Apartheid

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by orders or even laws from above. 177 Not unlike the Greek and Roman soldiers in Egypt,
many of them had been conquering, plundering, killing and destroying for years, even
decades, before they came to set up a new apartheid system – in the case of South Africa:
under supervision from the Netherlands or the Dutch East India Company.
Another case of victimization and the victimization syndrome developed with the
Afrikaners, the indigenous ‘white tribe’ of mainly Dutch origin in South Africa. When the
British took over the Cape Colony and developed it, they gradually phased out the Dutch
system of slavery. (Incidentally, the British abolished slavery primarily in their own long-term
interest, not the slaves’, because they needed mass markets for their pioneering industrial
mass production of consumer commodities, i.e. they needed to turn the slaves into wageslaves
who would also be part-time consumers of industrial products. 178 ) In protest and in
defiance of the British, many Afrikaners then emigrated on their ‘Great Trek’ inland and set
up their own independent agricultural apartheid republics. By the time British imperialists and
settlers caught up, diamonds and gold had been found on Afrikaner-held territory and the
British invaded and took over the remaining Afrikaner republics during the Anglo-Boer war
(1899-1902), confining many Afrikaner civilians to concentration camps and even killing
many of them there. Thus, the persecution syndrome appears to have played a very significant
role for South Africa’s as well as for Israel’s apartheid elites. 179 Similarly, they also make the
truly (or relatively) indigenous, the innocent, suffer for wrongs done to them by others.
Of course, these past traumatic experiences and past victimizations of apartheid
perpetrators do not justify a single human rights violation carried out under apartheid
conditions, but they are important pieces of information from the interpretive and strategic (or
diagnostic and therapeutic) points of view. Palestinians, for example, should be aware of the
important role of the Holocaust in Jewish mentalities. To deny the existence of the Holocaust,
as is sometimes done in the criticism of Israel, is a great disfavor, not only to Jews in general
– who are, after all, not necessarily Zionists – and not only to truth and justice, either.
For lack of a better word, there is something ‘inventive’ about ethnicism, when seen as
a psychological phenomenon. It constructs extremely elaborate justifications for its own acts
of oppression, murder and theft, including religious and pseudo-scientific ones, which could
be interpreted both as evil manipulations and as collective psychoses. These ‘psychoses’ do
not, however, stay put in the mental world, like the overwhelming majority of individual
psychoses do. Unlike most (?) individual psychoses, they are also state- and elite-sponsored
infirmities. They slam down on others, on real people, real communities, cultures, and even on
nature.
Aletta Norval, for example, refers to South African directives to white women as the
‘Beginnings of a Security Psychosis’. The evidence she presents is in the document, ‘Women
Our Silent Soldiers’, published by the Federal Council of the (ruling) National Party in South
Africa in 1978/79, which instructs white women to: ‘[m]ake a study of Marxism in your own
family, social or political circles and you will be shocked to learn under what guise the enemy
works in the circles in which you move’. The document further informs readers:
‘[C]ounter-offensive’ action has to be taken against domestic employees by
checking their identity documents for falsification; by ‘visiting’ their ‘dwelling
places’ regularly to establish whether ‘strangers’ were ‘harboured’ there; by
being on the look-out for literature of a Communist origin and books containing
manuals for terrorism; by inspecting the contents of suitcases and trunks for
false bottoms in which machine guns could be smuggled; by paying attention to
clothes not obtainable in South Africa; and in the rural areas, by being on the
177
Iliffe 1995: 125: ‘Seventeenth-century Dutch law was brutal to Dutchmen; to slaves [in South Africa] it was
unspeakably cruel.’
178
Iliffe 1995: 127-159; Ankomah: It’s Time to Pay, 1999: 16-19
179
McGregor: Israel Should Learn from the Boers, 2001; Iliffe 1995