Apartheid, policy of racial segregation formerly followed in South Africa.

The word apartheid means separateness in the Afrikaans language and it described the rigid racial division between the governing white minority population and the nonwhite majority population. The National Party introduced apartheid as part of their campaign in the 1948 elections, and with the National Party victory, apartheid became the governing political policy for South Africa until the early 1990s. Although there is no longer a legal basis for apartheid, the social, economic, and political inequalities between white and black South Africans continue to exist. The apartheid laws classified people according to three major racial groupswhite; Bantu, or black Africans; and Coloured, or people of mixed descent. Later Asians, or Indians and Pakistanis, were added as a fourth category. The laws determined where members of each group could live, what jobs they could hold, and what type of education they could receive. Laws prohibited most social contact between races, authorized segregated public facilities, and denied any representation of nonwhites in the national government. People who openly opposed apartheid were considered communists and the government passed strict security legislation which in effect turned South Africa into a police state. Before apartheid became the official policy, South Africa had a long history of racial segregation and white supremacy. In 1910 parliamentary membership was limited to whites and legislation passed in 1913 restricted black land ownership to 13 percent of South Africa's total area. Many Africans opposed these restrictions. In 1912, the African National Congress (ANC) was founded to fight these unfair government policies. In the 1950s, after apartheid became the official policy, the ANC declared that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and worked to abolish apartheid. After antiapartheid riots in Sharpeville in March 1960 (see Sharpeville Massacre), the government banned all black African political organizations, including the ANC. From 1960 to the mid-1970s, the government attempted to make apartheid a policy of separate development. Blacks were consigned to newly created and impoverished homelands, called Bantustans, which were designed to eventually become petty sovereign states. The white population retained control of more than 80 percent of the land. Increasing violence, strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations by opponents of apartheid, and the overthrow of colonial rule by blacks in Mozambique and Angola, forced the government to relax some of its restrictions. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the government implemented a series of reforms that allowed black labor unions to organize and permitted some political activity by the opposition. The 1984 constitution opened parliament membership to Asians and Coloureds, but it continued to exclude black Africans, who made up 75 percent of the population. Apartheid continued to be criticized internationally, and many countries, including the United States, imposed economic sanctions on South Africa. More urban revolts erupted and, as external pressure on South Africa intensified, the government's apartheid policies began to unravel. In 1990, the new president, F. W. de Klerk, proclaimed a formal end to apartheid with the release of ANC leader Nelson Mandela from prison and the legalization of black African political organizations. Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, born in 1922, United Nations (UN) secretary general from 1992 to 1996. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was born in Egypt and educated at the Sorbonne and at Columbia University. After a career as a law professor and journalist, Boutros-Ghali served as Egypt's minister of state from 1977 to 1991 and then as Egypt's deputy prime minister. A skilled diplomat, he accompanied Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat on Sadat's historic trip to Israel in 1977 and played a major role in the Camp David talks that led to the 1979 Arab-Israeli peace accord. Fluent in French, English, and Arabic, and a specialist on Third World development, BoutrosGhali wrote essays on the unequal distribution of wealth between rich and poor countries and on the relationship of water conservation to political stability in Africa and the Middle East. Boutros-Ghali was influential in resolving several African conflicts and in helping to secure the release of South African political activist Nelson Mandela from a South African prison in 1990. Nominated by the UN Security Council in November 1991 to become the UN's sixth secretary general, he was both the first African and the first Arab ever nominated to that post. He succeeded Javier Prez de Cullar of Peru on January 1, 1992, for a five-year term. BoutrosGhali faced not only financial challenges within the United Nations but also world economic, ethnic, and environmental problems during a time when the United Nations was expected to play a key post-Cold War role in ensuring collective security and in settling regional disputes. Boutros-Ghali expressed his belief that the United Nations Security Council members were more concerned about the problems in developed nations than those in Third World countries. He created controversy in July 1992 when he contrasted the Security Council's concern about civil war in the former Yugoslavia with its alleged indifference to the crisis in Somalia. In November of that year he supported the use of United States troops to impose peace in Somalia. His tendency to be outspoken with the Security Council made him unpopular with some of its members. In 1996 the United States vetoed his candidacy for a second term. Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Kofi Annan, born in 1938, secretary general of the United Nations (UN) from 1997 until December 31, 2006. Born in Ghana and educated in the United States, Annan was the first UN secretary general from sub-Saharan Africa. Annan began serving his first five-year term as secretary general in 1997. In 2001 the UN General Assembly unanimously elected him to a second term, beginning in 2002. Annan shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his accomplishments as UN secretary general. Annan was born in Kumasi, Ghana. In 1961 he received a bachelors degree in economics from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. After ten years of service with the UN, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a masters degree in management in 1972. Annan joined the UN in 1962 as a budget officer with the UNs World Health Organization (WHO). He later managed budgetary and personnel operations for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Office of Financial Services. Between 1987 and 1992, Annan served as an assistant secretary general in a variety of posts, including the Office of Human Resources Management and Security Coordination and the Office of Program Planning, Budget, and Finance. From 1992 until his election as UN secretary general, Annan served as assistant secretary general and under secretary general for UN peacekeeping operations. Annan assumed responsibility for UN peacekeeping operations in a period when localized conflicts, fueled by nationalism and tension between ethnic groups, had flared up in many parts of the world. During the early and mid-1990s, the UN organized an increasing number of peacekeeping operations in nations such as Cambodia, Haiti, and Bosnia. The major challenge Annan faced was to secure funding for these operations in a period of diminished international financial and political support for the activities of the UN, particularly from the United States. Between 1990 and 1996, the United States held back more than a billion dollars in dues owed to the UN to emphasize the need for bureaucratic and financial reform within the organization. In 1996 the United States blocked the reelection of former secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom many U.S. government officials believed was hostile to reform of the UN. With more than three decades of service to the UN, Annan became the first career UN official to be elected secretary general. As secretary general, Annan reorganized the management of the UN in order to increase efficiency and reduce costs, and he improved the organizations relationship with the United States. He rededicated the UN to its traditional goals of economic development, social justice, and international peace. He placed particular importance on combating the epidemic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and improving human rights worldwide. In his farewell address as secretary general, Annan emphasized the importance of human rights, saying, Human rights and the rule of law are vital to global security and prosperity. Microsoft Encarta 2009. 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

