In this opening episode, Oliver Tambo leads citizens of the world in their condemnation of South Africa's cruel and racist new regime. The world reacts with horror when protesters are gunned down in the town of Sharpeville and the entire ANC leadership is forced underground or imprisoned. Nelson Mandela is jailed for life and ANC deputy president Oliver Tambo escapes into exile, embarking on what will become a 30-year journey to engage the world in the struggle to bring democracy to South Africa. With resistance inside South Africa effectively crushed by the brutal apartheid regime, the fate of the liberation struggle is in Tambo's hands.
This second episode looks at how athletes and activists around the world hit white South Africa where it hurts - on the playing field. Knowing that fellow blacks in South Africa were denied even the most basic human rights, let alone the right to participate in international sports competitions, African nations refused to compete with all-white South African teams, boycotting the Olympics and eventually creating a worldwide media spectacle that forced the International Olympic Committee to ban apartheid teams from future games. By the 1970s, only South Africa's world champion rugby team remained, and citizens across the world took to the fields to close the last door on apartheid sports
The brutal suppression of a youth uprising in the South African township of Soweto and the murder of activist Biko turn South Africa from a country into a cause, a worldwide emblem of injustice. But even as the most powerful western governments refuse to heed Oliver Tambo's calls for cultural and economic boycotts, it is the world's youth that helps turn the tide.
Citizens all over the world, from employees of Polaroid to a General Motors director, from student account-holders in Barclays Bank to consumers who boycott Shell gas, mount the first-ever international grassroots campaign to successfully use economic pressure to help bring down a government. Faced with attacks at home and growing chaos in South Africa, international companies pull out in a mass exodus, causing a financial crisis in the now-isolated South Africa.
In this final episode, the campaign to free Nelson Mandela ignites a worldwide crusade which brings apartheid to an end. Faced with growing international isolation, the apartheid government tries to convince the world of the merit of its piecemeal reforms even as it savagely struggles to suppress open revolt. Three generations join together as the United Demographic Front, mounting a fierce campaign of defiance, demand the freedom of ANC leader Nelson Mandela. Caught between an unstoppable internal mass movement and ongoing international pressure, the apartheid regime is finally forced to the negotiating table and at last lifts the decades-long ban on the ANC. After 27 years in prison Mandela is released, sparking a global celebration as he tours the world to thank all. After 30 years in exile Oliver Tambo is finally able to return to South Africa, but the struggle has taken a heavy toll on him and he will die one year before his comrade Nelson Mandela is elected the first black president of a democratic South Africa.
