The South African Police (SAP) was the national police force in South Africa from 1913 to 1994; it was the de facto police force in the territory of South-West Africa (Namibia) from 1939 to 1981.
During South Africa's rule under apartheid, the SAP operated in close conjunction with South Africa's military to quell civil unrest amongst the country's disenfranchised black majority. Beyond the conventional police functions of upholding order and solving crime, the SAP employed counter-insurgency and intimidation tactics against black activists and critics of the white minority government.
The SAP was responsible for numerous human rights abuses against black South Africans, including acts of state terrorism and murder. After South Africa's transition to democracy in 1994, the SAP was reorganized into the South African Police Service.
Famous quotes containing the words south, african and/or police:
“Indeed, I believe that in the future, when we shall have seized again, as we will seize if we are true to ourselves, our own fair part of commerce upon the sea, and when we shall have again our appropriate share of South American trade, that these railroads from St. Louis, touching deep harbors on the gulf, and communicating there with lines of steamships, shall touch the ports of South America and bring their tribute to you.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
“It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all men ... that alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)