Apartheid

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9. Thought
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
(Steve Biko) 574
Abstract phenomena or concepts – such as ‘culture’, ‘race’, ‘nationality’, ‘ethnicity’
and ‘religion’ – are habitually invoked by apartheid oppressors and their sympathizers as
bastions separated by unbridgeable divides. Nothing could of course be further from the truth,
but the strategic and political function of such reasoning is almost invariably to avoid or to
marginalize the more concrete and material facts of discrimination, i.e. of apartheid violence,
repopulation, citizenship, land, work, access, education and language. Especially when a
violent conflict flares, the underlying apartheid is disguised by the elites responsible for them
as somehow inevitable, and even more importantly as a clash of cultures, or even as a clash of
different human natures. The background information of oppression is conveniently forgotten
and, in many cases, itself repressed.
A clever trick is achieved by sympathy thus being generated for the ‘beleaguered
minority’, the most common reaction to typical western media reports about and from both
apartheid South Africa (at least until the 1970s) and apartheid Israel (until the present). This
card is also played cunningly by the apartheid governments and their allies, e.g. by the US
Secretary of State in October 2000 (see below). And today the mass media do, to a large
extent, govern and control political opinion. Especially when it comes to world affairs, of
which there is even less direct knowledge among the public than of local, national or regional
affairs, public opinion is published opinion.
Apartheid thought is therefore neither unimportant nor unessential unto apartheid
itself. It is an exceptionally extremist, elitist kind of thinking, which attempts to justify gross
human rights violations, and even to make them appear as moral duties. And in order for the
entire system of oppression to function, this variety of extremist thought has to become
internalized by each generation of an entire people – the oppressive minority. 575 That is
sufficient. But it usually goes further than that.
Apartheid thought also targets the oppressed majority as well as any other minorities
aside from the most privileged one in an apartheid state. Especially the small, indigenous class
that has been selected as the favored allies of the oppressors, are sought out and worked upon.
Although apartheid ideologues never even approached success in convincing an indigenous
majority of its inherent inferiority, they have often proved successful with these favored
groups, and also in severely limiting the self-respect, self-confidence, dignity and dynamism
of the majority, by means of de-humanization and humiliation. That is why it, for example,
became so important for the South African white elites to silence and eventually murder Steve
Biko, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement (see Chapter II.1.2.).
Finally, apartheid ideology is directed at vital military, political and business partners
abroad. With the indiscriminate way the mass media work, the not so vital partners and the
numerous neutral or powerless parties are of course also subject to the propaganda. But if they
were not so brainwashed, they probably would not be so neutral or powerless, either. I could
have called this section ‘Propaganda’ or ‘Ideology’, but I believe the pervasiveness of
apartheid manifests itself even more in this section than in the previous ones. Apartheid
thought seems to be something that can only be fully understood by those who suffer or
perpetrate it, but I will attempt to decipher at least some of its essential characteristics in the
chapters that follow.
574 Quoted in Boyle: 27 Years On, S.Africa’s Slain Biko Sets a Standard, 2002. Also quoted by Barsamian in:
Liberating the Mind from Orthodoxies, An Interview with Noam Chomsky, 2001. (The interviewer quotes Biko
and Chomsky agrees with Biko.)
575 See MacCann & Maddy: Apartheid and Racism in South African Children’s Literature, 1985-1995, 2001