Apartheid

50
successfully fought off, but at such a high price that the victors of the war would eventually
lose in the wider, more globalized conflict. Vietnam finally had to succumb to capitalism and
other western values and institutions – largely due to global US economic power – and
KwaZulu eventually had to accept British rule, just as the Arab and Muslim cultures have
been giving in to western domination during the last two centuries especially, but almost
continuously since the 14 th century. The Lebanese historian, Amin Maalouf, argues that late
Medieval Europe was immeasurably enriched by Arab and Muslim culture, science, and
technology during and following the crusades, whereas the Arab and Muslim worlds closed
themselves in as a result of the traumatic experience, becoming increasingly introspective and
self-occupied. 57
Comparisons with Colonialist Societies:
British Destruction in Ireland
Northern Ireland, a British-imposed construction of six counties, re-creating and redelineating
the province of Ulster in 1920 so as to ensure the existence of a privileged, pro-
British, Protestant majority, has also been compared with South African political and
economic apartheid and can also be likened with the Israeli creation of a privileged Jewish
majority within the borders of the state of Israel. