Apartheid

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Egypt’s development under European rule during antiquity quite closely. 362 )
In neither case, however, is there a simple, uni-directional curve of steady increase or
decrease of racism. Although the British in South Africa abolished institutional racist slavery,
for example, they introduced the systematic urban segregation of races at roughly the same
time. And although Egyptians gained Roman citizenship from Emperor Caracalla, they did
not gain what we understand as citizens’ rights today. For instance, they did not gain any
voting rights or any social security.
Egyptian women were probably the group that suffered the most under Greek and
Roman rule. Although traditionally part of a mainly patriarchal culture, women had enjoyed a
situation throughout Dynastic times, i.e. during the preceding three millennia, during which
the extent of their rights and privileges remained unparalleled in the ancient world.
Women in Dynastic Egypt were judicial persons with no need for male guardians; they
were treated as equals to men by the courts and most probably also by the law; they practised
professions at almost all levels of society, also repeatedly serving as heads of state, something
that never happened in any of the other great civilizations of antiquity. (I am, however,
unaware of any women who might have served as grand-viziers, i.e. as heads of government,
as prime ministers.) Women disposed freely over their own property, they were in general free
to choose sexual and marriage partners, and often themselves initiated divorce proceedings.
Egyptian women in fact often carried away more property from a divorce than their husbands
did. Virginity seems never to have been a precondition for marriage, as it was and sometimes
still is elsewhere and in Egypt today. Women, moreover, decided themselves over who should
inherit their belongings after they died, also a feature unheard of in the rest of the ancient
world. Egyptian children carried their mother’s name as surname, perhaps as often as they
carried that of their fathers. On the name issue, the status of women in ancient Egypt has not
even been surpassed in the modern world. On the other issues, Egypt was presumably most
often behind post-World War II democracies with their relatively fair treatment of women, but
not far behind.
With the Greeks, however, came an opposite, extremely sexist social system, also
probably without parallel in the ancient world. Greek men and Greek law treated women as
property, on a par with children, slaves, and inanimate objects, i.e. with no legal rights
362 Iliffe 1995: 233ff. The British and the French, as opposed to the Portuguese, the Belgians and the South
African Whites, were keen on establishing friendly relations with the new rulers in de-colonialized Africa.
Already before World War II, the former had cleverly realized and calculated that keeping the colonies, with
their demographic and political pressures, would no longer be profitable for the colonialists. But they, along with
the US and other western powers, were also actively preventing any kind of African unity from developing in the
wake of colonialist withdrawal, thus reserving and protecting continental cooperation, coordination and unity,
which were simultaneously being developed in Europe and North America, as guarded and unique western
privileges. Thus we have today the established European Union and NAFTA, as well as NATO, but an African
Union which is still only in the starting blocks. Ibid. and 246ff. Due to the arbitrariness of colonial-era borders –
sometimes also drawn intentionally in order to physically split up existing polities potentially or actually difficult
to master for the colonialists, such as the Nzima between the British (Ghana) and the French (Ivory Coast) or the
Bakongo between the French Congo, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola – Africa could have and should
have achieved a postcolonial economic and political union much more easily and much sooner than Europe,
North America, or the North Atlantic. Yet, a parliament for Africa is unlikely to become reality before 2010, half
a century after the European Parliament appeared and even longer after an African one was first suggested by
Africans. (See Boyle: Legislators Look Forward to Pan-African Parliament, 2002.) Apart from fearing the
potential power of such a union and its probable resentment of committed or assisted colonial, neo-colonial,
apartheid, slavery-related and genocidal oppression and atrocities, NATO countries were also interested in
keeping bulwarks against Communism in remaining colonies and in the apartheid South of the continent. Those,
and the profits that could be made in countless ways by transnational corporations based in NATO countries, are
the main reasons for the numerous post-colonial assaults on Africa by NATO powers. The assaults by
Communist non-Africans were fewer, though also deadly and even genocidal in Ethiopia with its 1980s famines,
which could indeed be blamed largely on the Soviet Union. They also sometimes displayed colonialist and racist
streaks, but they mainly appear to have been of a politically opportunist character. See Reader 1998 (1997):
649ff.