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Apartheid in South Africa was a 20th-century equivalent to the three and a half centuries of slavery in America. This brutal system of racial apartness came to an end during the final decade of the 20th century, when Wilhelm de Klerk, the then president of South Africa, lifted the ban on the African National Congress and more than 30 other organizations, freed Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and canceled the Population Registration Act, the cornerstone of apartheid, in 1991.