Apartheid

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In each of the three apartheid societies that are under investigation here, there is a
peculiar form of indigenous femicide, in Graeco-Roman Egypt female genital mutilation, in
South Africa ‘witch’-burnings, and in Palestine and Israel ‘honor’ killings. The perpetrators,
the murderers carrying out the killings, are all indigenous in these instances. Mostly, they are
related to the victims, except in the South African instance. In Graeco-Roman Egypt Greeks
and Romans also practiced (mainly female) infanticide on their own babies, a fourth form of
femicide. All apartheid ethnic elites have practiced rape-murder of indigenous women and
girls, a fifth form. By deliberately withholding or preventing access to existing pre- and
postnatal medical services as well as childbirth facilities for indigenous women, the ethnic
elites of both apartheid South Africa and Israel have also indulged in a sixth form of femicide
(as well as ethnicist infanticide, see Chapter II.6, below).
I believe the following arguments are strong enough to subsume these kinds of
homicide under apartheid violence without reducing them to apartheid violence. The only
exception is the fourth form, which is the only one targeting females of the elite ethnicity and
should be seen as a leftover from pre-apartheid Greek custom. (It is also testimony to the
remarkable tenacity of femicide, as we shall see in the following.)
Due to the ethnicist immigration pressure along with ethnic cleansing, the indigenous
develop a higher birth rate than the invaders. This may be seen as a kind of self-defense on the
part of the indigenous: more fighters, more votes, and more leverage with regard to socioeconomic
factors. We will look at this in detail in the next section, on apartheid repopulation.
But in order to keep up this higher birth rate, over generations, indigenous women who do not
marry early or have many children are targeted with deadly violence as are those who
encourage young women to self-realization, i.e. to make something out of their lives aside
from marrying and having children. Thus, both indigenous men and (mainly) women are
killed by representatives of the indigenous patriarchy in the demographic war. The invaders
and their descendants must, in my opinion, be held responsible firstly for strongly prompting
the high indigenous birth rates and secondly for encouraging indigenous patriarchy in this
way, whether it be conscious or not. But, as is the case with violent resistance against
apartheid, there are also indigenous responsibilities for these killings, including what must be
considered as charges of murder in the first degree. There was of course indigenous violence
in each society before the apartheid invaders arrived, but the apartheid conditions have
exacerbated some kinds of that violence, and in some cases apartheid may have brought about
new kinds of violence between groups within the indigenous population. There are also, of
course, other forms of violence between indigenous individuals and groups, i.e. common
crimes, which should best be treated independently of apartheid.
Because of their superiority in military terms, but also due to their strongly ethnicist
mindset, which, as we shall see later, includes an effective ideological de-humanization of
their enemies, and of their perceived enemies, apartheid perpetrators usually carry out
provocations as well as extremely disproportionate armed actions in response to armed as well
as unarmed resistance. 190 Added to this is the paranoid, and in effect genocidal, sentiment that
& Russell: Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, 1992; Russell & Harmes (eds.): Femicide in Global
Perspective, 2001. I first became aware of the importance of femicide within apartheid on Easter Monday 2005
in Jerusalem. During an unusual lull in this Intifada, no Palestinians had been killed by Israelis over the Easter
weekend, but three young Palestinian women were murdered by Palestinians in ‘honor’ killings in Ramallah and
Jerusalem. I experienced this as a continuation or extension of the main violence and drew the parallels for
myself with South Africa and with Egypt almost immediately.
190 Hauser: ICRC Concerned over Casualties in Mideast Conflict, 2002. The article quotes the president of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, as being deeply worried about the Israeli use of
disproportionate force in the ongoing conflict. There is, however, a certain danger involved in this kind of
terminology, since it explicitly only blames Israeli retaliations for being over-reactions, not mentioning other
Israeli acts of violence and thereby implicitly suggesting that Israeli acts of violence are usually or in essence
retaliations. As we shall see in Chapter II.9.3, many western mainstream news media help Israelis to spread this
illusion by grossly mislabeling most Israeli acts of violence as ‘retaliations’ or presenting them as such with