The Culture of Violence in the Final Phase of the Apartheid: South Africa c. 1984-1994

Abstract

Since the 1970s, an organic crisis of the apartheid system began in South Africa, and it intensified in the beginning of the 1980s with the explosion of a new popular revolt, known as the township revolt. This article deals with a time period of approximately one decade (c. 1984-1994), characterized by a qualitative change in the culture of violence, which began in September 1984 but was triggered by the 1983 constitutional referendum and which symbolically ended with the first democratic election of 1984.