Apartheid

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whatsoever. Like the women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, women in ancient Greece
were not allowed to leave their homes unless accompanied by a male guardian, usually
husband, father, brother, or son. Although this practice may have many origins, it is perhaps
worth pondering on whether Alexander the Great, his army, and the semi-civilian colonialists
they left behind first brought the practice to Afghanistan, and to what extent the Taliban is a
European creation; also of course with Anthony Giddens’ definition of fundamentalism in
mind, namely as a beleaguered tradition reacting to (eurocentric) globalization. 363 In any
event, when Greek culture and politics were imposed on the Egyptians, following Alexander’s
conquest of their country, it spelled bad news for the Egyptian women.
Unfortunately, during the Graeco-Roman period when the Greek
laws, customs and language started to have profound influence on the
Egyptian way of life, the women’s right to equal status was slowly but
surely eroded away. At this point many Greek families settled in
Egypt and closely cloistered Greek women…started to live side by
side with the free-born Egyptian women. . . . By the Roman period,
[Egyptian] women had lost many of their former rights and privileges,
so that although continuing local customs allowed them to remain less
suppressed than the women living in Rome, they were nowhere near
as emancipated as their Dynastic [pre-Ptolemaic] forebears had
been. 364
Ethnic Greek women in Graeco-Roman Egypt, on the other hand, saw their lot
somewhat improved. Compared to what they and their sisters had been suffering at home in
Greece, this amounted to a small revolution, though their rights were still very limited from
the Egyptian point of view. But, at least, they were now able to leave home without a male
guardian. They still needed legal guardians, but they were allowed to own property, and were
for the first time allowed to be the main beneficiaries of their husbands’ wills. As during
Dynastic times, there were even a few women among the Ptolemies who actually did become
regent queens, despite male primogeniture. These changes certainly would not have been
possible without the Egyptian precedent, but they did not bring any improvements for women
outside of Egypt, only little for Greek women in Egypt and, apparently, only misery for
Egyptian women. 365
3.2. The Bantustans
The South African institution of citizenship itself did not play a great apartheid role
until the 1970s, with the formation of ‘Homelands’, or ‘Bantustans’ as they were also known.
During this time, South African citizenship – or rather the inferior version of it: South African
third-class citizenship – was revoked from millions of black people due to one condition only:
the color of their skin. Prior to that, however, Africans were not granted full citizenship either.
An inferior kind of citizenship had been granted by the British to a few Cape Africans who
were allowed to vote. Other Blacks faced serf-like conditions under which they were usually
not granted permission to leave the country or for other normal exercises of the freedom of
363 Giddens 2000 (1999): 67
364 Tyldesley 1995 (1994): 44. Strangely, many Egyptian women appear to have changed legal status voluntarily
in order to be handled under Greek law (in particular to be forced to have a male guardian) rather than Egyptian
law, and we do not know why. Tyldesley guesses that this was done ‘...perhaps in the hope that others might
mistake them for sophisticated Greeks rather than provincial Egyptians.’ Ibid. Her conjecture seems far-fetched,
but so does every other explanation. It seems at least possible that these choices by Egyptian women, although
they appear to be so, were not voluntary after all.
365 Ibid. See also Kreuzsaler: Der Rechtsalltag von Frauen im Spiegel der Wiener Papyri, 2005: 1-18; Pomeroy
1997; Schulze: Frauen im Alten Ägypten: Selbständigkeit und Gleichberechtigung im häuslichen und
öffentlichen Leben, _1988; Wenig: Die Frau im Alten Ägypten, 1969.