Apartheid

sovereignty and strength of the state in South Africa, and the concepts of colonialism and neocolonialism
(dependency of the former colony on the economic power of the former
colonialists) become even weaker in attempts to explain South African apartheid. The racist
aspects of everyday life, however, are not surprisingly very similar for South Africa and
African colonies during the same time period. The victims of apartheid and those of
colonialism do indeed have similar experiences, but the perpetrators are different and act
differently and for partly different reasons, as well. They are mainly civilian in apartheid, and
their actions are more exploitative, on the one hand, and more akin to genocide, on the other.
Their cultural and ideological attitudes and actions are also very different from those of
colonialists.
Consider, also, the following similarity between modern Israel, South Africa and
Graeco-Roman Egypt: Travelling is more common and much easier nowadays, and many
thousands of tourists come from all over the world to visit Israel every year. The Jewish
tourists and visitors are non-settlers, but they still act in accordance with apartheid principles
and laws in Israel, even to the point of considering the country as theirs more than the
Palestinians’, who live there. One of the reasons behind this is that Jews – two thirds of whom
are not Israeli citizens today – have an automatic ‘right of return’ to Israel. Greek and Roman
settlers, on the other hand, would much more likely make a single trip from their home
countries to Egypt, and never go back. Still, they would also immediately and automatically
be considered ‘citizens’, whereas, perversely, the indigenous Egyptians were called ‘aliens’.
In South Africa, Blacks who had never been outside the country suffered from discrimination
with regard to ‘visits’ to cities, and were moreover turned into aliens, and even forcibly
moved to ‘Bantustans’ or ‘Homelands’ that were created on patches of land that the Whites
did not want anyway in the 1970s and ‘80s. Meanwhile, white tourists and other visitors had
an easy time entering South Africa. Similar to Blacks in South Africa, Palestinians from the
Occupied Territories, many of whom were forcibly expelled from the state of Israel in 1948,
need permissions to enter and to work inside the state of Israel.
Thus, an apartheid society is much more than just a ‘settler colony’. It involves
specific forms of oppression that I have named ‘repopulation’ and ‘citizenship’, both of which
make a great difference in comparison with colonies. At times, these forms of oppression
actively strip the original inhabitants of any rights at all. As mentioned, the severity of human
rights violations in apartheid societies and the liberation processes also differ a great deal
from those of colonies, mainly due to the facts that the oppressive ethnic minorities have
nowhere else to go, that the relative sizes of the oppressive minorities differ considerably
between apartheid and colonial societies, and that competitive population growth takes place
under apartheid, with specific forms of concomitant violence, especially femicide. Finally,
African slaves settled in America, and Asian slaves in South Africa, and although this was
forced settlement, they should according to the terminology of ‘settler colonialism’ be seen as
part of the priviliged ethnicity, which can hardly be said to be anywhere near true.
Postcolonial theory is at times also, perhaps, somewhat uncritical of Marxist
explanations of the economic and political structures involved in ethnicist oppression in its
focus on colonialism in culture (usually interpreted in a non-anthropological sense),
particularly in literature 96 . Thus, colonialism superficially appears to be a specific ideological
phenomenon, with no less important political and economic accompanying causes. The latter,
however, are often tacitly assumed to be identical in principle with the colonial powers’ (and
is similar, but that the Israelis would not be massacred and expelled, a reference to some of the privileged French
Algerians who had been killed or felt (or were) forced to flee Algeria during or after its liberation from French
colonial rule, largely through their own doing or through that of their immediate ancestors and other compatriot
predecessors. (Sharon, of course, does not mention the latter fact, nor that the French minority ruled Algeria
undemocratically and brutally, nor that they ruthlessly exploited the land and its indigenous population. On the
latter issues, see Iliffe 1995: 166f, 230, 246f.)
96 See, for example, Morrison: Theories of Post-Coloniality: Edward W. Said and W.B. Yeats, 1998.
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