How did white-minority rule end in southern Africa?

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Student Demonstrations Against ApartheidPolice fire tear gas at anti-apartheid protesters in 1989 at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. (Ulli Michel/Reuters/Landov)

TTHE RACIALLY SEGREGATED SYSTEM OF APARTHEID in South Africa was part of a larger system of white-minority rule that included Portuguese Angola and Mozambique, the government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia, and South African control of the former German colony of Namibia. In the 1970s the buffer of neighboring white-minority governments around South Africa crumbled. Domestic and foreign pressure brought a political transition to majority rule in Namibia and South Africa in the 1990s.