Apartheid

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minorities that they are inherently superior and the indigenous majorities that they are
inherently inferior. Much of apartheid thought is shaped by typical war propaganda. The
enemy is dehumanized by both sides’ ideologies, but mostly so by the invaders and their
descendants. A related essential feature of all apartheid ideologies is ‘de-secularization’, a
reliance on alleged divine revelation as a source of information about the world and an
attempted legitimization of war and oppression, on the one hand, and the use of religion as an
‘opium’ for the oppressed people (including the potentially oppositional members of the
privileged minority, of which there always seem to be quite a few), on the other. This is not an
automatic feature that has an effect on the thought of every individual, but it is an overall
trend noticeable in, and characteristic of each apartheid society. Other essentials within this
category are the comparatively large amounts of manipulated information, bias,
misinformation, and propaganda, as well as the unfree flow of information in apartheid
societies. The apartheid elites manage most of the information, manipulate much of it, and
guard their control over it jealously.
If only one of these nine categories is missing in a society, I would still call it
‘apartheid’. The most obvious examples are Egypt under Imperial Roman rule, in which the
oppressive ethnic minority was always mainly of Greek descent, and South Africa under
Imperial British or colonial Dutch rule, where the oppressive ethnic minority was always
mainly of Dutch descent. In both of these instances, my third category, ‘Citizenship’, was
missing, since the countries were not independent during these periods. Yet, there were other
oppressive instances of the use of citizenship here: not as oppressive, but still able to target the
oppressed indigenous majority from Rome and London, respectively. I believe the label
‘apartheid’ can still be useful even if two of the nine apartheid conditions are missing, but that
was never or hardly ever the case in the three apartheid societies that are the focus of this
investigation.
My definition is neither essentialist nor arbitrary. It is a flexible definition, the focus of
which may be allowed by the investigator to shift. Any (two) of the nine categories may in
practice be disregarded in case the whole system of oppression is in focus. Nonetheless, the
basic underlying structure is the same. Without implying or requiring a Platonic, conceptual
idealism, there is a kind of ‘ideal apartheid’, or better: a ‘full-blown apartheid’, for instance
observable 1948-1994 CE in South Africa, as well as in Israel 1948 CE until the present, or in
Egypt from 323-30 BCE and it manifests itself with the presence of all nine categories.
8. Beyond Postcolonial and Postmodern Theory: The Study of Ethnicism
and Apartheid in the Context of Some Recent Theories of Oppression
The dawn of the 20 th century had a single academically articulated or ‘scientific’
theory of systematic oppression: Marxism, the theory of class struggles. Soon, a theory of
systematic oppression, or ‘repression’, within the individual followed, Sigmund Freud’s (and
also Alfred Adler’s) psychoanalysis. The end of the century saw the emergence of feminism, a
powerful theory of gender-based systematic oppression. Still missing, however, is a
comprehensive theory of structured or systematic racist or ethnicist human rights violations,
the long-term effects of which are becoming increasingly acute in the current, globalizing
world.
For instance, ten years after the formal ending of apartheid, South Africa remained the
country with the largest income differences in the world, with the possible exception of
Brazil, and those differences still basically run along race lines, in both South Africa and