Apartheid

146
elites to keep ‘their’ women in line, so that the women may serve the ‘higher’ cause of
demographic predominance for their respective ethnicities. The main way for women to serve
their respective nations under these patriarchal schemes is to produce a maximum amount of
offspring. The demographic edge is then to be used militarily, politically (mainly in elections
or demands for elections), or in business, as needs to educate and promote people will switch
once a critical demographic threshold is overcome. We shall return to this economic condition
in the next section.
There could also be a psychological dimension to femicide in apartheid societies.
People often take out their anger over their own oppression on those of the next lower rung of
society’s hierarchy. Yet another aspect of femicide is its embeddedness in a real or imagined
‘cultural tradition’. As the entire culture of the besieged indigenous majority is threatened –
including language, religion, and other more or less essential markers of identity – reactions to
the oppression can easily become both radical and desperate.
As mentioned above, there may also be a sex-balancing calculus behind femicide in
apartheid societies. Since so many indigenous (and in Graeco-Roman Egypt also
invader/immigrant) men and boys are killed, it may be felt that girls and women have to be
sacrificed in order to even out the demography. Again, emigration of indigenous women and
girls is not an option for the indigenous elites, because it could become popular.
Aside from demographic war and femicide, and aside from suicidal ‘conventional’
warfare, the radical despair can also be seen in the notorious ‘Xhosa Cattle Killing’ of 1856-7,
a largely self-inflicted disaster that took place after nearly half a century of indigenous South
African unsuccessful warfare against the white invaders. As the southernmost Bantu-speakers
saw their land and livestock slowly being taken by the relentlessly advancing Whites, and as
their freedom and self-determination deteriorated, a new messianic cult appeared and spread
quickly. It prophesized a return of dead ancestors who would somehow abruptly end white
presence in South Africa, but only once the Xhosa killed their own cattle and stopped sowing
corn, i.e. once they destroyed their own primary means of subsistence. The Xhosa had
engaged in cattle culling earlier in order to stop livestock diseases, at least some of which had
been brought to South Africa by white settlers. Over the protests of many non-believers
around 400,000 cattle were culled by fervent believers in the prophecy, which resulted in a
devastating famine that cost an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 Xhosa lives. 280
Suicide attacks and femicide by Palestinians become understandable (though not
excusable) with this background. Fifty-eight years of apartheid warfare and oppression by
Israeli Jews against them has weakended them continuously, and all of the employed methods
and strategies of resistance have so far proven unsuccessful.
Aside from femicide, demographic warfare is also evident in more innocent-looking
elite measures, which may even be identical across the apartheid divide. Both the Israeli
government and the Ramallah-based nationalist Palestinian In’ash al Usra Society promised
social aid to families with more than ten children during the 1970s. (Israel only gave up the
scheme after prime minister Golda Meir was shocked to find out that Arab families in Israel
had been the main beneficiaries of the program.) 281 Obviously, the perceived need to qualify
280 See McArthur: The Colonial Dynamic: The Xhosa Cattle Killing and the American Indian Ghost Dance,
2005, for an astute analysis of the parallels between the South African disaster and a similar one among Native
Americans in the USA of the 1890s. The role of the genocidal mindsets of the white invader elites is highlighted
here. For instance, white charities to help the starving Xhosa were forbidden by Sir George Grey, the ruling
governor of the Cape Colony – apparently not out of direct racial hatred, but out of a reckless opportunism aimed
to further his own career. Only one soup kitchen had been opened for Xhosas by white settlers, who were not
overly anxious to aid the rebellious tribe, but it was closed down by Grey, who then decreed that such charities
were ‘not requisite’. Another focus of this thoughtful and well-researched article is the role of opportunist
indigenous leaders, who on both continents saw opportunities to extend their own power with the aid of
messianic millennarianism. See also Makhura 2003; Stapleton: Reluctant Slaughter: Rethinking Maqoma’s Role
in the Xhosa Cattle-Killing (1853-1857), 1993.
281 Tamari July 4, 2005