Carter on Apartheid

Extract

In 1913, when Woodrow Wilson was assuming the duties of President of the United States, Joseph Stalin was in exile in Siberia and Lenin in Galicia. When Union and Confederate veterans were meeting to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and Henry Ford was about to set up the first modern assembly line, the newly established Union of South Africa promulgated the Natives Land Act. A world preoccupied with the decay of great empires and apprehensive about the onset of world conflict was only dimly aware of this law enacted in a distant corner of a remote continent. The law prescribed the apportionment of territory of the Union into areas of exclusive settlement by whites and blacks.