Apartheid

28
remote location, moreover, the appointed Dutch elite in the Cape Colony was running its own
affairs.
The culture and language of the white settlers in South Africa differed increasingly
from those of the mother country, and they started calling themselves ‘Afrikaners’ and their
language ‘Afrikaans’ rather than Dutch. In this sense, white-ruled South Africa (initially only
the Cape peninsula) was a colony from 1652 when Whites first settled. It then gradually
developed apartheid features but became more of a colony again from 1806 as it became
British. The 19 th century Boer republics, Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and Natalia, and
the independent South Africa from 1910 to 1994 were clear-cut apartheid societies in my wide
sense. The Dutch and British colonies, on the other hand, were hybrid phenomena, somewhere
in between colonies and apartheid societies. More accurately, they could be described as
essentially apartheid societies with colonial veneers. They had a colonialist surface structure,
but an apartheid deep structure. 18 The same applies to Egypt under Roman rule, where Greeks
were also a majority among Europeans, remaining privileged in ways comparable to the
Afrikaners under the British.
The differences between an apartheid society and a colony manifest themselves further
in the apartheid society being generally more violent – much due to paranoid tendencies
within the ruling minority and also because it wants to make room for immigrants of its own
choice in order to boost its own numbers and to further increase its military, political and
economic power, in many cases, moreover, because there are genocidal attitudes and practices
originating from the elites. There are cycles of violence in apartheid that are not duplicated in
colonialized societies. Apartheid is also more extreme in terms of exploitation, repopulation
policies, land confiscation, forced removals and ideology. The oppressive minority is larger
than it is in colonies, and it cannot expect or even hope for the mother country or countries to
help out in a time of crisis. It would not even be welcome, in large groups of migrants, in its
countries of origin, in case it really faced ‘being driven into the sea’ 19 by the indigenous and
would have to emigrate on a large scale. This goes for the Greeks in Egypt, for the Dutch (and
many other European) descendants in South Africa, and for the Ashkenazy as well as the
Sephardic Jews in modern Israel. In each case, we are talking about several million people.
They would not be taken in en masse willingly by anyone, whether in Europe or elsewhere.
Moreover, since the oppressive minority is larger, the control and surveillance established by
the elites, their security forces, and their allies abroad is far greater than it is in a colony.
Therefore, the political and economic pressures on the oppressed majority in an apartheid
society can be (and are) increased in comparison with colonies.
‘Proper’ apartheid states are themselves aggressively colonialist in attitude and
behavior. Greek-ruled Egypt established numerous colonies to the east, north and west. Dutch
and British soldiers, as well as Dutch, Afrikaner and British farmers from the Cape gradually
invaded land to the north and east and often added it to the white political entity gradually, as
18
Lester 1996: 15ff; Fredrickson: White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African
History, 1981: 18
19
For example, in 2001, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s foreign policy adviser, Daniel Ayalon, told
reporters at a press conference that “We are not fans at all of a military solution although...if they hold us at
gunpoint and tell us ‘Give us what we want or else we will keep shooting,’ they will never stop shooting until
they drive us into the sea…” (N.N.: Palestinians Would Exploit Weakness - Israeli Official, August 16, 2001).
Similarly, in an interview with the Russian magazine, New Times, the Israeli ex-prime minister, Binyamin
Netanyahu, talks about a political movement under Yasser Arafat “having the slogans ‘Death to Israel! And Cast
the Jews into the Sea!’”, also without citing any specific sources. Pumpyansky: Binyamin Netanyahu: “The End
of History”? It’s Rubbish, 2002. There is in fact plenty of macabre irony in the claim that the Arabs want to
throw the Jews into the sea, an irony that has not been lost on the Palestinians. In 1948, many Palestinians were
literally pushed into the turbulent Mediterranean sea, where they perished. With land routes cut off by Zionist
forces, tens of thousands of refugees from the Palestinian city of Jaffa and neighbouring villages tried to flee by
boat to Lebanon, Gaza and Egypt; scores of Palestinians were thus drowned. See Sohl: Implementing the Right
of Return, 2003.