Apartheid

colonies, which may also give rise to one-sided views and even distort the real processes. The
reasons for this focus are compelling in one respect. Colonialized societies and societies in
general that have suffered from the last half-millennium of white expansion around the world,
are facing the real possibility of cultural extinction, and rescue work is urgently needed. On
the other hand, phenomena such as religion and religious hypocrisy – see Chapters II.9.1-9.3
below – are entirely different in the mainly Pagan Graeco-Roman Egypt and colonies taken by
Christians and Jews, respectively. This may well be theoretically significant, although not
recognized in current postcolonial theory, which has restricted itself to the study and
explanation of colonializing societies with biblical – almost exclusively Christian – religions.
It has confined itself to western European colonies, apartheid and genocidal societies of
western European origin during the last 400 years.
Due to reasons such as these, a more generalized, future theory might eventually lead
to a revised look at ethnicism, oppression and elitism as a whole, perhaps even reinterpreting
the phenomena studied by psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism with a partially or entirely
new conceptual apparatus. Yet another dimension to such a theory could be the role of
oppression in societies that are not human, but which may be found in human societies as
well. There is, by the way, nothing that suggests that such a dimension would necessarily be
genetically fixed. It may, on the contrary, imply only socio-structural constraints that are also
present and active in human contexts. 105
In summary, racism and ethnicism appear to have been underestimated by most social
theorists. The perhaps most important exception is W.E.B. Dubois, who correctly predicted,
over a century ago, that the main problem of the 20 th century would be the ‘problem of the
color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in
America and the islands of the sea’. 106 This problem and related phenomena urgently need to
be better understood, among other things due to corporate and commercial-cultural
globalization, to the currently unprecedented rate of extinction of languages (see Chapter II.8,
below), to the concomitant hollowing of democracy and equality, as well as to the increasing
intensity of interethnic relations and conflicts that accompany social globalization, but also
due to long existing racist or ethnicist power relationships – local, national, regional and
global. A general theory of racism or ethnicism, similar in scope to the feminist theory of
sexism, the Marxist theory of classism or the psychoanalytic theory of individual repression,
could help both to explain ethnicism and to prevent it from spreading, and perhaps even to
defeat it where it already exists. Instead of speculating further, however, we will now take a
brief look at some of the basic facts and main historical events in each of the three societies
that we are about to study.
9. The Historical Frameworks
1. Graeco-Roman Egypt
Graeco-Roman Egypt is by far the best-documented society of ancient times, and
exceptionally well documented for any society of the past. This is due to excellent conditions
from an archaeological and papyrological point of view, especially the dry air and sand, which
have preserved many otherwise fragile materials from decomposition, but also due to its
extensive and often over-bearing bureaucracies as well as to the relatively widespread
105 See, for instance, de Waal: Peacemaking Among Primates, 1989.
106 Quoted in Stone & Dennis: Introduction: Race Against Time – The Ethnic Divide in the Twentieth Century,
2003: 1. The authors also mention Max Weber and Robert Ezra Park as important sociologists who did not
completely overlook the problem. One might even say that Dubois’ characterization is an underestimation as it
leaves out Europe. On the other hand, Europe is not a continent, strictly speaking, and so, being intelligent, he
may have intended for it to be included in ‘Asia’.
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