Apartheid

I. The State of Apartheid and the Apartheid States
1. The Big Picture: Human Rights Violations, Ethnicism and Racism
The Afrikaans term ‘apartheid’, which originally means ‘apartness’ or ‘separateness’,
has become a globally used word for racist, grave, and systematic human rights violations.
There is some irony in this, since South Africa’s all-white National Party (NP), which ruled
the country continuously from 1948 until 1994, seems to have coined the term to veil or mask
the numerous oppressive aspects of its policies and practices. It claimed, for instance, that
ethnic separation would be beneficial to all ethnic groups in the country. Those 46 years have
become known as ‘the era of apartheid’ in South Africa and the phenomenon ‘apartheid’ has
now gained the kind of notoriety otherwise reserved for undemocratic, oppressive and
destructive societies such as Germany (and most of the rest of Europe) under the rule of Adolf
Hitler, Italy under Benito Mussolini, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Uganda under Idi Amin, or the
Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.
The concept of separateness in itself does not necessarily imply that any group is or
will be favored over any other. After all, segregation per se of ethnic groups was supported by
some South African Blacks. In the past, moreover, a wide range of natural conditions have
separated human beings, which has led to natural and cultural differences between them. The
distinctive characteristic of apartheid and of other kinds of oppressive segregation is that
political, economic, social, and even geographic conditions are created consciously and
systematically in order to forcibly separate groups, invariably to the benefit – at least the
short-term benefit – of at least one of the groups, but never, or only accidentally, to the benefit
of all of them. 2
‘Apartheid’ is without a doubt the most successful Afrikaans word outside South
Africa. It has found its way into practically every language, although not with its originally
intended overt meaning: ethnic separation to the benefit of all those involved, with a merely
implied understanding that separateness should especially be to the benefit of the worthiest
ethnic group. It appears that the world outside South Africa, by not translating ‘apartheid’ and
insisting on the use of the Afrikaans word, made it a pejorative term, and expressed solidarity
with the victims of apartheid. (Who ever heard of the ‘Separateness Regime’ of South
Africa?) This, however, also made the phenomenon of South African apartheid seem more
unique than it really was. In this sense, the word was often confused with the concept. And so,
although the term ‘apartheid’ was often also applied to describe ethnic oppression and
2 Lester: From Colonization to Democracy: A New Historical Geography of South Africa, 1996: 87ff. Without
segregation, many South African Blacks may indeed not have been able to keep so many of their cultural
traditions – including language – and proud resistant attitudes in defiance of Whites and their cultures. Of course,
this was not part of most of the Whites’ plans or expectations. The indigenous culture was supposed (by the
leading white intellectuals as well as by the analphabetic soldiers and settlers and almost everyone in between) to
just fade away, due merely to being in the proximity of ‘superior’ white culture. For one example of this selfdeceptive
eurocentric attitude in a prominent philosopher and intellectual commonly considered ‘humanist’, see
Jaspers: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, 1949: 69, 88. According to Mandela: No Easy Walk to
Freedom, 2002 (1965): 60, there was in South Africa until the 1960s never any ‘serious or responsible leader’
who ‘ever accepted segregation, separation, or the partition of this country in any shape or form’. Similar to
black South African separation advocates, who multiplied as the Bantustans were created during the 1970s and
‘80s, the physical separation of races was favored, at least for a while, by a black US emancipationist like
Malcolm X, and it still is today by the US ‘Nation of Islam’ leader Louis Farrakhan. See Posner: Hundreds of
Thousands of Blacks Mass in Capital, 1995; Mbakwe: A Powerful Fighter for Freedom – Malcolm X, 1993; X &
Haley (Contributor): The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965. On some of the numerous parallel acts and
policies of racist discrimination in the USA and South Africa, as well as the essential differences between them,
see Chapter I.4, below. On the interpretation and the reception of the term and the concept of ‘apartheid’, see
also Bishara, A.: New Forms of Apartheid, no date.
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