1913 — The Natives Land Act

On June 19, 1913, the Natives Land Act took effect in the Union of South Africa, restricting Black South Africans, eighty percent of the population, to about seven percent of the land. In a single law, the great majority of a country's people were confined to a small fraction of its soil.

Families who had farmed for generations became squatters overnight, forced to trek in search of somewhere to live. The Act became a cornerstone of apartheid's land policy, though apartheid's full system still lay ahead. Its cruelty was in its arithmetic and its immediacy: home, by law, could suddenly cease to be home at all.