Africa at Noon: Alex Lichtenstein

In 1950, LIFE magazine sent renowned photographer Margaret Bourke-White to South Africa to cover that country’s increasing racial polarization. While there, Bourke-White gained unprecedented access to the country’s gold mines, prison farms, and burgeoning shantytowns and exposed to American eyes for the first time the emerging cruel system of racial control that would define South Africa for the next half century, apartheid.