Apartheid

also obstruct any structural understanding of the phenomenon. Apartheid is both a process and
a system that is and should be studied by the academic disciplines of government or political
science, but equally also by sociology, and, I may add, by humanities such as history,
psychology and philosophy. ‘Political sociology’ may be the most accurate label for what I
am attempting to accomplish here, 26 but the style of research, the terminology, and the
methodology are certainly more those of political science. First and foremost, it should not be
read as historiography, but as an attempt to conduct a structured investigation into systematic
gross human rights violations.
To conclude the argument so far: apartheid in the narrow sense contains countless
unique aspects. However, the same basic structural features can be found elsewhere, or at
other times. South Africa itself, for example, displayed all those features at earlier stages of
white rule and white domination in the country, i.e. before ‘apartheid’ in the sense of the NP
became a government priority. And so do modern Israel as well as Graeco-Roman Egypt. We
will now take a closer look at systems of human rights violations in other countries that have
been compared to apartheid in South Africa, starting with genocidal societies, then turning to
closer apartheid parallels, then to colonialized societies, and finally to more adventurous, yet
distant and tenuous parallels.
4. South African Apartheid Compared
Modern Israel and Graeco-Roman Egypt are frequently compared to apartheid South
Africa, but there are many other societies that also come close to it in a structural sense. The
situation until the 1960s in the southeastern states in the USA, especially, has systematically
been likened with apartheid in South Africa. In this section I will look at some of those
structural similarities in several different cases, but also at some of the most important
differences.
Throughout the 20 th century, the historically unique developments in South Africa
often confounded political theorists and others by proving to be exceptions from otherwise
global trends. For instance, while race in apartheid South Africa remained more decisive than
economic class, the Marxist tenet of the centrality of class struggle was effectively suspended.
Ever since the repeal of the apartheid laws during the 1980s and 1990s, however, Marxism
could be seen as vindicated ‘in the last resort’. From that perspective, the highly artificial
racist class society of South Africa is now increasingly in the process of being replaced by a
normal capitalist class society. 27
Comparisons with Genocidal Societies:
‘Life Is All Right in America, If You’re All White in America’ 28
The same Marxist analysis in this regard could, for example, be applied to the USA
from 1863 (abolition of slavery) and 1964 (outlawing of race segregation), respectively. The
much-resented signposts ‘Whites Only’ were in fact as widespread throughout the American
South until the 1960s as they were in South Africa until the 1990s. So-called ‘petty apartheid’,
the racially segregated access to such every-day details in life as toilets, water fountains, park
benches, post office entrances, etc., was perhaps taken further by racist state authorities in the
26
See Faulks: Political Sociology: A Critical Introduction, 2000; Kloby: Inequality, Power and Development:
The Task of Political Sociology, 1998
27
Lester 1996: 2ff. See Ato Quayson’s Introduction to Mandela 2002 (1965) for ‘significant echoes’ of the
struggle against South African apartheid in ‘…Palestine and Ireland…various micro-minority struggles in
various parts of Africa and Latin America. They [the echoes] are even pertinent for thinking through the
persistent sense of injustice felt by African Americans and Australian Aborigines…’ (ix).
28
Sondheim: America, from West Side Story (Motion Picture Version), 1957 (1956). The quoted line does not
appear in the stage version of the song.
35