Apartheid

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especially those enforced by United Nations mandates, have made it increasingly difficult for
apartheid in recent years, in spite of one of apartheid’s main licenses to continue existing in
the 20 th and 21 st centuries – state sovereignty, ironically also guaranteed by that strange hybrid
phenomenon, the United Nations.
The triptych colonialism-apartheid-genocide is to a large extent a function of relative
population numbers and population policy: In colonialism the class of ethnic oppressors in
situ is the smallest and it is also kept at a minimum (by the colonial power). The most basic
principle here is not to replace the natives or even to settle in their land, but to keep a colonial
economic output at a maximum for reasons of profit. In times of crisis for the colonial power,
the colonies can also supply cannon fodder, i.e. soldiers, such as in the world wars of the 20 th
century. For example, France used over half a million African soldiers and another half
million soldiers from its other overseas colonies to fight the German and Austro-Hungarian
empires in World War I. One quarter of the soldiers from the French colonies were killed in
this war, most of them African. Altogether, an estimated 300,000 Africans died for France
during the world wars, many of them conscripts. They were often sent on dangerous missions,
because, as one white French military commander put it, they were ‘less sensitive to pain
because their nervous systems were not as highly developed’ as those of their European
colleagues! Afterwards, however, the efforts of Africans were played down in French history
books, school textbooks, military victory parades, and war memorials. As an additional slap in
the face, France stopped paying pensions to its African war veterans after their countries had
gained independence. The British also used many soldiers from their African colonies,
especially in World War II. On the whole, Africa can be said to have suffered more from
colonialism than other victims of that scourge, at least in the so-called ‘Old World’. The
Romans, for instance, built infrastructure and encouraged trade in Britain, as the British would
indeed also do in India, two millennia later. And due to reasons such as this, colonialism is
indeed not as harsh as genocide or apartheid. With the limited exceptions of South Africa,
Rhodesia and Kenya, where they had brought in many white settlers, the British would
however chiefly make sure that colonialized Africans created or contributed to profits for the
British which were not reinvested into the African economies. The same goes for the other
European colonies in Africa. 20
In apartheid, on the other hand, the oppressors represent a sizeable minority,
sometimes, as in the case of the Israeli Jews, striving to become a majority, whether for
reasons of ethnic hatred, or of ethnicist fear. Here, longer-term profits also come into the
picture. The oppressors, moreover, have come to stay and regard the country as theirs, in both
a belonging and a possessive sense. In their eyes, they belong to it, and it belongs to them. As
opposed to colonialism there is also necessarily a civil, or at least a semi-civil society among
the oppressors. They are not all state employees, although they (at least the adult males) may
all be armed and organized in a military or paramilitary fashion.
In genocide, finally, the oppressors constitute either a majority or a minority, in either
case striving to become a totality. Profits made out of the disappearing ethnicity, and what it
leaves behind, appear as altogether secondary to hate, except perhaps profits made from the
land conquered thus. Genocide is often accompanied by the more or less forced import of a
new subjugated ethnicity, such as the African slaves into the Caribbean and elsewhere in the
20 Tattersall: Africa’s Old Soldiers Feel Forgotten by France, 2004; Ajayi: The Unfinished Business: Confronting
the Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism in Africa, 2000. Today, in the so-called ‘post-colonial’ Africa, around
90 per cent of Africa’s intellectual output is produced in European languages. Not even a single treaty between
Europe and Africa exists in any African language. See wa Thiong’o: A People without Memory Are in Danger of
Losing Their Soul, 2003. Similar to but not entirely identical with my general conception of ethnicism as a
continuum is the following: “...from unofficial but pervasive social discrimination at one end of the spectrum to
genocide at the other, with government-sanctioned segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, forced
deportation (or ‘ethnic cleansing’), and enslavement among the other variations on the theme.” Fredrickson
2002: 9.