Apartheid

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invented oppression. For any kind of scientific anthropology, 2,500 years is but a moment in
the development of such a complex, diversely and deeply rooted phenomenon as oppression.
For example, as noted above, civilizations have existed for more than twice as long as that. As
will be discussed below, certain Europeans, namely ancient Greeks and ancient Romans, may
have invented slave-labor-based economies – which play important roles for Classical Greece
and Rome, and thus indirectly for Graeco-Roman Egypt, as well as for and in South Africa –
but to say that they also invented all the basic phenomena that make up apartheid, would be to
go too far with the available facts. In at least one important instance, it would even be untrue.
I consider apartheid, the systematic human rights violations against an indigenous ethnic
majority, to be possible only with superiority in the military technology of the ethnic minority,
but we know that arms races started already with Stone Age humans, before they moved out
of Africa for the very first time. 88 Military superiority is much older than apartheid.
Nevertheless, the extension of the label ‘apartheid’ to an ancient society is no doubt
significant for the purpose of understanding war and oppression. Apartheid is not dependent
on modernity or industrialization, for example. And, as we shall see, this is certainly not the
first time that the label has been extended to Graeco-Roman Egypt.
Another reason for choosing Graeco-Roman Egypt as a point of comparison is the
enormous influence that the ancient Greek and Roman cultures have exerted upon
Mediterranean, European, ‘western’, and world culture in general. Frequently, perhaps even
generally, this influence has been evaluated in positive terms, perhaps especially vehemently
in these days of searching for a common European identity within an emerging European
superstate, a difficult ideological task since Europe is in fact the only part of the world that
calls itself a continent without being one, even in the geographic sense. What I wish to do here
is to draw attention to some of the elitist, ethnocentric, and other violent aspects of these
civilizations. 89 But most of all, I have chosen to study Graeco-Roman Egypt in parallel to
South Africa and Israel due to the very strong structural affinities between the systems of
severe human rights violations employed by the elites in each of these countries.
To try to find out which two of my three main examples of apartheid represent the
closest parallels may be a fascinating endeavor, but in my opinion, it is an idle one. In sum, it
is impossible to say. Although Israel and South Africa are not only close in time but also
collaborated intensely with each other, the parallels between Graeco-Roman Egypt and South
Africa are often even closer. In both of the latter, for example, there were two very similar
waves of European colonializers turning an African country into and consolidating an
apartheid society. In their apartheid roles, the Greeks and the Dutch correspond very closely
to each other, as do the Romans and the British. On the other hand, the parallels between
Graeco-Roman Egypt and Israel, which are the closest in space, are also often closer
structurally as well, e.g. neither had an initial slave-labor-based economy as South Africa did.
That is partly because both of these countries are characterized by high population densities,
as opposed to South Africa. There will be more examples of such parallels in the following,
and I do not think that there is much sense in trying to pick two of my three examples that are
88 See, for example, Makris: The Human Story, 1985: 21ff.
89 See Bernal: Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1: The Fabrication of
Ancient Greece 1785-1985, 1987, for a critique of ideological aspects of the Graeco-Roman civilization
becoming the model for European culture during the last couple of centuries to the detriment of the civilizations
from which it (the Graeco-Roman one) really originated. Bernal’s book has become the catalyst for a huge
academic and public controversy, also with regard to, among other things, the roles of racism and political
correctness in history and historiography. For overviews of the still raging debates, see Löwstedt: The Clash of
Histories of Civilisations, 2002: 45f; Bernal & Moore (ed.) 2001; Berlinerblau: Heresy in the University: The
Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals, 1999; Tzermias: Für eine
Hellenistik mit Zukunft: Plädoyer für die Überwindung der Krise des Humanismus, 1998; Binsbergen (ed.):
Black Athena: Ten Years After, 1997; Lefkowitz & Rogers (eds.): Black Athena Revisited, 1996 (a selective and
overwhelmingly negative critique and rejection of Bernal’s ideas); Bernal: Black Athena, Volume II: The
Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, 1991; Peradotto (ed.): The Challenge of Black Athena, 1989.