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taken from earlier Bantu-speaking ‘occupiers’, although the latter had hardly colonialized the
land, but rather assimilated with the indigenous – at any rate to a much greater extent than the
Whites would do. The pastoralist and hunter-gatherer Khoisan, who first inhabited the region
and the farthest southern Bantu-speaking, agriculturalist and pastoralist people, the Xhosa,
had accomplished a ‘high degree’ of assimilation before the Whites arrived in South Africa,
according to Lester. In this regard, most of sub-Saharan Africa, in fact, seems to have
functioned quite well prior to white invasions, with an informal system in which new
immigrants initially assumed a ‘subservient’ status to groups already settled. 721 One could
even go so far as to call this system a natural and morally superior opposite of apartheid.
Obviously, the indigenous people, or the earlier settlers, generally know the land, the climate,
the histories and cultures of neighbors, etc., better and should often be the authorities on such
issues (though of course not on all issues). However, one runs the risk of adopting an
unqualified and patronizing attitude towards immigrants in this way. The immigrants may
know some of the histories and cultures of neighbors better because they just came from there.
It is obviously better from a human rights perspective, and perhaps even from a collective
survival perspective, that nobody is subservient.
Another main difference between apartheid societies is the large extent of desecularization
in Egypt under Greek and Roman rule. It enabled priests to become the class
favored by the apartheid authorities, with privileges that mirrored those of certain indigenous
political and business leaders in Israel and South Africa. This condition also reflects the high
degree of admiration that the Greeks had held towards Egyptian culture prior to invasion in
332 BCE, especially during the eighth to early fifth centuries BCE. Perhaps it could be
compared to Jewish admiration (and assimilation) of Islamic and Arab culture during the time
of the European Middle Ages and later. Only South African apartheid did not have this
lengthy pre-history of ancestors of the subsequent invaders actually condoning and admiring
the culture that their descendants would eventually oppress and to some extent even destroy.
Ptolemaic Egypt represents a unique and dramatic, though short-lived success of
apartheid. It became the leading military, political, economic and cultural power in the world
during the first two centuries of its existence. Neither South Africa nor Israel ever reached that
kind of position. Of course, it cannot be compared with the hegemonic scope of US world
dominance today, nor with British dominance during the 18 th and 19 th centuries, nor with that
of the Roman Empire. Yet Ptolemaic Egypt does share a great deal with the USA. In this
comparison, the Greeks play the role of the British pilgrims, colonialists and pioneers. It was
ruled by emigrées from the leading military power of the previous era, who had made
themselves independent in a land across the ocean. The USA was, and to some extent: still is,
more genocidal in kind, but all the overlaps, with apartheid and even with colonialism were
(are) there, as well. The USA is still largely run by white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant males, who
may well have learned a lesson or two in oppression and hanging on to and extending their
power and wealth from taking their Ptolemaic predecessors as role models. Like the USA,
South Africa and especially Israel appear to display more genocidal aspects (in the concrete,
physically violent sense) than Ptolemaic Egypt did, but the historical record that we now
possess with regard to Egypt is still not extensive enough to support (or contradict) this
assumption.
A so far spectacular difference between South Africa and Israel/Palestine is the
relative Israeli failure to cause Arab-on-Arab violence in comparison to South Africa proper,
where Black-on-Black (ANC-Inkatha) violence cost more lives than the White-Black conflict
itself between 1948 and 1994. It is hardly the case that Israel has not tried. In Lebanon, the
Israelis and their US allies registered their greatest success to date with this divide-and-rule
strategy. In Israeli and Palestinian areas, however, they have (so far) failed to cause serious
rifts, although the creation of Palestinian Bantustans – and Palestinian security forces
721 Lester 1996: 35 and Reader 1998 (1997): 258, respectively