Plot Synopsis

This five-part series chronicles the unprecedented international movement of citizen activists who fought for three decades to bring down the brutal, racist system of apartheid in South Africa when their governments would not. HAVE YOU HEARD starts with the time that South Africa instituted a system of oppressive laws against non-whites and imprisoned Nelson Mandela, though the pressure others placed on South Africa to politically isolate it, and finishing with the end of the apartheid regime in Pretoria resulting in a freed Nelson Mandela being elected president of a democratic South Africa. PBS aired this five-part documentary as episodes of its INDEPENDENT LENS series.