The scene is familiar to anyone who has studied history: black civilians – men, women and children alike – being "dispersed" by white state-employed thugs dressed as policeman. High-pressure hoses, nightsticks and tear gas were routinely used against innocent people whose sole "crime" was acknowledging their own humanity.
Scenes like this may seem to belong to the history books, but perhaps it's even more important that we remember them today. This is why F.W. de Klerk's visit to UNL this Tuesday is important.
If there's a country with a worse history of race relations than our own (which is, admittedly, hard to imagine) it is the country on the southern tip of Africa. Going back to the first whites who arrived in the area centuries ago, their relationship to the so-called "natives" has always been messy.
And the man who made great strides in addressing that issue is coming to campus this week, but more on that later.
South Africa's messy race relations came to a head in the 1950s with the rise of booming urban centers such as Johannesburg.
The whites generally lived lives of affluence, while the black population of the city was often reduced to working dangerous, low-paying jobs in the mines.
Small wonder many of them found crime to be a more promising career. It was a product of learned helplessness, taught to them by the cruelty of whites who, like their counterparts in North America, were incapable of seeing humanity in their black neighbors.
In time, it led to what then-Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd called a policy of "good neighborliness." Eventually, it came to be called "apartheid," the Afrikaans word for "separation."
It called for separate townships for South Africa's blacks , which were theoretically supposed to allow the black population to flourish. In reality, it led to the demolition of several thriving black neighborhoods and the relocation of their residents to cramped desert-like areas where they were forced to live in one-room shacks.
It also called for the banning of the black political parties, including Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC).
Over the next 40 years, countless black Africans would be killed by the government. Others would be arrested and mysteriously die in prison. The government explanations for these deaths ranged from, "hung himself," to "fell down stairs," to "slipped in shower." The harsh reality behind this veneer of lies is that many of these men were beaten to death in prison.
Perhaps the most famous of these men is Steve Biko, who coined the phrase "black is beautiful" and who, like Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights leaders, saw that the greatest damage done by segregation was the psychological inferiority it inflicted upon the oppressed group.
Mandela himself spent 27 years in prison on Robben Island.
In perhaps the most egregious crime committed by the government, many children were killed in the Soweto student uprising in 1976 – a peaceful gathering that turned violent when police arrived to disrupt it. The students were demonstrating against the teaching of Afrikaans in school because it was the language of their oppressors.
What followed is graphically portrayed in the movie "Cry Freedom" as government soldiers opened fire on the students, sometimes chasing them down to shoot them as they tried to escape.
The iconic image of the event was a photo taken of two students carrying the twisted, bloody corpse of Henrik Pieterson, a 13-year-old student killed by the police.
It was into this world that F.W. de Klerk – who will be speaking at the Lied Center on Tuesday – came to power as president. De Klerk was elected in 1989 and called for a non-racist South Africa. He ended the banning of the ANC and released Mandela from prison.
In 1993, de Klerk and Mandela were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work to reconcile racial groups in South Africa.
In 1994 his term ended and South Africa held their first post-apartheid elections in which the majority black population was finally given the vote. It was in this election that Nelson Mandela was elected president. His deputy presidents were future South African president Thabo Mbeki and de Klerk.
Mandela's election, like Barack Obama's in the United States, signaled to the black population of South Africa that a new era had arrived.
Also like the United States, it did not signal the end of racism in South Africa. Politics cannot overcome years of hatred and bigotry.
However, progress in the political sphere is still progress, and it's something for which to be grateful.
We are not yet a society that has realized the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. A short trip around Lincoln is proof that functional, economically-based segregation still exists. But we've made progress. Voices like de Klerk's are a reminder that others share our struggles and are also working to overcome them.
We would do well to hear him.
JAKE MEADOR is a junior history and english major. Reach him at jakemeador@dailynebraskan.com.
is a member of the 
Be the first to comment on this article!