Apartheid

38
After being freed from slavery in the mid-19 th century, in both countries, they remained poor
and oppressed. Their situation could only really be matched by that of the indigenous people.
Coincidentally, in each of the countries the descendants of those slaves and imported
indentured laborers now make up around twelve per cent of the total population.
But here, in the crucial realm of demography, the similarity between the indigenous
groups, between South African Blacks and Native Americans in the USA, breaks down
completely. After over half a century of both absolute and relative growth, more than three
quarters of South Africa’s population today is black, whereas Native Americans have by now
been made to dwindle to one per cent of the US population. 34
This important difference in the demographic development of the oppressed
indigenous ethnic groups in South Africa and the USA thus highlights the most dramatic
phenomenological difference between apartheid and genocide. South Africa under white rule
was essentially apartheid, the USA under white rule was (and to some extent still is)
essentially genocidal. Nonetheless, there are obviously overlapping zones between genocide
and apartheid, as well. Millions of Southern African Blacks were murdered, on the one hand,
and there are still some Native Americans alive and some Native Americans tongues spoken
today, on the other.
The book most similar to mine is perhaps ‘White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in
American and South African History’, by George Fredrickson, who is well aware of those
demographic discrepancies in his comparison, but does not consider them as important as I
do. The difference between us, however, is not of a fundamental nature. I have nothing in
principle against labeling some of the conditions imposed upon Black and Native Americans
‘apartheid’, and I believe that Fredrickson’s work is both very good and important for the
understanding of ethnicism, racism, war and oppression in general, on the one hand, and for
the understanding of unique US and South African developments on the other. But I believe it
can be argued convincingly that there are even closer structural parallels to white supremacy
in South Africa, namely in Graeco-Roman Egypt and in modern Israel. Writing in 1981, when
South African apartheid was still officially (but mostly inofficially) being defended and aided
by the dominant US and UK elites, Fredrickson commendably took pre-1948 developments in
South Africa into consideration, and referred to them well with his more unspecified title. His
was also, however, a more diachronic perspective than the relatively synchronic perspective
that I have chosen. His analysis is more about the process and the causal chains within it;
mine is more about the structure or system and the interdependence and interactions between
constituents of that system. 35 He writes history, and I write political science and political
34 Fenton 1999: 41; Churchill: Suppression of Indigenous Sovereignty in 20 th Century United States, 1997. In
Canada, a similarly genocidal society, the present combined population of indigenous people, American Indians
and Inuit, is also less than two per cent of the present total of 26 million inhabitants. In Hawai’i, which was
conquered by Whites much later but more overwhelmingly, the indigenous have only survived due to
intermarriage with incoming groups, and there are still 18 per cent people with part Hawaiian ancestry left of the
total population in the archipelago today. Ibid. The genocide of Native Americans was probably most
destructive, however, during the first century after Columbus stumbled upon America. An estimated 70 to 90 per
cent of all Native Americans had died, mostly from White-borne diseases, by the end of the sixteenth century.
See Reilly 2003: 129. On the many parallels of internationally illegal land expropriation, creation of native
reservations, official lies, broken promises, and ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations between the US white
elites and the modern Israeli Jewish elites (with US elite support), see also McCabe: What Indians And
Palestinians Share, 2005.
35 Fredrickson 1981; Churchill: Perversions of Justice, 1993; Cox: Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social
Dynamics, 1970 (1948): 355ff; Hodge, Struckman & Dorland Trust: Cultural Bases of Racism and Group
Oppression: An Examination of Traditional “Western” Concepts, Values and Institutional Structures Which
Support Racism, Sexism and Elitism, 1975: 12ff; Indigenous Watch, no date. The systematic oppression and
genocide of the cultures of Black slaves in the USA reached more extreme dimensions than that of Asian forced
laborers in South Africa. Many of the descendants of the latter are still Muslims, whereas African religions,
languages, and almost all other African cultural traditions, were systematically and successfully forbidden and
eventually exterminated by Whites in the USA. White slaveowners and their employees in the Caribbean and in