Apartheid

72
salvage the dominance of the concept of colony at all costs. 93 Some colonies had small
numbers of civilian settlers from the mother country, but that fact alone did not make them
apartheid societies. Moreover, even if colonialists did not settle for life in most colonies, they
certainly did so for extended periods of time. So, whether the invaders settle or not does not
appear to be the basic issue, although it certainly makes a difference. More importantly,
however, political and economic independence, the invaders’ attitude towards the country as
their home, and other ideological elements, as well as the issues of violence, repopulation,
citizenship, land, work, and access characterize apartheid in my understanding. Sometimes,
though, it may still be hard to see the difference, perhaps especially from the perspective of
victims of colonialism.
Unique as was the Apartheid regime, there was no feature of that evil
system that could not be duplicated in the experience of other parts of
black Africa. It was the racist colonial system that…made it possible
for a few settlers protected by the force of the colonial power to erect
such a system and operate it under neo-colonialism for so long
because the Western world chose to regard white South Africa as their
bulwark against the spread of communism. Another point to note is
that the evil system arose out of the contempt bred by the Atlantic
slave trade. The theology of the Dutch Reformed Church used to
justify and sustain apartheid arose from the Unfinished [sic] business
of the antislavery movement, and the failure to declare the Atlantic
trade and racist colonialism as a sin incompatible with the Biblical
notion of neighbourly love. 94
The arguments delivered in this quote are of course not erroneous, but the other parts
of Africa that experienced the closest ‘duplicates’ were in fact themselves apartheid societies,
such as Rhodesia or Graeco-Roman Egypt, or mixtures between colonies and apartheid, e.g.
Kenya, Algeria and South West Africa. They all had sizeable white civilian populations, i.e.
settlers, yet no political independence, except Rhodesia (from 1965 to 1980) and Greek-ruled
Egypt, which were both independent apartheid states, not colonies. The dependency on the
European or white superpowers, moreover, is treated rather monolithically in the quote above.
It is important in this context that Kenya in the 1950s, for example, was a great deal more
dependent on Britain than South Africa was. That was the time when British troops were sent
to Kenya to crush the Mau Mau rebellion. Nothing of the kind could have happened during,
for instance, the Soweto uprising. 95 Add to that the political and legal implications of the
93 This overextended use of the concept of ‘colony’, and the fact that Ptolemaic Egypt remained independent of
Greece, Macedonia, and of all other countries, throughout its three centuries of existence, are the main reasons
why Roger Bagnall dismisses modern attempts to identify (and criticize) so-called ‘colonialist’ aspects of Greekruled
Egypt. He unfortunately does not bring in South Africa under white rule to anything but two footnotes and
a parenthesis and stays away from even considering a characterization of Greek-ruled Egypt as an apartheid
society. Indeed, in contrast to his otherwise methodologically solid work, Bagnall’s references to South Africa
appear to be little more than unintegrated afterthoughts. In the end, he calls the Graeco-Roman system of
domination in Egypt ‘hierarchical’, thereby conclusively confirming that a circle is indeed round. Bagnall:
Decolonizing Ptolemaic Egypt, 1997: 225-241. Bagnall’s tautological conclusion is all the more disappointing
since one of the editors of the same volume in his introduction points to no less than five different modern
sources who refer explicitly to ‘apartheid’ in Graeco-Roman Egypt. See footnote 119 below. See also Petraglia-
Bahri: Introduction to Postcolonial Studies, 1996.
94 Ajayi 2001. Moreover, the two crimes against humanity mentioned in the last sentence are sins incompatible
with some central notions in every, or almost every, religion, and of course with secularized international law
and most systems of national law as well. Nonetheless, all three Biblical religions to some extent also approved
of slavery in their holy scriptures.
95 Iliffe 1995: 235, 248. On another interesting parallel, between French-ruled Algeria and modern Israel, drawn
by Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel, himself, see N.N.: Sharon: “Wir Werden Bleiben”, December 28,
2001. Sharon told the French president, Jacques Chirac, who fought for France against the Algerians, that Israel