The decades-long struggle, roughly 1948 to 1994, through which South Africa's Black majority and their allies fought to overturn apartheid — moving through petition, mass civil disobedience, armed struggle, township insurrection, and a global pressure campaign of sanctions and boycotts, and winning not a clean military victory but a negotiated revolution that left the country free, democratic, and still burdened by apartheid's economic legacy.
By 1985 South Africa had become almost ungovernable. Townships ran their own street committees. Strikes shut down mines and factories. Foreign banks refused to lend. None of this was inevitable. For nearly forty years the resistance to apartheid had been beaten, banned, jailed, and driven into exile. It had argued with itself over whether to petition or fight, integrate or separate, organize at home or strike from abroad. That it finally helped force a negotiated end, rather than a bloodbath or a permanent white state, is the question this entry exists to explain.