Apartheid

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6. Access
Accusing everyone of conspiracy
Tightening the curfew, charging people with walking
…Soweto Blues 466
This chapter reminds me – with a fair degree of horror – of adverbs. I admit it has
been put together in an ad hoc manner to account for kinds of ethnicist discrimination that
could not be subsumed satisfactorily under the other chapter headings. Access to water, health
care, decision-making in public affairs, work and leisure opportunities, obviously do share
characteristics that set them aside. Yet I am painfully aware that this is also the least
systematic of the chapters defining apartheid. The dominant theory of grammar which throws
demonstratives with adverbs that modify verbs or adjectives, ‘sentence adverbs’, temporal and
spatial ‘adverbs’, ‘adverb’ particles, interrogative ‘adverbs’, and even interjections into a
single basket, is in my view more troublesome for linguistics and related disciplines, from a
scientifically theoretical point of view, than this chapter is for the theory of apartheid. And
still, elementary school children around the world are required to memorize adverbs as a
single word class, on a par with such well-defined grammatical categories as nouns,
adjectives, prepositions, articles, pronouns, and conjunctions.
Nonetheless, the category of access sometimes, even to myself, seems to serve the
function of a waste paper basket for kinds of oppression that do not fit in under my other
headings. It is certainly a more abstract noun than any of the other eight used in my definition
of apartheid. In the end, though, it is perhaps good to have a miscellaneous category like
adverbs which at least attempts to organize left-over data. My understanding of apartheid will
hopefully serve some kind of scientific or analytic purpose for someone else than me, but it
will in any case eventually be abandoned at some time in the future and replaced by a better
theoretical, and no doubt very different, understanding of it. I thus hope to sow the seeds of
destruction of my own theory in this chapter, namely, in order to facilitate the analytic
understanding of apartheid and perhaps also of other kinds of war and oppression for future
and improved attempts at explanation and critique.
6.1. ‘All Egyptians Are by All Manner of Means to Be Expelled, Except…’
We know of land confiscations and forced removals of Egyptians during the Graeco-
Roman period, but we have no direct evidence of enforced ethnicist segregation, the
displacement of people due to their ethnicity alone. However, it certainly seems as if
Alexandria was planned and segregated into different areas for the different ethnic groups. As
already noted, fifteen Egyptian villages were ‘cleared’ to make space for the new capital. This
kind of phenomenon may also occur in non-apartheid societies, but after the foundation of
Alexandria the Egyptians appear to have been confined to live in Rhakotis in the southwest
quadrant of the city, the Jews lived in the northeast, the royal palace was in the north, and
normal Greeks, Macedonians and others lived in between. Just off the Alexandrian coast, on
the island of Pharos – with its famous lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient
world – was an additional, walled village or small town with an Egyptian population. There
was also a growing area of increasingly rich Greek suburbs to the east of the city, as far away
from Rhakotis as possible without being isolated from the city center. As slums arose and
expanded, crime levels climbed, and the rich, i.e. European invaders and descendants of
European invaders, moved out of the city to these suburbs, just like in Johannesburg or Cape
Town, over 2,000 years later. 467 Urban segregation along ethnic lines is ethnicist, though not
466 Masekela & Todd: Soweto Blues, recorded by Miriam Makeba on the album ‘Welela’, 1989
467 Hellström 1997: 20; Bowman 1996 (1986): 209; Fraser 1972: 17. As the Jewish proportion of the Alexandrian
populace grew, Jews moved into some of the other districts. In 38 CE, however, under Roman rule, most of the
Jews outside the main Jewish district in Alexandria were murdered indiscriminately by rioting Greek city rabble.