Apartheid

60
‘solution’, and also how many others were firmly in place before then. As Nelson Mandela
says in his autobiography: ‘Apartheid was a new term but an old idea. . . .What had been more
or less de facto was to become relentlessly de jure.’ 79 All essential aspects of apartheid had in
fact existed in South Africa before 1948. Only the comprehensive system of laws and
practices and the name for this prioritized and overriding government policy were not yet
there.
Unfortunately, my first preliminary definition would include most colonies in world
history, so there are some additional characteristics that my three examples will have to share
if apartheid is to be systematically distinguished from colonialism. As mentioned above, they
are all, at least during parts of the long time periods studied here, independent states. 80 That is,
they achieved independence before they were colonialized by the second ruling ethnic
minority (Greek-ruled Egypt taken over by Rome in 30 BCE), or at least well before they
were ‘decolonialized’ (South Africa in 1994). Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly,
in my three chosen societies the oppressors came to the country to stay, they came to see it as
their home country. Unlike in most European colonies in Africa, for example, the Whites
were not just waiting to be posted somewhere else. They settled to become indigenous, though
separate from the indigenous ethnic group already present at their arrival in the ‘new’ country.
Next, my three examples of apartheid were (are) among the world’s leaders in several,
if not all, different fields of military technology. At first glance, this may seem like a
contingent condition, but the power of apartheid elites is invariably based on considerable
military superiority over the conquered indigenous majority. And that superiority had to be
based on the military effectiveness of weapons, rather than on numbers of soldiers or
fighters. 81 For example, both South Africa’s and Israel’s apartheid arsenals ostensibly
include(d) ABC (Atomic, Biological and Chemical) weapons, although neither of them
admit(ted) it.
Lastly, in all of my cases, the oppressors and/or the vast majority of their recent
ancestors came from Europe. The Jews in modern Israel present but a qualified and limited
79 Mandela 1995 (1994): 111. Yet it never became completely relentless, as we observed with regard to
Thompson. Most Whites were too ‘rational’ in the economic sense to let their maids, gardeners, etc. travel for
hours every day to and from areas designated for Blacks, so they let them stay on in servants’ quarters on their
‘white’ land, even if they did not have special permits in order to bypass the laws of racial segregation.
80 South Africa or parts of it were Dutch and then British colonies during most of the time since Whites started
settling there in 1652. Transvaal, Orange Free State and Natalia, however, were independent Boer republics and
thus pure apartheid societies during parts of the 19 th century, and all of South Africa achieved independence,
within the British Empire, in 1910 and remained a purely apartheid society in my wide sense during the
following 84 years. Egypt was a Roman province from 30 BCE until 642 CE, but prior to that an independent
Macedonian-ruled kingdom from 323 BCE until the Romans took over. Israel was independent throughout the
period under investigation. On the other hand, Israel has been treating the Palestinian territories occupied since
1967 as colonies, similarly to Namibia by the South Africans and many Southwest Asian, Southeast European,
Libyan and other territories by Egypt under Macedonian rule, for instance by confiscating land, using cheap
labor, and by denying the overwhelming indigenous majority the right to vote altogether.
81 See Section II.1, below. Thus, a country like Rhodesia does not rate with the three countries I decided to study,
although it shares a great deal more than just a border with South Africa, and generally fits inside my definition
of an apartheid society. To me, Rhodesia (see Chapter I.4, above, and footnotes 394 and 399, below), a country
with a one to three per cent oppressive minority of mainly British origin, represents the sixth most obvious
example of apartheid in the wide sense proposed here, (after White-ruled South Africa, modern Israel, Graeco-
Roman Egypt, Outremer, and Guatemala) though it was not a world military power. I have also not yet compared
my three main examples in much detail with independent Brazil or Cuba (where the oppressed majorities,
however, are not indigenous but were imported after the already accomplished conquest of the countries and
genocides of the indigenous people), nor with the various Saxon and Viking kingdoms in the British Isles and
Normandy, where invading ethnic elites also developed apartheid structures (see Sawyer: Kings and Vikings:
Scandinavia and Europe, AD 700-1100, 1994 (1982): 98ff). There are bound to be many other similar short-lived
apartheid societies, short-lived mainly due to the basic and explosive inner tension within such societies, but also
due to other factors such as less available capital (as we shall see, apartheid is invariably very expensive), a
smaller military advantage and, perhaps, less ethnicist ideologies and attitudes within the conquering ethnic
minority.