Apartheid

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meaningful way to their pre-victim indigenous ancestors within the space of their last say.
Justice may seem elusive, but history is certainly not only and not always written by the
victors. The condemnation and sentencing for crimes against humanity is exactly what
apartheid warrants, and not only because international law – the UN, the ICC, the Geneva
Conventions, etc. – say so. It is mainly because of heroic resistance against overwhelming
odds, but also through objective research, the wisdom of experience, conscientious ethical
judgement and informed critical assessment, that apartheid has become known, repudiated,
and judicially categorized as a crime against humanity.
The penultimate idea here belongs to the great Old Kingdom philosopher, Ptahhotep,
who wrote the following stanza around forty-three and a half centuries ago, two thousand
years before the invading Greeks would arrive to set up their version of apartheid in his home
country. Yet, across the millennia, an inalienable sense of justice, backed by the determination
and the courage required to defend and to implement it, appears to be able to both overcome
and defeat evil, and eventually to assign historic apartheid figures and societies to either the
halls of shame (as a short-term remedy) or oblivion (as a truly long term remedy) where they
belong.
Great is justice, lasting in effect...
Baseness may seize riches.
Yet crime never lands its wares
In the end it is justice that lasts... 768
Mandela voiced a philosophically related claim, a negation of the negation of
Ptahhotep’s assertion, as he defended himself in an apartheid court against charges by an
apartheid state. It is perhaps somewhat less optimistic than Ptahhotep’s strong statement, but
in the most desperate of circumstances, it provides a reason for hope:
Men are not capable
Of doing nothing,
Of saying nothing,
Of not reacting
Against injustice… 769
Ptahhotep’s conception of justice – along with its profound implication that justice
will not naturally generate its own negation, as injustice appears to do – is strangely echoed by
Souad Srour al-Mere’eh, most of whose family were shot dead in Shatila, Lebanon in 1982
768 The Instruction of Ptahhotep, in Lichtheim 1973: 63ff. See Brunner 1997: 111ff, for an updated and much
improved interpretation and translation of Ptahhotep’s book. On Ma`at, the ancient Egyptian concept of justice
and truth, see Assmann 1995 (1990) and Karenga 1995. On the two ancient Egyptian concepts of constancy, Djet
and Neheh, or ‘permanent sameness’ and ‘permanent change’, see Thausing: Sein und Werden. Versuch einer
Ganzheitsschau der Religion des Pharaonenreiches, 1971; Assmann: Zeit und Ewigkeit im alten Ägypten, 1975;
Allen: Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts, 1988; Löwstedt 1995: 143-
157.
769 Mandela 2002 (1965): 136. The quote is from Mandela’s brilliant defense in the 1962 trial which nevertheless
found him guilty of inciting black Africans to strike (which they were not allowed to do under any
circumstances) and of leaving South Africa without valid papers (which were hardly ever granted to Blacks).
Mandela was sentenced to five years in prison and had to spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, sewing
mailbags. His sentence was cut short a year later when he was charged with new-found evidence against him and
faced a death sentence for terrorism, a sentence he narrowly escaped in favor of a life prison sentence. In the
introduction to this collection of articles and speeches by Mandela, Ato Quayson writes of Mandela’s mindset:
‘…injustice naturally generates its own negation, sowing in its devastating path the desire for freedom and the
unquenchable urge to strive for it. Beyond his obvious stature as one of the great icons of the twentieth century,
it is this idea that gives Mandela a significance beyond his country and his time…’ Ibid: xv. Incidentally,
Quayson also mentions Palestine first among countries suffering from evils similar to apartheid in South Africa.
See footnote 27, above.