Apartheid

sociology. In my view his is a different but equally valid perspective. But my investigation
does not marginalize process or change. Apartheid is apparently perpetrated in different
forms, which may indeed often depend on the different sequences of realization of the system,
though more likely on the historical, socio-economic, and geopolitical contexts. It can also be
seen as elite attempts to optimize an unstable dynamic equilibrium between ethnic cleansing,
exploitation, and control from the side of the oppressors, on the one hand, and resistance by
the primary victims, on the other.
In any event, one should not study apartheid without looking at the wider historical
and social contexts. Racism in South Africa and the USA are certainly not unrelated to each
other. The brutal oppression, exploitation and murders of hundreds of millions of Blacks with
impunity by Whites in the USA and South Africa, the overwhelming (and obviously
intentional) failures to redress those crimes sufficiently or to achieve long-term reconciliation
have kept the two ethnic groups in both countries interlocked in an often distrustful and
largely separated relationship. The cultures do overlap much, especially since the 1960s in the
USA and since the 1990s in South Africa, but in each country one can still usually tell
immediately, without asking, what skin color a person has, merely by talking to the person on
the telephone. And, in general, those overlaps are still mainly on white terms, most ostensibly
in and with the use of the English language (although the dialects and accents of English
spoken by each ethnic group are very conspicuous), and in the deep immersion in the culture
that comes with it, a eurocentric culture that still equates ‘white’ with good, pure, and
superior, and ‘black’ with evil, impure, and inferior, but also with the persistent statistical
condemnation of people with dark skin color to institutional – though nowadays formally and
officially invisible – oppression and economic hardship.
Ethnic Cleansing from the South: Australia and New Zealand
Not only was race more important than class in South Africa. Along with Australia
and New Zealand, South Africa also stands out as a prominent exception to the ‘North-South
Divide’ of rich or ‘developed’ countries on the one hand, and poor or ‘underdeveloped’ or
‘developing’ countries, on the other. It is, for example, a frequently overlooked fact that the
electric power station in Johannesburg in 1914 was the largest and most modern one in the
world. 36 In fact, ever since the industrialization of South Africa over a century ago, it has been
one of the richest and technologically most advanced countries in the world. The first ever
open-heart surgery on a human patient was performed there in 1967. Only a few years later,
the NP government procured the country’s first nuclear weapons, less than 30 years after the
USA.
Australia and New Zealand were also conquered by Whites through forced invasion
and institutionalized theft of land and resources. In both what is today South Africa and
Australia, the southernmost indigenous groups – the Tasmanians like the Khoikhoi in the
Cape – were exterminated by a combination of killings and diseases. The invasions carried out
South America were not quite as ruthless nor as systematic as the Whites in North America with regard to their
similar attempts at cultural genocide against the black slaves, although they certainly also tried and often
succeeded in several regards. Moreover, there is no South African parallel known to me of the notorious
Mississippi state law of 1823, which explicitly prohibited the teaching of reading and writing to Blacks. Aside
from that, the brutality of the ocean crossings was probably also more accentuated in the transatlantic case,
where an estimated ten to twenty per cent of the total number of kidnapped Africans died during the ocean
crossings alone. (Many more, of course, were killed during capture, captivity, re-capture, or work). Much of this
apparent difference in brutality between the USA and South Africa can probably be put down to the enormous
size of the business venture and the extremely impersonal nature of contacts between slaves, on the one hand,
and slaver employers and employees, on the other, in the transatlantic case. However, that background does not
negate the personal and institutional responsibilities of the people, companies, and governments that built,
supported and perpetuated the system, and profited from it. See footnote 736 below on this unresolved and
contentious issue. See also N.N.: Black History Timeline: Change and Challenge, 2003.
36 Iliffe 1995: 274
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