Apartheid

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realize these lofty goals, or even their temptations to deny them,
created serious inner tension to which the contact with Africa gave
emotional release. 622
Africans were also seen as generally inferior by the Europeans from the 17 th century,
at the latest, due to their inferiority in military technology, their relative political
powerlessness and slavery, i.e. the very fact that they had been victimized in this way.
Africans were commonly relegated by European thinkers to the bottom end of the racist
ladder of spirituality and morality, of human worth and value. The slightly paler Asians and
Native Americans were usually placed above them, the Europeans fixed at the top. (During
the early 19 th century, during the heyday of Hellenomania, the famous Swiss biologist,
Georges Cuvier, placed ancient Greeks along with deities above his contemporary Europeans.
Hellenomania remained influential during the 19 th and 20 th centuries to include Friedrich
Nietzsche among many others.) Blacks, on the other hand, were continuously seen as the
‘link’ between men and animals, not only in the European countries and by the white elites in
their colonies and ex-colonies indulging in the Atlantic system of slavery, but all over Europe.
Skin color became a prime criterion for racism during the 18 th and 19 th centuries. But other
excuses kept being used as well. The Khoikhoi (‘Hottentots’), for instance, were commonly
considered by Europeans to lack the power of human speech due to their use of ‘clicks’ for
some consonantal sounds in their languages. 623
The Africans were also regarded by the Europeans as lazy (for sometimes refusing to
work for the invaders, the settlers, the plantation owners and other entrepreneurs supported by
European governments), and as immoral from an ethical as well as a religious point of view.
The factor of Africans being considered lazy contributed to the Whites’ decision to ship over
Indians to perform work in the sugar plantations in the KwaZulu-Natal region, although Zulu
pride and initially blank refusals to perform such work were additional factors.
Furthermore, when the Africans opposed the dispossession of their land by the Whites
and tried to fight back, they were seen as thieves and criminals in the eyes of the Europeans,
which further intensified the Whites’ negative perception of the ‘soulless Africans’. Similar to
the devious thuggery, laziness, etc., ascribed to Egyptians by the Greek invaders of Egypt,
Whites in Africa, two millennia later, were probably only able to steal people’s countries and
take their freedom, their cultures and sometimes even their lives, if the latter were regarded as
brutes. The following passage, written by the nationalist Afrikaner author, Oordt, in 1898,
illustrates this ideology.
According to the Boer idea, the Kaffer [Bantu-speaker], the Hottentot
[Khoikhoi], the Bushman [San] belong to a lower race than the
Whites. They carry as people once rightly called it, the mark of Cain,
God, the Lord, destined them to be ‘drawers of water and hewers of
wood,’ as presses [servants] subject to the white race . . . People can
only control a Kaffer or a Hottentot through fear, he must always be
kept in his place, he was not to be trusted, give him only a finger and
he will take the whole hand. The Boer does not believe in educating
him; yes, I do not believe that I go too far when I express my feeling
that the Boers as a whole doubt the existence of a Kaffer- or a
Hottentot-soul. 624
Religion was a constant factor that had to be involved by the oppressors as well. We
shall return to the biblical reference in the quote above in the course of the next chapter. Also
622
Cohen, 1988: 33, quoted in Lester 1996: 33f, text added by Lester. Egyptian women were also attributed with
vast sexual appetite in Graeco-Roman propaganda. See Knight 2001: 319f.
623
Comaroff & Comaroff 1992: 218f; Fredrickson 1981: 11; Bernal 1987: 281-336. See also footnote 620.
624
Quoted in Reader 1998 (1997): 481