Apartheid

Indeed, only half a year lies between the demise of the apartheid state and the end of
the Soviet Union. South Africa and the former Soviet republics are at present also facing very
similar restructuring problems manifesting themselves primarily as high unemployment, large
informal economies, high crime-rates, and lingering structural and practical difficulties with
adapting to globalized capitalism.
There are substantial differences between apartheid South Africa and the Soviet
Union, as well. Their governments were on opposite ends of the political scale, South Africa
was a right-wing dictatorship, the Soviet Union a left-wing dictatorship, and they were almost
at war against each other in Angola and Mozambique, whose anti-colonialist and antiapartheid
movements and independent governments were supported by the Soviets. They also
supported the African National Congress (ANC), the main South African resistance group, in
its struggle against apartheid, though not as much as the ANC would have liked and nowhere
near as much as the ANC’s African allies did. 62 At home, the Soviet elites appear to have
targeted certain ethnic minorities as well as economic and cultural groups with war,
discrimination and oppression, but their system of oppression was not ethnicist in kind. If
anything it was an imperialist and colonialist kind of oppression, especially outside Soviet
borders, in other Warsaw Pact countries, and in other more or less invaded countries, such as
Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Lastly, the Soviet Communist Party was often supported by a
majority at home, not least due to state-sponsored intimidation, terror, and propaganda – tools
that were also employed to a great extent but were unable to triumph in forcing a similar nearconsensus
in South Africa, partly because South Africa did have a far higher degree and a
more obvious kind of exploitation and overt discrimination than the Soviet Union ever did.
Comparisons with Other Kinds of Societies:
Taliban ‘Gender Apartheid’
Another society sometimes labeled ‘apartheid’ was (most of) Afghanistan under
Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001. The targeted victims here were primarily women, who were
separated not only from men outside of their families but also from society at large. This is
how a journalist puts it: ‘Women were subjected to a dire form of gender apartheid under the
Taliban. They could not attend school, were forbidden from leaving their homes without a
male relative and some were beaten for exposing an ankle or too much of their wrists from
under their head-to-toe veils.’ 63 This example of systematic human rights violations takes us
further away from the common-sense understanding of ethnicity and ethnicism. Yet,
obviously, women are biologically different from men. And that difference is in many ways
greater than the biological differences between ethnicities. Gender and ethnicism, however,
are in reality exclusively about culture. They are man-made forms of oppression. They are not
natural, since gender and ethnicity are cultural constructs.
The Taliban oppression of women was to a large extent about slavery, i.e. about
unpaid, and thus devalued, housework and childrearing, which are actually important parts of
a global phenomenon that has always accompanied societies that use money: patriarchy, i.e.
male sexism. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, however, it went one step further. Women
were not allowed to work for pay at all. The extent of the state-led oppression to which
women were subjected in Afghanistan is perhaps, as we shall see in Chapter II.3.1,
unparalleled in human history since the ancient Greeks, who treated their women similarly,
62 Mandela 1995 (1994): 289ff. Apparently, the Soviet Union, a major diamond producer, was so weak
economically that it also felt forced to come to terms with the white South Africans due to the worldwide price
controls established and imposed by the giant South African diamond corporation, De Beers. See Duodu: The
Oppenheimer Conundrum, 2000: 30f. Most of the ANC’s African allies were poor, newly independent, and
militarily weak countries, conditions that made their assistance insufficient, especially when compared to the
already militarily superior South African government’s even more powerful military allies, the USA, the UK,
and Israel, in particular.
63 Pleming: Afghan Women Push for End to Gender Apartheid, 2001
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