Long Walk to Freedom

by Nelson Mandela

The manifesto utterly rejected the notion of trusteeship, the idea that the white government somehow had African interests at heart. We cited the crippling, anti-African legislation of the past forty years, beginning with the 1913 Land Act, which ultimately deprived blacks of 87 percent of the territory in the land of their birth; the Urban Areas Act of 1923, which created teeming African slums, politely called “native locations,” in order to supply cheap labor to white industry; the Color Bar Act of 1926, which banned Africans from practicing skilled trades; the Native Administration Act of 1927, which made the British Crown, rather than the paramount chiefs, the supreme chief over all African areas; and finally, in 1936, the Representation of Natives Act, which removed Africans from the Common Voters’ Roll in the Cape, thereby shattering any illusion that whites would allow Africans to have control over their own destiny.