Tutu Leads 30,000: Cape Town's Anti-Apartheid March

Thirty thousand people marched through the streets of Cape Town on September 13, 1989, in the largest anti-apartheid demonstration South Africa had ever seen, led by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Reverend Allan Boesak. The peaceful procession through the city center, just eleven days after police had beaten and tear-gassed protesters in the same streets, signaled that the apartheid government’s ability to control public dissent through force had reached its limit. The march occurred during a period of intense crisis. President P.W. Botha had resigned in August after a stroke and power struggle, replaced by F.W. de Klerk, whose intentions remained unclear. The Mass Democratic Movement, a broad coalition of anti-apartheid organizations that had formed after the banning of the United Democratic Front, called for a defiance campaign timed to coincide with the September parliamentary elections, which excluded the Black majority from voting. Police had violently dispersed earlier protests in Cape Town, including a march on September 2 where water cannons laced with purple dye were turned on demonstrators. The image of a protester commandeering the dye cannon and spraying the surrounding buildings with purple became one of the iconic photographs of the anti-apartheid struggle. By September 13, the new de Klerk government, seeking to signal a break from Botha’s hardline approach, quietly authorized the Cape Town march. Tutu, who had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his nonviolent opposition to apartheid, linked arms with Boesak and Cape Town Mayor Gordon Oliver as the procession filled Adderley Street from end to end. The march demonstrated that mass peaceful resistance could no longer be suppressed without catastrophic political cost. Five months later, de Klerk unbanned the African National Congress, released Nelson Mandela from prison, and began the negotiations that dismantled apartheid. The Cape Town march was one of the final acts of public pressure that made that reversal inevitable.