Apartheid

10
Africa by the Whites. The Greeks took over Egypt from the Persians, who were running it as a
province or colony at the time. The Jews took over most of Palestine from the British, who
were also running a colony.
The wider concept of apartheid, in my view, is also structurally more coherent than the
narrow one. It exposes apartheid as a systematic crime, equally akin to colonialism and
genocide – yet with distinctive features of its own. One of these is demography. In
colonialism, the presence of invaders is kept at a minimum, just enough in order to keep an
incessantly changing optimum level of exploitation running as smoothly as possible. In
apartheid, on the the other hand, a large minority of semi-civilian and civilian settlers is added
to, or accompanies, the military and administrative personnel needed for mere colonialism,
which is therefore, on the whole, not as profitable as apartheid. The exploitation of natural
resources and indigenous labor, in particular, is usually a great deal less intense in
colonialism. As indicated, apartheid also entails state sovereignty, which radically changes the
status of the oppressive minority, especially its status in the countries of origin. For the
invaders and all their descendants, the declaration of independence is a formal, and in many
respects also a practical, point of no return. In genocide, finally, an ethnic minority or
majority, whether consisting of indigenous people or invaders, strives to become a totality.
The presence of invaders or oppressive indigenous people is kept at a rising maximum level.
The profit motive also looms large in genocide. After stealing land, especially, the prospects
of refugees, resentment, and calls for justice, which might find sympathetic ears and allies, are
seen by the perpetrators of genocide as threats and the refugees or potential refugees are
therefore often slaughtered as well. But genocide, like apartheid, is often also blind ethnic
hatred, which is perpetrated for no economic reason at all. It appears hard, if not impossible,
to determine whether genocide in general is more or less profitable than apartheid or
colonialism.
Despite this shortcoming, which is – at least partly – conditioned by the absence of a
general theory of war and oppression, I hope that my analysis of apartheid can help to open up
the phenomena of racism, ethnicism, war, and oppression, including colonialism, genocide,
neo-colonialism, neo-apartheid, and other forms of imposed servitude, misery, and horror, to
more systematic study and criticism. The way I have analysed apartheid may be heuristically
useful especially for studies of genocide and colonialism, but perhaps also for investigations
into imperialism, slavery, prostitution, and other forms of systematic human rights violations.
Nevertheless, it is important to the conception of this work that apartheid is unique in form: it
cannot be reduced to a form of colonialism, or of genocide, or of imperialism. Although this
book will not deliver an exhaustive description of apartheid, I hope to have identified its most
essential aspects, and to have situated the phenomenon of apartheid within an admittedly
loose structural context of other kinds of systematic gross human rights violations, of other
kinds of crimes against humanity.
To refer to today’s South Africa or tomorrow’s Palestine as ‘postcolonial’, as is often
done, is in my view even worse than an underestimation of the problems that still have to be
faced in both of these contexts. It is an insult to the victims of apartheid. For most of these
victims, there are very few choices in life, and most of them are unattractive. Their backs are
against the wall. Black South Africans went through something much worse than colonialism,
something that is as close to genocide as it is to colonialism, and the Palestinians are trying to
do the same now.
Finally, this book is an attempt to understand and explain apartheid systematically
from the perspective of the people most affected by it, i.e. chiefly from the perspective of the
victims, or rather, from a human rights perspective. As such, its approach lies between that of
comparative political science and that of political sociology, rather than being comparative
history. If read as the latter, it may appear biased to the reader. But as political science or
sociology it should offer a partly new perspective on oppression, ethnicity, and violence. I am
not writing histories of Graeco-Roman Egypt, South Africa, or Israel/Palestine, nor even