Apartheid

Finally, the cultures of an apartheid society, both the elite culture and the culture of the
majority, also differ from that of the minority’s country of origin to a much larger extent than
the dominant culture in a colony does. The descendants of Dutch invaders in South Africa
speak Afrikaans, not Dutch. Most of the Jewish immigrants and invaders of Palestine and
their descendants speak Hebrew as a first language, not any Indo-European language, and not
Yiddish. The Greek oppressors in Egypt spoke ancient Attic Greek, not the more modern
koine Greek of their immediate ancestors. Moreover, any apartheid elite culture is essentially
‘de-secularized’ in comparison with the relatively secularized cultures from which it
originated. It seemingly needs to invoke supernatural explanations and justifications in order
to make its specifically apartheid acts of war and oppression seem sensible, both to the
perpetrating class and to that of the surviving victims (whom it will thus try to goad into going
back to work, once the violence has subsided). The culture of the indigenous majority, on the
other hand, is characterized in a much more direct manner by the struggle. It is constantly
under threat of disappearing under apartheid conditions, which sometimes also happens, not
least because the oppressive minorities often want exactly that. My three examples, then, were
or are essentially apartheid societies in all three of these broad aspects, politically,
economically and culturally.
As indicated, there is in my view nevertheless a potentially continuous spectrum from
purely colonial to purely apartheid societies. Both types of oppression entail keeping a
majority of members of the conquered, indigenous majority alive, as opposed to genocide.
Only total genocide is a purely Darwinian binary situation of death or survival, but apartheid
is not far removed.
Furthermore, two of my three main examples, South Africa and Egypt, were at times
colonies, dependent on huge, centralized empires with faraway capitals. In these instances,
though, the changes in sovereignty status were, in general terms, superficial changes, at least
from the perspective of the vast majority of the inhabitants. The people of Greek and Dutch
origin remained the majority within the privileged, oppressive European minority in the
province and colony that were created by the Romans and the British, respectively. This
underscores the fact that the basic features of the original apartheid societies remained intact.
On the surface, things certainly changed. The European minorities even fought each other –
also involving many members of the indigenous majority in the fighting – for control over the
countries, and then centralized executive power moved abroad. Yet for the indigenous
Africans, a majority of Greek and Dutch descendants, respectively, continued to exploit and
oppress them. The British did introduce a very limited kind of democracy in the Cape and
Natal colonies, tacitly designed to keep Africans powerless, but still giving a few of them the
vote – namely, the ones rich enough to have an interest in perpetuating the system. However,
this privilege for some Blacks was later revoked. 17 Similarly, after centuries of Roman rule,
the Romans introduced Roman citizenship for almost all non-slave inhabitants of the Empire.
That removed an important institution of privilege for Europeans in Egypt. Yet the economic
and social class system that replaced citizenship brought the Europeans new, crucial
privileges. And for the overwhelming majority of Africans in these two countries, things
indeed remained the same throughout the entire period of European minority domination and
rule.
South Africa under Dutch rule was mainly a service station for ships trading with or
plundering Asia and East Africa, with an economy dependent on a hinterland agricultural
slave society. It became increasingly independent of the Netherlands. Most of the time, it was
not even run according to directives from the Dutch government, but to a larger extent by
orders from the Dutch East India Company. The latter had been given the power by the
government to wage wars, make peace, and run military and naval operations as it saw fit, in
Africa as well as in Asia. For all practical purposes it had become a state in itself. Due to its
17 Iliffe: Africans: The History of a Continent, 1995: 177-179
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