Apartheid

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(UNITA in Angola) and Rhodesia (RENAMO in Mozambique). 219 The apartheid violence in
South Africa itself, however, was largely structural, i.e. of an indirect nature, though hardly
less brutal. Divide-and-rule policies originating with the white elites also led to violence
within South Africa. It started already during Dutch times with the Khoikhoi, and, although
discontinuous, it lasted until the 1990s with the struggle between the ANC and the Inkatha
Freedom Party, which sometimes became violence between the Xhosa and the Zulu, the two
largest ethnic groups in South Africa. This violence was the bloodiest within the borders of
South Africa between 1948 and 1994, i.e. during apartheid in the narrow sense. 220
As the struggle in South Africa intensified, incidents of intra-community violence
against women increased, as well. They typically included rape and other kinds of violent
abuse, among and between both Whites and Blacks. From 1985, the phenomenon of ‘witch’burnings
started to spread rapidly in rural black South Africa. It reached a climax in 1990, the
year Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in jail. Western liberal concepts had been part
of the general human rights policy of the main resistance movement to which Mandela
belonged, the ANC, since its inception in 1912, but in some resistance cells where the struggle
was particularly intense, human rights were sometimes blatantly disregarded. People
suspected of being collaborators with the apartheid regime were sometimes summarily
executed or assassinated. Occasionally, if collaboration could not be argued persuasively,
‘witchcraft’ became the charge. ‘Witch’-burnings are still a problem in today’s South Africa,
mainly in isolated rural communities. 221
Executions of ‘witches’ were not an entirely new phenomenon to South Africa, but
they only became widespread towards the very end of the apartheid era. Though not as
dramatic as the peak period of ‘witch’-burnings in Europe between 1450 and 1660 222 , the
219 Iliffe 1995: 257; Hanlon: Mozambique: The Revolution under Fire, 1984. Both UNITA and RENAMO are
still active, politically as well as militarily, in these countries, which were devastated by the apartheid offensives.
In consequence, Angola and Mozambique today belong to the poorest and most dangerous countries in the world
to live in. Similar to apartheid South Africa, Israel attempts to ‘export’ its civil war, for example to Lebanon in
the 1980s and ‘90s, and to the Palestinian territories outside of internationally recognized Israeli territory since
1948. On the lies of the then president and the then secretary of state of the USA, Gerald Ford and Henry
Kissinger, who said and maintained (among other things in Kissinger’s memoirs) that they intervened militarily,
by means of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in Angola as a response to Cuban deployments there, see
Kornbluh (ed.): Conflicting Missions, Secret Cuban Documents on History of Africa Involvement, 2002. In fact,
the Cubans deployed in Angola only after they had found out about the closely coordinated South African
invasion of the country from South West Africa (now Namibia) and the covert CIA operation from Zaire (now
Democratic Republic of Congo) in order to aid Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA against the Angolan government. See
also French: How America Helped Savimbi and Apartheid South Africa, 2002: 7, and Hitchens: The Trial of
Henry Kissinger, 2002 (2001): 99ff. The latter is a book containing some of the evidence of the many crimes,
including crimes against humanity, for which Kissinger could be held responsible, but which are unlikely to be
prosecuted in any event, due among other things to US military, economic and political power backing up the
arrogant US refusal to cooperate with the International Criminal Court. See, further, footnote 217. Incidentally,
Kissinger apparently also broke international law by secretly allowing and even personally encouraging and
prodding the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, to violate a UN Security Council-brokered truce and attack
Egypt and Syria during the hours after the 1973 war had officially ended. See N.N.: US Let Israel Stretch 1973
Truce – Documents, October 7, 2003.
220 See footnote 175, above.
221 Simpson: Women and Children in Violent South African Townships, 1993: 3-13; Harnischfeger: Witchcraft
and the State in South Africa, 2000. Although fines and confiscations were common among punishment for
witchcraft in 19 th century South African black communities, death sentences were apparently also sometimes
passed and carried out. See Makhura: Missionary and African Perspectives on the Politics of Witchcraft among
the Xhosa and Zulu Communities in the 19 th Century Cape and Natal/Zululand, 2003.
222 Hollister, McGee & Stokes: The West Transformed: A History of Western Civilization, 2000: 618-621. An
estimated 110,000 people were put on trial for witchcraft in Europe and its North American colonies during this
period. Around 60,000 were found guilty and executed. Here, again, we might conclude that demographic factors
played an important role. During this period in particular, the male European elites were interested in rapid
population growth at home in order to strengthen armies and expand and settle globally. Since then, the
prevailing and constantly expanding economic system has kept women systematically out of the market by not