Apartheid

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Arabic is still vigorously suppressed in and by Israel. Whereas some Egyptians were able to
defend themselves in court using their native language under Greek and Roman rule, this was
not at all possible for Blacks in white-ruled South Africa, which was, at least formally, the
most oppressive apartheid society with regard to language.
8.1. Atticism and the ‘Obsession with Language’
Ptolemaic Egypt...remained throughout its history a land of two
cultures which did coexist but, for the most part, did not coalesce or
blend. . . . We discern the manifestations of the two discrete cultures in
every aspect of their coexistence. . . . It would be difficult...to
exaggerate the significance of the fact that, except for some local
designations of places, measures, and so on, no native Egyptian word
made its way into Greek usage in the thousand years that Greek
endured as the language of Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine Egypt. 544
In fact, none of the words that we commonly use today to describe ancient Egypt are
Egyptian themselves, e.g. pyramid, sphinx, pharaoh, Egypt, hieroglyph. (Some of these Greek
words, however, have Egyptian etymologies which by far predate Alexander’s conquest. It is,
however, unlikely that Greeks in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt were ever aware of this.) Even
the Gods and all of the cities were given Greek names, most of which accompany them to this
day. The Egyptian kings of antiquity are also still known, ever since the sway of the Greek
apartheid system, by their Greek names, e.g. Cheops, Mykerinos, etc. This kind of cultural
dispossession is common with colonialism – the fact that the largest lake in the continent of
Africa is still named after a long dead white woman who never even went there speaks
volumes to that effect – but it is even more intensive in apartheid. Although Kenya’s largest
lake is still called Victoria, its main cities all have indigenous names. South Africa’s main
cities, on the other hand, all (still) have white names.
Cultural dispossession was later repeated to roughly the same large extent in South
Africa and Israel as in Egypt, one difference being that Egyptian, the language of the entire
indigenous majority, was eventually wiped out under Greek (and to a lesser extent, Latin 545 )
domination. The Persian occupiers of Egypt, prior to the Greeks, did not use their own
language, but Aramaic, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean region at that time, as
the language of administration in Egypt. They did this although Persian, an Indo-Iranian
language, is very different from Aramaic, which is a Semitic language. And being a Semitic
language, Aramaic is also an Afro-Asiatic language, which means it is much more closely
related to ancient Egyptian than to Persian, the mother language of the invaders. 546
Apparently, an invading power needs at least a sizeable civilian element if it is to impose its
language on an indigenous majority, and especially if it is to achieve the demise of an
indigenous majority’s language, unless of course the difference in military resources is large
enough and a physically genocidal policy is implemented successfully, as was frequently the
544 Lewis, N. 1986: 154f
545 The Romans were apparently not quite as ethnocentric as the Greeks. For instance, many Greek works of
literature were translated into Latin, and many Romans learned Greek. This was not reciprocated to any
comparable degree by the Greeks. Werner 1992: 11. Similarly, the British in South Africa were in general not
quite as ethnocentric as were the descendants of the Dutch, the Afrikaners. Due to over a hundred years of
British colonial rule, as well as the British pioneering efforts in industrialization, which left the overwhelmingly
agricultural Afrikaners behind them in terms of economic development, the British in South Africa were also
generally richer than the Afrikaners were. But there were significant exceptions to this general pattern. For
instance, from the 1820s onwards, British settlers and soldiers were in the process of subjugating the Xhosa in
the Eastern Cape, and some Afrikaners, who were conscripted by the British colonial administration from the
1830s onwards to do some of the conquerors’ dirty work, apparently even ‘showed some fellow feeling towards
the African chiefdoms.’ Keegan 1996: 35
546 Thompson, D. J.: Literacy and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt, 1994: 74