Apartheid

This independence also has profound consequences for the elite ethnic minority, which from
now on has nowhere else to go and is more or less forced to stay, come what may, in its
adopted, and conquered, home country.
4. Land: Apartheid entails land confiscation, land redistribution and forced removals, almost
without exception to the benefit of the invading ethnic minority. Usually, members of the
ethnic majority are forced on to barren and unfertile soils, where they must also try to survive
under impoverished and overcrowded conditions.
5. Work: Apartheid displays systematic exploitation of the indigenous class in the production
process and different pay or taxation for the same work depending on the elites’ (ultimately
arbitrary) definition of ethnicity. The fruits of labor, the profits and the decision-making
powers usually all end up with representatives of the oppressive ethnic minority. Any kind of
economic strength of the indigenous majority is made impossible by the apartheid business
elite, accompanied by intentional state measures sometimes amounting to economic sabotage
of attempts at indigenous economic and financial independence. As in all capitalist
economies, a large reserve ‘army’ of unemployed people is created (by both state and civil
society); only, in apartheid, the reservists are almost exclusively indigenous. The thirdethnicity
workers are imported partly in order to keep the indigenous reserve army of
unemployed laborers large, but also in order to carry out work that the indigenous refuse to do
(e.g. the Indian workers in Natal to work on sugar plantations on which the indigenous Zulus
refused to work) or are not likely to do efficiently (such as the collection of ethnicist taxes in
Graeco-Roman Egypt, which was largely carried out by imported Jews).
6. Access: There is ethnically differentiated access to employment, food, water, health care,
emergency services, clean air, and other needs, including the need for leisure activities, in
each case ensuring superior access for the favored ethnic community.
7. Education: There are also different kinds of education offered and forced upon the
different ethnic groups. Interestingly, or ironically, more and especially superior education
usually leads members of apartheid elites to less extremist positions, sometimes even to their
rejection, whereas members of the oppressed majority are mostly led to more ‘extremist’, i.e.
more oppositional, positions with increasing education. This is one of the reasons that so
many members of the ethnic majority are intentionally and systematically deprived by the
apartheid elites of an education altogether. Education is therefore another one of the main
battlefields of apartheid.
8. Language: Words, proper names, expressions, dialects, and languages are actively
prohibited, limited, allowed or promoted depending on their ethnic origins and affinities. A
basic apartheid characteristic is the fact that only very few of the invaders and their
descendants ever learn the language(s) of the indigenous victims. Yet, if they do, they are
apparently more likely to be or become opposed to apartheid.
9. Thought: Finally, apartheid contains ideologies or ‘necessary illusions’ 90 , aimed at the
elites in particular, and the societies at large in general, in order to convince the privileged
90 Chomsky: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, 1989. More recently, Chomsky has
argued that dictatorships and other undemocratic polities during the 20 th century in fact learned the most about
propaganda from democratic societies, in which elites can not control people by brute force accompanied by
formal, pre-publication censorship, and therefore have to control them, if at all, chiefly by means of propaganda.
And so, regardless of whether one looks at the democratic – of which there actually are (and were) a few, though
restricted to the privileged ethnic minority and perhaps a few other groups – or the numerous undemocratic
aspects of apartheid South Africa, Israel and Graeco-Roman Egypt, propaganda is always likely to play a very
important role in apartheid. See Chomsky: Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 2002
(1991): 20f: ‘Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.’ See also Chomsky:
Escaping Orthodoxies, Barsamian Interviews Chomsky, Part 3, 2000. Obviously, apartheid societies mainly use
the bludgeon, but all indications suggest that propaganda is also indispensable for the smooth functioning of
interim as well as long-term apartheid oppression, especially since the Second World War.
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