I never learned anything about Apartheid in high school (other than Nelson Mandela existed and ended it), and my university doesn't offer any classes on the subject. This seems like a huge gap in my knowledge. I know questions about apartheid have been asked in this subreddit, but I have absolutely no information with which to contextualize them. A list of recommended reading (books or articles) would also be appreciated.
There's been some great discussions about this topic, which might assume greater fund of knowledge than you have at the moment:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hbpyb/was_there_an_objective_to_apartheid_in_south/
In those two threads from a year or so ago, our very own /u/khosikulu and /u/yodatsracist, as well as a few non-flairs like /u/SammyGreen, discuss how apartheid was intended to create nominally "independent" blackhomelands as a legal method of depriving the black Bantu-speaking peoples of their civil rights while shoring up the power the existing rural elites in select areas. This systems was something of a farce, as pretty much everybody with two braincells to rub together realized pretty early on that the degree of population movement that was theoretically required by the laws was fundamentally incompatible with the existing economic and demographic patterns within South Africa. The business-owning whites needed the cheap township labor too badly, and the black Bantustans were completely unable to economically support the populations attributed as their "homelanders" (is that the right word?), which was why black moved to the townships in the first place.
/u/khosikulu, if I did a bad job summarizing your argument, please let me know.
edit: added details as per the new bot.
Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom appears to fit your needs. It is his autobiography from childhood up to the mid-90's. At this point, he is out of prison and something of an elder statesman. IIRC, the book ends before he served as president of South Africa.
Judging the book as a book, it is (1) well written, with lots of up-close detail of life under apartheid, (2) a pretty quick read, (3) well written and edited. Clearly, a nimble legal mind was writing this, independent of its actual (awesome) content, (4) and it has the current distinction of being the only book I've read on the subject.
I'm a little late to the party, but if you're still interested in recommended reading, I'd like to repeat my plugs from this similar reading-list request topic, for Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart and any of H.C.Bosman's anthologies (maybe Mafeking Road is the best to start with).
Both of them are very different writers, but both encapsulate the experience of apartheid from the white perspective - Malan, a direct descendant of one of the architects of apartheid as a policy, wrote his memoir in the 1980s as a journalist and exile who could no longer stand the madness and horror of his own country, a country which he loved. His book is also kind of a study of high-profile murder cases, and the far-reaching effects of the effects of the effects of apartheid. It's written very much in the "new journalism" creative non-fiction mode.
Bosman was writing a generation or two earlier, and although he worked as a journalist, the pieces are fiction - or maybe truthalized fiction? He's kind of a folk satirist in the same tradition as Mark Twain (or Gamble Rogers, if anyone remembers him)... only because of his place and time, I think, he's a little more wry and the humor is a few shades darker. Bosman also did a spell in prison for murder, which gave his stories a certain perspective.
Oom Schalk Lourens is his storytelling alter-ego, and a very evocative portrait of an old Boer who's seen everything in South Africa - the predators in the bush, and the ones in the nice houses in town. Sometimes, you need to do a little research to get a few of the jokes (Paul Kruger's political and military career is a regular reference point, and there are a few Afrikaans words sprinkled into the English prose), but most of it is pretty universal.
Can't recommend both of them enough.
Apartheid or apartness was a racial law to seperate the diffrent races as it was a global fenominom. South Africa was late to the cuase as a global community. Mandela and other members like Oliver Thambo. Where imprisoned for conspiering against the law. By spending years in jail he changed and created an impact from out of his jail cell. During that time the current president PW Botha passed the law allowing all races to beable to candise and vote. By creating an example Mandela was able to bring a country now anguished by racism. Using many mediums like sports he accomplised this.
This is a very very shortened version I will later link websites, movies and books. Regards a South African