Apartheid

8
stage of the invasion has taken several different forms – from legal to illegal land purchase, to
the loose imposition of administrative rule (colonial, i.e. essentially undemocratic, in style)
over military occupation, further to aggressive repopulation and settlement, ethnic cleansing
and genocide. In South Africa, the invasion went on, in fits and starts, for more than three
centuries. It reached as far north as Angola in the 1980s.
Roughly coinciding with the first invasion – in Israel and Graeco-Roman Egypt
earlier, in South Africa slightly later – the immigration of a substantial number of civilians of
the same ethnicity as the invaders is arranged by the actual or prospective apartheid elites.
Partly in order to make room for these immigrants, many indigenous people are eventually
exterminated or expelled from the country or from their land. Their other belongings are often
also stolen, along with the land. In the Dutch Cape Colony, the theft of Khoikhoi cattle by the
Europeans led to the extermination of this ethnic group. Large numbers of indigenous
survivors, however, are kept alive or are allowed to stay alive – if only barely – as an
exploited work force and as an abused reserve work force, and they are also kept as separated
from the ethnic elite as possible, especially the ‘reservists’. A host of excuses and remarkably
flexible, yet often successful strategic reasons are invoked for recurrent decimations of the
indigenous population, as its birth rate is higher than that of the oppressive ethnic minority –
mainly because of the high child mortality rates and low average life expectancy of members
of the indigenous majority, and also due to peculiar cultures of resistance, which are acted out
mainly at the expense of indigenous women, and which include killings of women (and some
men) who will not – or may encourage other women not to – participate as producers of large
numbers of indigenous babies. Nonetheless, despite these horrific conditions and their
resultant huge indigenous death tolls, population growth as a whole is much faster in the
oppressed apartheid populace than it is in the ethnic elite community, despite racist
immigration, naturalization, and citizenship laws or hi-tech fertility boosters for female
members of this minority.
At some point in time during these developments, an independent, sovereign state is
declared by the dominant ethnic minority, whose members thereby become its most privileged
citizens or nationals. (The privileges of members of the oppressive minority, however, are not
only consequences of the independence of the apartheid state. Both legal and practical
conditions of ethnicist discrimination can, of course, also characterize pre-apartheid, postapartheid,
colonialized, racist slave-labor-based, and yet other kinds of societies. Moreover,
the condition of independence is only absolute in a formal sense. Political independence and
especially economic and military independence are all matters of degree in practice. In at least
one practical sense, only the USA is today an independent country, owing to the unrivalled
economic and political power of its industrial-military complex and its embeddedness in a
globalized capitalist economy. All other countries in the world are, in this important sense,
dependent of the USA.)
As if all of this oppression were not enough, certain essential aspects of the invaders’
culture, including language and religion, are more or less forced upon the abused and toiling
indigenous masses in apartheid societies. Many members of the indigenous group eventually
come to believe, at least occasionally, that their cultures and they themselves are worth less
than ‘European’, ‘white’, ‘western’, or ‘Jewish’ cultures and people are.
Due to these conditions, their implications and consequences, my widened concept of
apartheid represents no less a crime against humanity than the narrow concept. It is in fact
even more of a crime; among racist crimes it could indeed be seen as second in severity only
to genocide.
However, when racist slavery is viewed as an independent system of racism – separate
from both apartheid and genocide – the crime of racist slavery that was perpetrated over 400
years in the ‘Atlantic System’ may perhaps be counted as the one exception to the ranking of
apartheid as second worst only to genocide.