Apartheid

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Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter II.9.1, unwanted Greek and Roman babies, left to
die on garbage heaps by their parents, were often rescued by Egyptians. The Roman
authorities would punish those Egyptians who adopted such babies, but they would not punish
Egyptians who enslaved them. It is possible that racism, i.e. the distaste for interethnic
biological mixing and a strong wish to counteract its long-term effects upon the demography
of the country, was one of the main reasons behind this legal peculiarity.
Nevertheless, the law often differs from the situation on the ground. At the same time
as racist pressures from the state increased, the number of Greeks in Egypt was growing
rapidly (mainly due to rigidly state-controlled immigration, as in South Africa and modern
Israel), and so were the points of contact with the Egyptians. Direct control over the Greeks in
Egypt and over interethnic encounters must therefore have decreased with time, despite elite
attempts to counter this development. As a result, there was a ‘gradual Egyptianization of the
Greeks of the middle and lower classes who were outside the citizen-body’. The most
unprivileged Greeks consequently appear to have had the least to lose from fraternizing and
mingling with the Egyptians, although ethnicist baggage must have made this relationship
fraught with difficulties. 322
2.2. ‘Family Planning’ and Circumscribed Immigration
According to John Iliffe the most basic ‘underlying historical process’ from 1886 (the
discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand which initiated rapid industrialization) until the end of
apartheid in South Africa a century later was demographic growth. During that time the
country’s total population grew from about 3 or 4 million to 39 million. At the ‘root’ of the
many factors that contributed to the downfall of white political supremacy, he writes, was
population growth. 323 By this he means both overall growth and the equally dramatic relative
growth and decline of the black and white ethnic groups, respectively.
The white population share sank from 21 per cent of the entire populace in 1951 to
16.9 per cent in 1970 and 13.7 per cent in 1995. Today it is 10.7 per cent. In relative terms, it
has halved in half a century. It lost more than a third of its relative size during apartheid in the
narrow sense. In the same periods the black portion grew from 68 per cent to 70.6 per cent
and 76.3 per cent, respectively. The Coloured and Indian populations remained roughly the
same at a combined 12 per cent.
‘The change took place despite white immigration and feverish official attempts to
encourage large families among whites and contraception among Africans [Blacks] – in 1991
South Africa had twice as many family planning clinics as health clinics’, Iliffe explains. 324
We shall return to the disastrous health conditions for Blacks, including the forced injections
of contraceptives in black women, in Chapter II.6.2. They further underscore the cynical yet
ultimately unsuccessful attitudes and repopulation policies and practices of the South African
government until 1991.
It did not limit the immigration of strong young men from surrounding countries
(including the Bantustans), however, since they were needed by the white profiteers as miners
and in many other underpaid professions (see Chapter II.5.2). But the white elites made it
practically impossible for these black immigrants to bring along their families to South Africa.
by Toussaint l’Ouverture, nearly two millennia later, which was the only successful slave revolt to date. South
African apartheid elites made sure that indigenous and imported ethnicities were segregated, and Israel can be
expected to do the same, once its recently imported third ethnicity workers truly settle in Israel.
322 Ibid: 131
323 Iliffe 1995: 271. If Fredrickson, as I believe, makes too little of demographic development in his comparative
analysis of South Africa and the USA (see Chapter I.4, above), one could perhaps say that Iliffe makes too much
of it. The domestic and foreign resistance to South African apartheid in other ways than black population growth
should in my opinion be considered as of equal importance, at the least.
324 Ibid.: 281