialism shapes the development of South Africa, this paper will first discuss the history of South Africa, discover the truths of apartheid and then explores the influence of apartheid. the TRC is quite effective to help South Africa overcome the legacies of apartheid. Dutch and British colonialism: Fighting over resources is the primary reason of conflicts in human history. No states officials pay attention to foreign lands until they see potential lucrative gains for their own countries’ development through exploiting other places. Despite the fact that human settlement in Africa dates back thousands of years and Out of Africa theory suggests that modern humans migrated to other continents from Africa, Africa has no happy relations when it comes to dealing with foreigners. Indeed, environment does not facilitate the development of African countries. As Herbst argues, due to low population densities and different environmental conditions, it is extremely difficult for any African government to try to unite its people and build a prosperous country. (Herbst, 12) Africa’s challenging geography situation also explains why it was colonized later than Latin America, even though Africa is closer to European monarchy’s reach. In South Africa, racial conflict began when the Dutch East India Company arrived and established a resupply station at Cape Town for its fleets commuting between Netherlands and Southeast Asian countries. As a matter of fact, the Dutch company initially had no interest in expanding its settlement across Africa, and only aimed at obtaining enough goods and necessities to resupply its fleets (Byrnes, 18). However, when the locals rejected the terms initiated by the Dutch company about goods provision, the Dutch became violent and forced most of the local population to …show more content…
The struggle for racial equality was long because the whites mainly dominated the government. And the Union of South Africa had rules and laws that were detrimental to the progress of the South Africans, such as only allowing whites to have skilled jobs in the mining industry. According to Strang, “ decolonization occurs more rapidly where metropolitan states incorporate more people as voters, and where dependencies possess representative institutions (Strang, 382).” The situation became worse because the Union of South Africa tried to separate people instead of uniting them. Decolonization was in disguise if only one group of white people was able to live a better life at the expense of other people who had different race. Two different parties opposing the Union of South Africa were formed after the formation of the Union of South Africa. The Afrikaners established National Party because they realized that they did not have capital and marketable skills. The black South African started African National Congress because they were discriminated and manipulated by the whites. Although both Afrikaners and South Africans initially opposed the Union of South Africa, the Afrikaners chose to side with the Union of South Africa out of fear of black competition for jobs (Byrnes, …show more content…
Following the leadership of the African National Congress, South Africa is the second largest GDP in Africa, and it is one of the BRICS countries. It is not only performing well economically, but also culturally. South Africa even held international events such as the World Cup in 2010, which signals that, the international community appreciates South Africa as an independent and strong country. Apart from the past, South Africa continues to thrive as an indispensible developing