This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Back in the 1980s, when Louis Smuts was growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa,

his family couldn't go outside together without breaking the law.

My father would never walk next to my mother.

My mother would always walk behind him wherever they went.

Louis was too young to understand why his parents couldn't be seen together in Johannesburg or as everyone calls it,

Joe Burke. Louis just saw a world that treated them differently.

You know, if your mother got sick and didn't have a medical age you'd go to a hospital out of the city

Whereas your dad you'd go to what is the Joburg Jen which was around the corner from where we stayed

Health care like almost everything else in South Africa, was decided by race.

Louis's father was white, his mother was colored, a local term for people of mixed

race.

They'd gotten married in neighboring Swaziland, but back home their marriage was against the law.

When Louis was a kid, only white people could move freely in cities here, live in the nicest neighborhoods, or access the best hospitals, schools and jobs.

This is Doshin Mudley, he's a South African journalist.

Black people on the other hand lived in the crowded outskirts which were far from just about

everything you'd want in a city. The country's ruling white minority called

the system apartheid which literally translated to separateness.

Our policy is one which is called by an Afrikaans word apartheid.

And I'm afraid that is being misunderstood so often.

It could just as easily, and perhaps much better be described, as a policy of good neighborliness.

Apartheid leaders like... policy of good neighborliness.

...