Apartheid

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centuries was exceptionally brutal. In the 1760s, it generated the first passes for non-Whites.
These passes were issued to slaves and Khoisan ‘servants’ by their employers to provide proof
that they had not run away from prison or from work. Other features of apartheid were also
present already in the early Cape Colony, such as the ban on intermarriage between races and
restrictions on land ownership for Blacks. Most of the officials and all of the top officials
appointed were white.
In 1658, only six years after they had set up the first white colony in South Africa, the
Dutch started importing a substantial number of slaves, at first mainly from Asia: India,
Malaysia and Indonesia. Later, Madagascar and Mozambique became the main sources of
slaves for the Dutch. The slaves in South Africa were mostly domestic servants and farm
laborers. In 1750, half of all white men owned at least one slave, an exceptionally high
proportion, which gave the white elite classes both width and strong mutual solidarity. The
Cape Colony was one of the cruellest slave societies the world has ever seen. Punishment for
disobedience could be extremely harsh. Few slaves ever gained freedom, and, in contrast to
e.g. Islamic slave law and practice, the children of free men by slave women automatically
became slaves. This was the same racist system of slavery that Whites had introduced into the
Americas, and the Greeks before them into Egypt. Nearly half the Company’s slave children
in 1685 had European fathers. Since non-White wives were not allowed into Holland, the
system was encouraged (if not devised and enforced) from there.
The slaves were stereotyped and stratified by color. Supervisors and artisans were
generally of mixed race, while Indonesians and Africans did unskilled work, the worst chores
going to slaves from Mozambique. The slaves outnumbered the settler population until 1795.
That rigid color hierarchy and a black, rightless labor force were the Dutch regime’s lasting
legacy to South Africa.
On the gradually east- and northward-moving frontier, poor Whites would gain
increasing independence from the Dutch government and started calling themselves
‘Afrikaners’. They fought frequent, victorious wars of domination against the indigenous
people. 121
The Cape Colony was occupied by the British from 1806 onwards. The British mainly
wanted to secure their long-distance ship traffic, as the Dutch had before them, and they
initially accepted the Dutch slave society. Even though Britain outlawed slavery in 1807, and
aggressively pursued outlawing it around the world from 1811, it was not banned in the
British-ruled Cape Colony until 1838. From 1809, the British themselves even practiced
something very close to slavery, actually more like medieval European serfdom, as they
exploited Khoisan people who became tied servants of white masters. It was mainly British
missionaries who finally put an end to this practice as well as to Dutch slavery. Yet
oppression continued. The unskilled, black labor was only half-free, poor, and destitute. The
end of slavery in fact sharpened racial divisions. Interracial marriage (which had been
practiced by a few poor Whites on the frontier) became even more uncommon, and in 1828
the British introduced urban residential segregation along ethnic lines, possibly for the first
time on the African continent since the Greeks and Romans had practiced ethnicist
segregation in Egypt. By now, the British were bringing in settlers. The new towns of the
Eastern Cape, which the British were in the process of taking from the indigenous Xhosa,
were divided into racial districts. These are sometimes erroneously considered the first cases
of racist segregation in Africa, but as we shall see, the Ptolemies in Egypt probably did the
same over 2,000 years earlier, and the Romans also probably took over the practice from
them. 122
121 Iliffe 1995: 123-126; Lester 1996: 23f; Thomasson: South Africa Faces Up to Slave Past, 1999
122 Iliffe 1995: 173-180. The centrality of segregation to apartheid is therefore originally not a purely Dutch or
Afrikaner invention in South Africa. This is important for those who still erroneously believe that the British
were somehow morally superior to other Whites in the country’s history, a belief apparently created consciously
by the British, for instance with their sham notion of a ‘Cape Democracy’ during the nineteenth century.