As the young rugby players sing the national anthem, the scene provides a small glimpse into the ...

JOHANNESBURG, July 17, 2008 (AFP) - A South African school is to be renamed on Friday after a militant supporter of the now ruling African National Congress who was hanged in 1986 for a bomb attack in a busy shopping mall.

JOHANNESBURG, June 8, 2008 (AFP) - It was just a farm, but what went on there was extraordinary: Nelson Mandela, disguised in blue overalls, plotting with other anti-apartheid leaders against South Africa's racist regime.

BRUSSELS, April 17, 2008 (AFP) - Belgian bank KBC on Thursday stood accused of aiding the sale of military equipment to South Africa during the apartheid era.

JOHANNESBURG, Dec 30, 2007 (AFP) - Disguised as an Irish priest and taking advantage of the New Year festivities, Donald Woods launched a dramatic escape 30 years ago to expose one of South Africa's most notorious apartheid crimes.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 21, 2007 (AFP) - South Africans jailed for apartheid-related political crimes were given a chance of freedom Wednesday when President Thabo Mbeki announced a special process of presidential pardons.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 21, 2007 (AFP) - South Africans jailed for apartheid-era political crimes got a shot at freedom Wednesday when President Thabo Mbeki announced they could apply for presidential pardons.

ROBBEN ISLAND, South Africa, Nov 21, 2007 (AFP) - Mark Shinners, a former anti-apartheid prisoner on South Africa's notorious Robben Island penal colony, will forever associate the beautiful game with a bundle of filthy rags.

CAPE TOWN, Nov 13, 2007 (AFP) - Piet Koornhof, a former South Africa cabinet minister who enforced racial segregation only to later fall in love with a woman of mixed race and join the once-banned ANC, has died at the age of 82.

Koornhof passed away in Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, on Monday afternoon, the SAPA news agency quoted his cousin as saying.

JOHANNESBURG, Nov 5, 2007 (AFP) - Helen Suzman, the 'vicious little cat' who served as a lone voice of parliamentary dissent during apartheid, shows little sign of putting her claws away as she celebrates her 90th birthday this week.

JOHANNESBURG, Nov 1, 2007 (AFP) - Arthur Magerman can still vividly remember the summer's morning half a century ago when he joined thousands of fellow township residents on the long walk to work in a protest seen as the first major salvo in the battle against South Africa's apartheid regime.

NEW YORK, Oct 15, 2007 (AFP) - Victims who filed suit for 400 billion dollars against US businesses allegedly complicit with the former South African apartheid regime have found new hope following a federal court ruling.

'The Appeals Court decision is a major victory,' said Michael Hausfeld, a lawyer for the victims on the heels of Friday's decision by a Manhattan federal court.

Hausfeld said the ruling 'enables victims of terrible human rights abuses to hold those who aided and abetted those abuses accountable.

JOHANNESBURG, Sept 14, 2007 (AFP) - Poppy Buthelezi, shot by South Africa's police on the first day of the June 1976 Soweto uprising and since confined to a wheelchair, has died aged 48, her close companion said on Friday.

Buthelezi was shot in the back on June 16 when the police of the country's then white minority regime opened fire on demonstrating students, sparking off the nationwide uprising that led eventually to the end of apartheid in 1994 when South Africa's first democratic elections were held.

CAPE TOWN, Sept 12, 2007 (AFP) - South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki lamented lingering racism and black submissiveness on Wednesday in paying tribute to black consciousness leader Steve Biko, killed by apartheid police 30 years ago.

The challenge Biko had lain down to black people, to reclaim their dignity, had not lost its relevance since South Africa's whites-only rule ended 13 years ago, the president told a Steve Biko memorial lecture in Cape Town.

JOHANNESBURG, Sept 10, 2007 (AFP) - Thirty years after dying in prison in apartheid South Africa, Steve Biko remains a historical icon, even if his 'Black Consciousness Movement' no longer carries political weight.

A fervent anti-apartheid and freedom activist, Biko's popularity in the new South Africa is rooted in culture, providing ideas for the shaping of the identity of young blacks rather than formal politics.

