Apartheid

256
poor Black majority, and the AB’s role was first and foremost to ‘protect Afrikaner culture
and language’. Its members included the first three apartheid prime ministers, and sometimes
every single cabinet minister, as well as senior army and church leaders. As they extended
their power, the ideology became less and less defensive and increasingly offensive. The AB
could indeed be held responsible for millions of untimely deaths. The knowledge of and about
the AB is only slowly being unravelled now. The TRC, in fact, did not deal with it at all. 629
During the early years of the apartheid system in the narrow sense, culture became the
ideological basis for the differences between races, thus the official white perception of
Africans started to acknowledge their difference as ‘other’ rather than ‘inferior’. It was up to
each racial group to ensure that its own people, language, religion, tradition, etc. would
survive. 630 This was the official position of white South Africa, the one that was presented to
the world.
Simultaneously, however, a much more racist and de-humanizing mythology was
again spreading within South Africa, this time disseminated by politicians, domestic mass
media, teachers and school textbooks. 631 The government was determined to protect the white
minority and to further develop its interests, aiming at separate developments even between
the Afrikaners and the English-speaking South Africans. More than ever before, the Whites
became concerned with maintaining and securing their own individual and collective
economic advantages, rather than their collective national or human identities.
Closely connected with the ideological justification of apartheid were two basic issues:
the first being economics. It was important for the Whites in South Africa to develop
economically in order to survive as a nation. Therefore separate economic developments were
necessary, as the Whites felt they needed to secure their (economic) supremacy over the black
majority. The second issue emerges from the former one and manifests itself as fear of black
supremacy (or even black urbanization). Throughout South Africa’s white history, racial fear
has been evident. This can be traced back to the seventeenth century, when the Dutch East
India Company obstructed and soured relations between the Blacks and the white settlers.
Therefore, apartheid (in the narrow sense) came to be seen as the final solution to the
problem. Segregation depended on race, rather than class or culture. According to Wade:
For the apartheid system to continue to exist and provide the surplus
needs of the white minority, that minority has to exercise political
power in a manner based on wide-ranging denial of reality. In practice,
this means a mechanism that enables the Whites to deny the existence
of Blacks as autonomous individuals... 632
This denial went far, and it had and still has profound effects not only on white
thought but on black thought as well. The social future of South Africa will very much depend
on whether this ideology can be overcome soon enough – maybe as much as on whether
perpetrators of violence and those responsible for it can be made accountable, land can be
returned to its rightful owners, and income and capital can be re-distributed in a more just and
equitable way.
Blacks were portrayed as innately inferior, accustomed to
dehumanised living, sexually promiscuous, intellectually limited, and
prone to violence; blackness symbolized evil, demise, chaos,
corruption, and uncleanliness, in contrast to whiteness, which equaled
order, wealth, purity, goodness, cleanliness, and the epitome of beauty.
629
Bell, with Ntsebeza: ‘Our Strength Lies in Secrecy’, 2004: 16-21
630
Lester 1996: 111
631
Ibid: 112
632
Wade: White on Black in South Africa: A Study of English-Language Inscriptions of Skin Colour, 1993: 48,
quoted in Lester 1996: 245