During the Middle Ages the Niger region was on the central caravan route from North Africa to the Hausa states and the empires of Mali and Songhai. The area was therefore penetrated early by Muslim missionaries. The Hausa states were dominant in southern Niger from before the 10th century until the early 19th century, when they were conquered by the Fulani under Usuman dan Fodio. Songhai was for almost a thousand years the supreme power in the western part of the country, while the Kanem-Bornu Empire exerted a powerful influence in the east. In the 14th century the Tuareg populated the Ar Plateau, where they subsequently established the sultanate of Agadez. The first Europeans to enter the area were Scottish explorer Mungo Park in 1795 and 1805 and German explorers Heinrich Barth and Eduard Vogel in 1850. The French occupied the area about 1890. It was made a military territory in 1900, an autonomous territory in 1922, and an overseas territory in 1946. Proclaimed an autonomous republic of the French Community in 1958, Niger became fully independent on August 3, 1960. In 1960 Hamani Diori was elected president by the legislature. In 1964 the government crushed a rebellion aimed against the Diori regime, and in April 1965 the president survived an assassination attempt. He was reelected in 1965 and 1970. Niger was one of six sub-Saharan nations affected by a five-year drought, which was broken by summer rains in 1973. Accused of corruption and of mishandling the famine, Diori was overthrown in a military coup dtat in April 1974. After the coup, Niger was ruled by a Supreme Military Council, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Seyni Kountch. His first priority was economic recovery after the drought, and to that effect a new agreement with France was concluded in 1977. Plots and coup attempts occurred during Kountchs first years in power, but by 1980 he was confident enough to release former president Diori from detention. Most cabinet posts in the government were gradually filled by civilians, but a drop in uranium prices left Nigers economy in a severely weakened condition. In November 1987 Kountch died of a brain tumor and was succeeded in the presidency by Ali Seybou, the army chief of staff. Seybou was reelected president in 1989 after introducing a new constitution that returned Niger to civilian rule under a single-party system. A wave of strikes and demonstrations in 1990 led him to legalize opposition parties. The same year, the nomadic Tuaregs of northern Niger began to rise up in favor of an independent Tuareg state. The Tuaregs, many of whom had left Niger in the early 1980s to escape a prolonged drought and had recently returned in large numbers, claimed that Seybous government had failed in its promises to adequately aid the returning nomads. After violent clashes with Nigerien forces the separatist movement became a full-scale rebellion. A constitutional conference, convened in July 1991, stripped Seybou of his powers and established a transitional government, headed by Andr Salifou. A constitution instituting a multiparty electoral system was ratified in December 1992. In elections in early 1993 Mahamane Ousmane of the Alliance des Forces du Changement (AFC; Alliance of the Forces of Change), a nine-party coalition, was elected president, and AFC candidates won a majority of the seats in parliament. In late 1994 the cabinet was dismissed by a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly. Ousmane called for legislative elections in January 1995. A coalition of four opposition parties won a majority in the National Assembly, with the Movement National pour une Socit de Dveloppement (MNSD; National Movement for a Development Society) taking the largest number of seats. Friction between Ousmane and Prime Minister Hama Amadou, head of the

MNSD, soon created a governmental deadlock. This slowed the implementation of an April 1995 peace accord signed with the northern Tuareg rebels. In January 1996 Colonel Ibrahim Bare Mainassara seized power in a military coup, arrested President Ousmane and Prime Minister Amadou, and banned all political parties. Mainassara cited the yearlong deadlock between Ousmane and Amadou as the reason for his coup. Ousmane and Amadou were released from prison in early February. A new constitution, consolidating the presidents power and limiting the prime ministers role, was quickly drafted and approved in a May public vote in which only 35 percent of the nations registered voters participated. The ban on political parties was lifted, and Mainassara announced his candidacy for president in upcoming elections; Ousmane also declared his candidacy. In July Mainassara won presidential elections under suspicious circumstances. The independent electoral committee was fired during the two-day elections and replaced with a committee handpicked by Mainassara. Several opposition candidates, including Ousmane, were placed under house arrest. Mainassara failed to garner a broad base of political support. In April 1999 Mainassaras presidential guard unit assassinated him and assumed control of the country. The coup leaders drafted constitutional amendments that restored the constitutional balance between the executive and legislative branches and absolved the participants in both the 1996 and the 1999 coups. The revised constitution was approved by referendum, and presidential and legislative elections were held in October and November 1999. MNSD candidate Tandja Mamadou was elected president, and the MNSD again took the largest number of seats in the National Assembly. Mamadou was reelected in December 2004.