PRETORIA, Aug 17, 2007 (AFP) - South Africa's apartheid-era police minister Adriaan Vlok was handed a 10-year suspended jail sentence Friday after pleading guilty to the attempted murder of a leading black activist 18 years ago.

In a plea bargain with prosecutors, Vlok, his former police chief Johann van der Merwe and three other former security officials, all admitted seeking to kill Frank Chikane in a case that has reopened the debate on justice for crimes committed during white-minority rule.

PRETORIA, Aug 17, 2007 (AFP) - South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) welcomed Friday the guilty plea of an apartheid-era minister over the attempted murder of a leading black activist 18 years ago.

'We regard today's developments as a step towards healing the wounds of the past and hope that more people would come forward and make full disclosure regarding their participation in apartheid crimes,' the ANC said in a statement.

PRETORIA, Aug 17, 2007 (AFP) - South Africa's apartheid-era police minister Adriaan Vlok was handed a 10-year suspended jail sentence Friday after pleading guilty to the attempted murder of a leading black activist 18 years ago.

In a plea bargain reached with prosecutors, Vlok, his former police chief Johann van der Merwe and three other former security officials, all admitted seeking to kill Frank Chikane, currently a senior aide to President Thabo Mbeki, by having his clothes laced with poison.

PRETORIA, Aug 17, 2007 (AFP) - South Africa's apartheid-era police minister Adriaan Vlok was handed 10-year suspended jail sentence Friday after pleading guilty to the attempted murder of a top opponent to white rule 18 years ago.

In a plea bargain agreed with state prosecutors, Vlok and his former police chief Johan van der Merwe admitted seeking to kill Frank Chikane, now a top aide to President Thabo Mbeki, by having his clothes laced with poison.

PRETORIA, Aug 17, 2007 (AFP) - South Africa's apartheid-era police minister Adriaan Vlok appeared in court Friday, charged with the attempted murder of a top aide to President Thabo Mbeki during the country's white minority rule.

Rival protestors greeted Vlok as he arrived with his four co-defendants: his former police chief Johann van der Merwe, former major-general Christoffel Smith and colonels Gert Otto and Johannes Van Staden.

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 15, 2007 (AFP) - An apartheid-era South African police minister goes to trial for attempted murder Friday in a case that has dredged up old political crimes and dragged a former president into the ensuing fray.

Adriaan Vlok, law and order minister at the height of apartheid rule in the mid-1980s, will enter the dock with four former senior policemen on five charges, including an attempt on the life of a top aide to current president Thabo Mbeki.

CAPE TOWN, Aug 3, 2007 (AFP) - The once secret organisation that led South Africa's white Afrikaner minority out of the political and economic doldrums into decades of oppressive rule is battling to find a niche post apartheid.

Following its dogged pursuit of exclusive white interests under the apartheid system, the Afrikanerbond (league) is finding it hard 13 years into majority rule to justify its past or find a foothold in the present.

PRETORIA, July 30, 2007 (AFP) - A South African whose family was killed in a 1985 landmine blast launched a push Monday for the attack's ANC masterminds to go on trial after a decision to prosecute an apartheid era police minister.

Dirk Van Eck said he had written to the national prosecuting authority after compiling a 140-page dossier containing evidence of how many leaders of the now ruling African National Congress allegedly ordered deadly attacks in the 1980s.

JOHANNESBURG, July 29, 2007 (AFP) - Nobel peace prize winner FW de Klerk, South Africa's last apartheid-era leader, on Sunday defended a fresh round of allegations of atrocities committed during his presidency.

De Klerk defended a decision to authorise a botched raid in 1993 in the Eastern Cape province in which five teenagers were killed after media reports in which he was accused of ordering the operation.

CAPE TOWN, July 26, 2007 (AFP) - FW de Klerk, the last president in South Africa`s era of white minority apartheid rule, denied any knowledge on Thursday of human rights violations committed on his watch.

'I`ve never been part of any policy that said assassination is fine, cold-blooded murder is fine, attempted cold-blooded murder is fine, rape is fine, torture is fine,' he told journalists in Cape Town.