Apartheid

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around, the future for justice appears very dim.
In the slightly longer run, however, there might be some grounds for hope. A
comparison with Egypt following Graeco-Roman rule may seem far-fetched, but it could still
be instructive, considering the close structural parallels during the preceding eras of apartheid
that I have established above.
Egypt flourished again under Arabian rule. Once the Muslims had conquered all of
North Africa (within a few decades) and after an initial overall demographic retreat, probably
due to drought and/or disease, stability ruled. The Muslims were on the whole far more
tolerant than their Christian predecessors, which can be seen in the fact that ten per cent of
Egypt’s population is still Christian today. (Christianity, the late Roman state religion, in
contrast, had wiped out the ancient Egyptian faith along with the Greek, Roman religions and
still others.) Although power in Egypt has rested firmly in Muslim hands since 642 CE, it took
three centuries before the Muslims became a majority in Egypt, since they were so tolerant, in
relative terms, towards both Christians and Jews. It was not until Napoleon’s invasion and
then the British colonial adventures in the 19 th and 20 th centuries that the Muslims would lose
power over the country to non-Muslims. Since then, things have not been as good as they
were during certain periods of the European Middle Ages, with only a few major exceptions,
in particular: female genital mutilation, slavery, and low population densities. And the latter
of those three can only be considered a mixed blessing.
Under Muslim rule the new capital of Cairo (near one of the ancient capitals,
Memphis) became the most important economic center in the world and also its political hub.
The Ptolemaic era was the only era of the country’s long history during which the capital of
Egypt lay on the coast. During the early second millennium CE Egypt experienced ‘prosperity
and power unequalled since the New Kingdom’, i.e. since two and a half millennia earlier.
Even Ptolemaic Egypt, which dominated the world for over a century, is dwarfed in
importance by those two (non-apartheid) Egypts.
During the European ‘Middle Ages’, in particular, Egypt was the focal point of most
of the regular trade between the Atlantic and China. But, of course, all was not well, as it is
not in the USA today or in Britain two centuries ago. An Arabian aristocracy clung to
privileges that were later inherited by the Turk, the Fatimid (of Berber and other origins) and
the Kurd rulers of Egypt. But only patriarchy, the aristocracies, the bureaucracies and the
plutocracies were oppressive, not the ethnicities.
On the other hand, there were slaves, mainly women. At first Berbers, then
predominantly Whites from Europe as well as Blacks from tropical Africa were brought to
Egypt as slaves. There were also ‘numerous paupers’ in the new, post-apartheid Egypt. 762 It
may seem fair to add that similar unfreedoms, or worse, were existent everywhere else in
civilized societies at the time. And Egypt’s economy did not become a mainly slave-laborbased
one, i.e. not like the ancient Greek or Roman parasitic ones, nor like the equally
parasitic economies and racist societies in the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, the southern
antebellum USA or the Dutch Cape Colony.
There are, however, some little known exceptions to the general inequalities of the last
couple of thousand years. In particular, the remarkable inland Niger Delta civilization in West
Africa, around the city of Jenne-jeno, was most probably a great deal more egalitarian and
mindful of human rights than any of the famous civilizations during its long lifespan,
especially during the 8 th and 9 th centuries CE. There were also some very similar civilizations
762 Iliffe 1995: 43ff, quotes: 47 and 45, respectively. It is also perhaps significant that some of the last remaining
vestiges of the overwhelmingly alienated Egyptian religion, already forbidden by the Romans for centuries, for
instance the practice of mummification, disappeared under Muslim rule. On the immediate economic effects of
the Muslim conquest on Egypt, including the initial demographic retreat of the overall population, see Alston
2002: 361ff.