by Andres Buenaventura

The apartheid regime in South Africa successfully accomplished one thing–isolating the country from the rest of the world for decades with its largely unpopular political system of discrimination.

International anti-apartheid legislation and embargoes played a major role in ending the severe oppression and discrimination Africans suffered during the apartheid era in South Africa, said Hunt Davis, a University of Florida professor emeritus of history who specializes in South African history.

Davis said the ban on the country from the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 because of its apartheid policy hurt South Africa the most. It struck the sports-oriented culture of the white Afrikaners with a massive blow. South Africa did not participate in Olympic competition until the 1992 games in Barcelona, after the end of apartheid and the freedom of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela in 1990, according to a CNN report.

"The exclusion of South Africa from international competition really hurt. It really made them feel they were isolated," Davis said. "It helped change some people's attitudes and was also something that gave the majority of South Africans a sense that the world was doing something [about apartheid]."

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations activated the first-ever mandatory sanctions against a member state on South Africa in 1977. U.N. members could not supply South Africa with "arms and related materials, including police equipment and spare parts."

Davis said the 1976 Soweto uprisings raised American awareness and discontent with South Africa's apartheid regime, especially after the civil rights movement in America.

"Americans didn't believe people should be subject to all sorts of indignities, discrimination and abuses on the basis of color," Davis said. "That's what the South African system was–and much more severe than in the United States."

In a heralded piece of American legislation against apartheid's abuses, Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986. American banks could no longer loan South Africa money, which severely crippled the country's economy.

"South Africa could no longer borrow money internationally," Davis said. "I think in the late Apartheid era, the [South African] government's inability to secure large loans put pressure on it [to end their apartheid policy]."