Apartheid

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introduction of demographic war must have amounted to a serious collective trauma, although
interethnic violence must have been far from widespread at the early stages of Greek rule. We
will return to the patriarchal aspect of Graeco-Roman apartheid, in the following sections,
especially in the realms of repopulation, citizenship, and access.
For female members of the ethnic elite, however, apartheid can be collectively
beneficial, at least in the short term. The gruesome tradition of infanticide was brought along
by Greeks and Romans from their home countries to Egypt. Most of the victims were female.
The Egyptians themselves did not practice it, and they often rescued Greek and Roman babies
from certain death. (The most popular method was exposure: unwanted babies were placed,
usually by their parents, on a garbage heap or somewhere similar, and were then abandoned
there.) However, the Egyptians were punished, at least according to the Roman law for Egypt,
if they rescued these Greek and Roman babies to bring them up as adopted children. They
were not punished if they enslaved them. We will consider some wider aspects of this in
Chapter II.9.1. Apparently, there were vicissitudes, but the practice continued, possibly
unabated, among Greek and Roman families until an imperial decree against infanticide was
issued by Valentinian in 374 CE. And even then, it took a while before the practice
subsided. 201
The practices of femicide in Graeco-Roman Egypt, on both sides of the apartheid
divide, may also be correlated with large numbers of male fatalities, on both sides, linked with
interethnic apartheid violence. This is conjecture, but both in apartheid South Africa and in
Israel/Palestine the fighting by the indigenous groups so far was predominantly a male affair,
and it is not likely to have been much different in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Thus, both sides
would have re-established a numerical balance between the sexes through femicide. The
extremely low number of white apartheid casualties in South Africa, and the more genderbalanced
casualty rate among the Israelis, where women are conscripted along with men to do
military service, could then explain why there was no or very little femicide within the
invader groups in the modern apartheid societies. Of course, other factors play even more
important roles here. In Graeco-Roman Egypt women and babies (also mainly female) had
nothing even approaching human rights, even if they were members of the elite ethnicity,
whereas all white and Jewish lives were particularly protected by apartheid South African and
Israeli laws and other institutions and practices.
With regard to cycles of interethnic violence, Graeco-Roman Egypt and South Africa
have more in common than what first, perhaps, comes to mind: the millennium that lies
between the Arab conquest of Roman Egypt and the establishment of the Cape Colony.
In both cases, two European military superpowers shared resources and power in a
rich, subtropical part of Africa. The first waves of Europeans – the Greeks and the Dutch,
respectively – declared independence from their European mother countries (though the Dutch
descendants did so later, i.e. during the 19 th and 20 th centuries). Throughout the period of
oppression, they also remained the majority of European settlers. The Europeans fought one
short major war between each other, the end of which established the new, even smaller
minority as (colonialist) rulers. The subjugation of a great majority of indigenous Africans
provoked several armed uprisings, all of which were suppressed by means of physical
violence.
The respective differences in military technology are also similar. The Egyptian army
under indigenous rule used mainly bronze weapons. The Egyptians enjoyed little access to
iron ore, and even less to fuel, i.e. firewood, to smelt it. The Greeks – like the Assyrians and
the Persians, the previous conquerors of Egypt – used superior weapons and armaments made
of iron.
Black South Africans also had iron weapons, notably stabbing spears, with which the
Zulu nation was able to repel an invading British army consisting of 8,000 soldiers as late as
201 Tyldesley: Daughters of Isis: Women of Ancient Egypt, 1995 (1994): 69; Lewis, N. 1983: 54