Apartheid

4
Preface
Apartheid is often explained – by institutions, groups and individuals who tend to
either trivialize or mystify it – either as purely a state phenomenon, or basically a legal
phenomenon, or an ideological phenomenon, or, again, as a mere matter of violent ethnic
conflict. Among other things, this investigation attempts to refute all four of these important
misconceptions.
I hope to show that a powerful portion of civil society is needed to support apartheid
and that the latter cannot exist without the cooperation, empowerment, and enrichment of a
considerable number of civilian – as well as many state-employed – members of the
oppressive minority. This does not mean that, for instance, all white South Africans were in
favor of apartheid or supported it. On the contrary, some opposed it and even gave their lives
for opposing it. But the overwhelming majority of Whites in the country accepted apartheid
and supported it, at least indirectly, during almost the entire period of white domination. The
same applies to Israeli Jews with regard to their very similar system of violence and
discrimination against Palestinians. In this sense, there was never only an apartheid state
responsible for apartheid, but in each instance a wider apartheid society.
Likewise, apartheid never was fundamentally based on law. It was always based on
practice, and so, ultimately, were the apartheid laws. In fact, legislative, executive, judicial,
business, and information powers and institutions are generally used and abused in apartheid
societies in order to support, uphold, implement and reinforce such practice. The spectrum of
that practice reaches from entirely unprovoked physical violence over legalized theft to
insidious ideology. Thus, apartheid law never has become an organic legal or even political
entity, but, rather, it has remained a constantly shifting, haphazard result of strategies, full of
internal contradictions, inconsistencies and even of conscious, unconscious and half-conscious
lies. Apartheid laws are mainly the results of the conflict-engendering interests and
perceptions of different elites within the oppressive minority and of the fluctuating
environment of resistance against those interests. When apartheid became explicit government
program and policy in South Africa in 1948, for example, the country was geographically
surrounded by European colonies, run by white supremacists allied with or sympathetic to the
South African regime. By 1980, however, each one of these colonies had turned into an
independent enemy country. The laws of apartheid changed accordingly. Among many other
new developments, the apartheid elites had now introduced ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence’
for large numbers of black South Africans in the so-called ‘Homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’,
pockets of land, poor in agricultural quality, reserved for large numbers of Blacks whom it
could not support. The new developments also included political courtship of the relatively
educated, urban black ‘elites’ within the directly white-ruled South Africa, who were,
according to the new plan, to be turned against the rural and urban proletariats and to be raised
to the social level of ‘Coloureds’ and people of Asian descent. All of these schemes were
eventually to fail spectacularly.
Only in times of crisis for the apartheid system do the differences between the
apartheid elites fade in importance. Even then, however, fundamental contradictions within
the apartheid society, within the apartheid system, persist to make laws and decrees keep their
ad hoc character. The cheap labor supplied by members of the oppressed indigenous majority,
for instance, may be tempered or even halted when an increase in resistance activities is
perceived by the elites. One among countless examples of this is the application of one of the
Israeli Basic Laws, the ‘Law of Return’ – guaranteeing Israeli citizenship for any Jew who
wants it and even for some Jews who do not want it – which is carried out with a much wider
definition of ‘Jews’ whenever the Israeli political and military elites perceive a stronger need
for increased immigration of non-Arabs to the country, such as the case has been since the