Apartheid

There are some additional features that Thompson overlooked in the quoted passage.
Firstly, apartheid is not only carried out by the state, but to a large extent also by the
(privileged minority) business community and beyond that, by (the privileged minority) ‘civil
society’ at large. When not celebrated as ‘pioneers’, white South African farmers, both before
and after 1948 – often heavily armed by the army and with many other paramilitary
characteristics – were routinely referred to as ‘civilians’ by their government and closest
allies, but in reality they were far from civil, and the adult males among them were better
referred to as extensions and in many cases even as instruments of state power. The same
applies to the Jewish settlers in Palestine today. But white civil society in apartheid South
Africa and Jewish civil society in modern Israel kept voting apartheid regimes into office.
Businesspeople kept up discrimination and even invented new kinds of discrimination to
increase their profits from indigenous labor and natural resources and to keep the least needed
natives more securely locked up.
My theoretical move away from considering apartheid as an essentially state
phenomenon is a close reflection of the recent development of political science. Originally an
academic discipline to study state and government, its object of study has widened
progressively since the 1950s. The subsequent arrivals in mainstream political science of new
theoretical and research paradigms – such as behaviorism, rational choice theory, feminism,
and discourse theory – have led to a progressive widening of the concept of politics,
increasingly and now commonly seen as the field of power relationships, formal and informal,
state-related and civilian. 23 Apartheid itself came about before the new kind(s) of political
science, but that does not mean that it has to be understood within the old narrow perspective
of a political science that is outdated today. On the contrary, it can in my opinion only be
understood better by political scientists endorsing the internal advances of the discipline
during the last half-century.
Even more importantly, apartheid is about greed and exploitation. Unfair market
competition is one of its hallmarks. The system will certainly not work without the active
support from the overwhelming majority of the privileged minority, including many of the
important private businessowners. A few corrupt and/or extorted members of the oppressed
majority also seem to be needed to keep it running. The ethnicist immigration and citizenship
policies, as well as the legal or practical bans on interethnic sexual relations and marriage – all
of which were present in South Africa in one form or another before 1948 – were only implied
by Thompson in this context. He also failed to mention the ethnicist hierarchy, that Coloureds
and Indians were ranked above Africans and below Whites, which led to hostilities and
divisions between these groups, again closely mirrored by equivalent situations in and around
Graeco-Roman Egypt and modern Israel. Most importantly, he overlooked the most basic
feature of apartheid, so obvious to him that it, apparently, became unconscious: Apartheid is
founded on the military superiority of the invading minority and its self-defined and
privileged members, and not only on the armaments but on the use of them, too. Thus, the
proximity to and frequent overlaps with genocidal behavior by the privileged minorities is, in
effect, downplayed by Thompson’s description of South African apartheid in the narrow
sense.
There is, however, another dimension to apartheid, which Thompson does point out
succinctly. From the very beginning, apartheid was: ‘...an inconsistent, contradictory hybrid of
two competing ideas. It set out complete economic segregation of Africans in their reserves as
an ultimate goal but qualified it by stressing the need to satisfy white farming and
manufacturing interests.’ 24 To that he might have added the white interest in black service
23
Stoker: Introduction, 1995:4ff. One of the main reasons behind this development is of course the relative loss
of power of states and the relative growth of corporate power worldwide, especially since the 1970s.
24
Ibid: 185. A similar point is made with regard to Egypt under Greek rule in Huß: Ägypten in hellenistischer
Zeit: 332-30 v. Chr., 2001: 217
33