Apartheid
Apartheid
Apartheid
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especially those enforced by United Nations mandates, have made it increasingly difficult for<br />
apartheid in recent years, in spite of one of apartheid’s main licenses to continue existing in<br />
the 20 th and 21 st centuries – state sovereignty, ironically also guaranteed by that strange hybrid<br />
phenomenon, the United Nations.<br />
The triptych colonialism-apartheid-genocide is to a large extent a function of relative<br />
population numbers and population policy: In colonialism the class of ethnic oppressors in<br />
situ is the smallest and it is also kept at a minimum (by the colonial power). The most basic<br />
principle here is not to replace the natives or even to settle in their land, but to keep a colonial<br />
economic output at a maximum for reasons of profit. In times of crisis for the colonial power,<br />
the colonies can also supply cannon fodder, i.e. soldiers, such as in the world wars of the 20 th<br />
century. For example, France used over half a million African soldiers and another half<br />
million soldiers from its other overseas colonies to fight the German and Austro-Hungarian<br />
empires in World War I. One quarter of the soldiers from the French colonies were killed in<br />
this war, most of them African. Altogether, an estimated 300,000 Africans died for France<br />
during the world wars, many of them conscripts. They were often sent on dangerous missions,<br />
because, as one white French military commander put it, they were ‘less sensitive to pain<br />
because their nervous systems were not as highly developed’ as those of their European<br />
colleagues! Afterwards, however, the efforts of Africans were played down in French history<br />
books, school textbooks, military victory parades, and war memorials. As an additional slap in<br />
the face, France stopped paying pensions to its African war veterans after their countries had<br />
gained independence. The British also used many soldiers from their African colonies,<br />
especially in World War II. On the whole, Africa can be said to have suffered more from<br />
colonialism than other victims of that scourge, at least in the so-called ‘Old World’. The<br />
Romans, for instance, built infrastructure and encouraged trade in Britain, as the British would<br />
indeed also do in India, two millennia later. And due to reasons such as this, colonialism is<br />
indeed not as harsh as genocide or apartheid. With the limited exceptions of South Africa,<br />
Rhodesia and Kenya, where they had brought in many white settlers, the British would<br />
however chiefly make sure that colonialized Africans created or contributed to profits for the<br />
British which were not reinvested into the African economies. The same goes for the other<br />
European colonies in Africa. 20<br />
In apartheid, on the other hand, the oppressors represent a sizeable minority,<br />
sometimes, as in the case of the Israeli Jews, striving to become a majority, whether for<br />
reasons of ethnic hatred, or of ethnicist fear. Here, longer-term profits also come into the<br />
picture. The oppressors, moreover, have come to stay and regard the country as theirs, in both<br />
a belonging and a possessive sense. In their eyes, they belong to it, and it belongs to them. As<br />
opposed to colonialism there is also necessarily a civil, or at least a semi-civil society among<br />
the oppressors. They are not all state employees, although they (at least the adult males) may<br />
all be armed and organized in a military or paramilitary fashion.<br />
In genocide, finally, the oppressors constitute either a majority or a minority, in either<br />
case striving to become a totality. Profits made out of the disappearing ethnicity, and what it<br />
leaves behind, appear as altogether secondary to hate, except perhaps profits made from the<br />
land conquered thus. Genocide is often accompanied by the more or less forced import of a<br />
new subjugated ethnicity, such as the African slaves into the Caribbean and elsewhere in the<br />
20 Tattersall: Africa’s Old Soldiers Feel Forgotten by France, 2004; Ajayi: The Unfinished Business: Confronting<br />
the Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism in Africa, 2000. Today, in the so-called ‘post-colonial’ Africa, around<br />
90 per cent of Africa’s intellectual output is produced in European languages. Not even a single treaty between<br />
Europe and Africa exists in any African language. See wa Thiong’o: A People without Memory Are in Danger of<br />
Losing Their Soul, 2003. Similar to but not entirely identical with my general conception of ethnicism as a<br />
continuum is the following: “...from unofficial but pervasive social discrimination at one end of the spectrum to<br />
genocide at the other, with government-sanctioned segregation, colonial subjugation, exclusion, forced<br />
deportation (or ‘ethnic cleansing’), and enslavement among the other variations on the theme.” Fredrickson<br />
2002: 9.