Apartheid

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at the end of the 19 th century, a Dutch Reformed Church minister, S.J. du Toit, became the
first South African intellectual to endorse and build upon the myth of ‘the chosen people’,
namely that: ‘Afrikaners...were...endowed by God with the destiny to rule South Africa and
civilize its heathen inhabitants.’ 625
As we observed in apartheid Egypt, there was in South Africa, too, a process of desecularization,
which resulted in it becoming the most Christian country in Africa, mainly
through missionary activities. The underclass was obviously easier to control, exploit, and
abuse with a religion that emphasized non-violence and rewards in the afterlife.
During the 20 th century, however, the role of religion diminished slightly, due among
other things to the success of natural sciences, including the theory of evolution. This was a
global development against which South Africans could do little. Yet on the whole, racism
prevailed, probably even intensifying. Segregation and discrimination (before and in the post-
1948 apartheid system) were in this context often based on an assumption that Africans were
an inferior branch of the evolutionary tree. In the late nineteenth century, Whites thought that
any of the Africans who were undeniably intelligent must have acquired their intelligence
from ancestors who possessed ‘white blood’. 626 This was at a time that brought transformation
for all racial groups in South Africa, but discrimination became more and more unquestioned
among Whites. ‘Racial order’ became paramount for establishing new economic, social and
spatial relations as industrialization and demographic revolution swept the country.
By the 1920s, some Whites began to realize that differences between Africans and
Europeans were due more to culture than to nature. Yet, by seeing racial differences through
culture, the Europeans almost invariably still thought of the Africans as inferior. Now,
however, they sometimes believed that there was a chance for this ‘inferior culture’ to
advance through industrialization and urbanization in order to achieve the cultural ‘level’ of
Whites. 627
At the same time, though, race had become a crucial criterion for social segregation,
mainly to secure white dominance over Blacks in the region. Because of this, Whites in
general did not feel that segregation should be eliminated in order to help the Africans
develop culturally. This was in the heyday of colonialism, when only Ethiopia was not (yet)
ruled by Europeans in Africa. Segregation was a solution to the South African problem of
industrial developments, since it gave the white population the opportunity to use cheap,
unskilled black laborers at low cost, and at the same time, Whites thought they did not have to
live amongst them. This was seen as a natural and rational thing to do for the Whites, since it
was in their own economic and (perceived) social interest. This, according to Lester,
‘...provided the structures which the apartheid ideologues would seek to consolidate.’ 628
The ideologues, however, had some very useful, already existing thought at their
disposal. The Afrikaner Broederbond (AB), the ‘Afrikaner Brotherhood’, a secret organization
that had been formed in 1918, came to dominate every NP government from 1948 onwards.
Its basic tenet was remarkably similar to the ideology of Jewish supremacy in Palestine (see
next chapter). The Afrikaners felt threatened, by the (richer) British population as well as the
625 Thompson 1990: 135
626 Lester 1996: 58
627 An elderly white South African once told the author: ‘Yes, the black man is my brother, but he is 200 years
younger than I am.’ It should be added that the philosophical problem with this kind of racist thought is not the
adoption of the concept of progress itself, but rather the adoption of a single dimension and a single direction of
progress. This narrow concept of progress appears to be a peculiarly European invention, with dire
consequences, such as the many strands of Hegelianism, Marxism, Comte’s positivism, Freud’s, Piaget’s and
Kohlberg’s developmental psychologies, among the ‘scientific’ (in the wide sense) examples. The unequivocally
unscientific theories and concepts of unidimensional and unidirectional progress were even more influential and
even more fatal, especially within racist paradigms, theories and propaganda. See further Löwstedt 1995: 65ff.
Similarly, some of the pre-1948 Zionists earnestly believed that the ‘primitive’ Arabs would welcome the
‘modernizing’ invading or immigrating Jews and would want to emulate them.
628 Lester 1996: 83