Apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced through legislation by the National Party governments, who were the ruling party from 1948 to 1994, of South Africa, under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and white supremacy and Afrikaner minority rule was maintained. Apartheid was developed after World War II by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party and Broederbond organizations and was practiced also in South West Africa, which was administered by South Africa under a League of Nations mandate (revoked in 1966), until it gained independence as Namibia in 1990.

Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times under Dutch and British rule. However, apartheid as an official policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. New legislation classified inhabitants into four racial groups ("native", "white", "coloured", and "Asian"), and residential areas were segregated, sometimes by means of forced removals. Non-white political representation was completely abolished in 1970, and starting in that year black people were deprived of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands called bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government segregated education, medical care, beaches, and other public services, and provided black people with services inferior to those of white people.

Michael Duncan Buerk (born 18 February 1946) is a BBC journalist and newsreader, most famous for his reporting of the Ethiopian famine on 23 October 1984, which inspired the Band Aid charity record.

Buerk was born in Solihull, and was educated at Solihull School, an Independent school in the West Midlands where he was a member of the Combined Cadet Force and represented the school on the sports field.

Michael Buerk's hopes of a career in the armed forces were dashed when he failed an eyesight test at the selection centre. After a brief spell as a hod carrier he began his career in journalism with the Bromsgrove Messenger, South Wales Echo (where he shared a house with Sue Lawley in Cardiff), and the Daily Mail, he joined Radio Bristol in 1970 before becoming a reporter for BBC News in 1973.

He was awarded the Golden Nymph award at the Monte Carlo festival for his reports on the famine from Korem in Ethiopia, first broadcast on 24 October 1984. The footage of the famine was shot by Mohamed Amin. He later said that the broadcast was one of "the most influential pieces of television ever broadcast [prompting] a surge of generosity across the world for Ethiopia[that raised] more than $130 million". Another notable bulletin he is renowned for is being the first news reporter on the BBC News in the 2000s, making the bulletin at 0100 GMT on the 1 January 2000.

John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London.

Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger has been a strong critic of American and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians and the practices of the mainstream media. In the UK print media, he has had a long association with the Daily Mirror, and writes a fortnightly columnn for the New Statesman magazine.

Pilger has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries, screened internationally, have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, and the journalist has received several honorary doctorates.

Pilger was born and raised in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney. He attended Sydney Boys High School, where he started a student newspaper, The Messenger, and later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, he later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph where he was a reporter, sports writer and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was for a year a freelance correspondent in Italy.