Apartheid

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and it continued throughout their apartheid era in Egypt, for a thousand years. Naturally, the
Egyptians themselves eventually reciprocated the hate. There is a genre of late Egyptian
literature called ‘hate rituals’ by a present-day commentator. It consisted of texts, and
sometimes of ritual acts, which were supposed to cause harm to enemies. The genre had its
beginnings already under Assyrian and Persian occupation, and occasionally, due almost
certainly to fear of persecution, the ‘hate rituals’ against the Persians written during Ptolemaic
times seem to be thinly veiled symbolic attacks on the Greeks. 584 Many of these texts would
be called ‘hate speech’ today, and they should be condemned as ethnicist or racist, and so
should some texts by some black South Africans and some Palestinians, but none of them
should be taken out of context. As with acts of violence against apartheid perpetrators carried
out by apartheid victims, this racism was (is) deeply provoked racism, provoked by racist
crimes against humanity. Again, that does not make it forgivable, but it makes it
understandable. In my opinion, the ethnicism manifested by the ethnic elites in apartheid
societies, on the other hand, is both unforgivable and unworthy of any kind of sympathetic
understanding. To ignore either kind of literature, however, might be dangerous, because, as
this chapter will show, it seems that we are doomed to repeat what we forget in the field of
ethnicist ideology. As long as racist texts are free of incitement to violence, they will receive
some support from international law, under the human and civil rights articles allowing
freedom of expression, and therefore, it is imperative to deal with these texts with
circumspection, to monitor racist texts as a way of monitoring racism, in order to prevent it
from becoming violent, especially by means of pre-emptive investment in the removal of
factors contributing to the marginalization of racists and would-be racists, a policy that is
completely absent in apartheid government measures.
Throughout human history, it seems that whenever a time- and energy-consuming
military conquest is completed, (further) contempt towards the conquered people sets in. The
same phenomenon can be observed in South Africa. Of course, racism was there from the
very start. But as long as there were still some unsubjugated Khoisan in the Cape, there was
still some sort of dignity afforded to the Khoisan as a whole by the white invaders. Only when
the land had become all white did wholesale racial contempt on a systematic basis set in. 585
The same appears to have been the case with Greek contempt for Egyptians.
Once Egypt had been conquered, or re-conquered, the Greeks in Egypt – generally a
brutal and lazy ethnic elite – typically described the Egyptians as ‘cruel’, suffering from
‘profligacy and indolence’, ‘excitable and uncivilized’, lacking ‘good sense and capacity’. 586
The Greeks steeled themselves using this method; their own negative qualities were simply
reflected or deflected, and dumped on the native population, a racist strategy that is by no
means unique to the Ptolemaic Greeks.
As we already noted, ancient Greek ethnicism was mainly culturalist, rather than
biologically imagined. Still, there are increasing signs, from the 6 th century BCE onwards, that
black Africans were associated by Greeks with ‘apes’, an expression used in an insulting and
racist manner. And many Egyptians must have appeared to be black Africans to both Greeks
and Romans. Furthermore, it is evident that people of Greek origin (and others) who lived
outside of Greece during antiquity considered their Greekness (whether real or imagined) to
584 Assmann 1996: 446ff. There are also hateful written exchanges between Egyptians and Jews during the
Ptolemaic era. Clauss 2003: 64-67. It should be added that Egyptian culture, prior to the first millennium BCE,
i.e. prior to the invasions by the first Iron Age powers (Assyria, Persia and Greece), appears to have been
remarkably tolerant towards foreigners and their cultures. In a recent investigation into this matter, the author
ranks ethnicity well under the following four categories of discrimination in Dynastic Egypt: status, wealth, age,
and class. Meskell: Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class et cetera in Ancient Egypt, 1999: 148ff.
585 Lester 1996: 14. On the few Greeks who are known to have dared to contradict the alleged inferiority of
barbarians, see Müller: Geschichte der antiken Ethnologie, 1997 (1972, 1980): 143; Cartledge 1993: 42.
586 Walbank: Polybius, Rome and the Hellenistic World: Essays and Reflections, 2002: 59f.