Apartheid

especially Tasmania, Namibia under German and South African rule, Libya under Italian
rule, Bosnian Serb society in the early 1990s, Rwanda in May and June 1994;
and Domestic settings.
Only the latter of these four would include the phenomena typically studied and
explained by Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist and many other theories. It would also
include majoritarian and ethnicist, but non-genocidal human rights violations, such as the use
of imported slaves, indentured servants, or ‘guest workers’. There will of course also be
overlapping areas between genocide and domestic, ethnicist oppression. There will in fact
always be at least a possibility of mixed forms of systematic human rights violations along
with inevitable overlaps. Nevertheless, apartheid is closer to genocide than colonialism is.
Apartheid occupies an intermediate position, between the other two, with regard to all basic
aspects of the systematic human rights violations: violence, population policies and practices,
expropriation of territory and other kinds of private and collective property, language and
ideology, the severity of discrimination and exploitation, etc.
As opposed to being too uncritical of Marxism as ‘taking care of material oppression’,
on the other hand, any material aspects of oppression might be overlooked by postcolonial
theory altogether. This is a common temptation in the so-called ‘Information Age’, in which
the already very powerful new philosophical and social scientific traditions of discourse
theory and postmodernism allow us meaningful contact with the real world only through the
media of symbols or systems of symbols. 98
The word ‘racism’, for example, has deplorably come to signify a state of mind or a
set of beliefs only, and mostly does not refer to processes, to acts of war and oppression, at all
– other than twists of logic or verbal outbursts, of course. Earlier, the term ‘racialism’ used to
refer more to oppressive practices, but that term has now become a less used synonym for
‘racism’. 99 In interaction with these new traditions, postcolonial theory has also come to focus
on symbols, rather than practices, of racism. This over-emphasis on ‘meaning and mentality,
ideology and culture’ is, however, sometimes being lamented with regard to racism and
systematic human rights violations in South African history. 100
In this context, I believe it must be understood that postcolonial theory has tended to
focus on symbolism partly due to this being the area in which the current white elites offer the
least resistance. They are much more likely to admit that ‘mistakes’ have been made here,
among other things in order to deflect and avoid the more concrete and substantial demands
for material reparations – not to mention criminal liability – for any of the crimes against
humanity perpetrated by them, including colonialism, neocolonialism, apartheid, genocide,
and slavery. It is much easier and vastly preferable for these elites to say ‘sorry’, and blame
the mentalities and ideologies of yesteryear, rather than to give the stolen land or artifacts
back, to face criminal charges, or to pay reparations for destruction wrought, lives taken, or
for labor, culture, and nature exploited.
On the other hand, postcolonial theory has been influenced to a large extent by certain
strands of Marxism, and much of that influence has no doubt been fruitful. Yet, some aspects
of the traditional Marxist-Leninist theory of colonialism seem to have been less than useful to
characterize apartheid, as the following assessment, made on the eve of liberation from
apartheid in South Africa, points out:
The concept of settler society is both useful and misleading in
98 Petraglia-Bahri 1996; Howarth: Discourse Theory, 1995: 115-133. See Sardar: Postmodernism and the Other:
The New Imperialism of Western Culture, 1998 for a profound critique of neo-imperialist and neo-colonialist
aspects of postmodernism.
99 Race/Racism, in Bullock, Stallybrass & Trombley: Dictionary of Modern Thought, 1988 (1977): 714. There
are also various uses of ‘racialism’ as a technical term, e.g. in Fredrickson 2002: 153f, or in Miles 1989: 53f.
100 Keegan 1996: vii
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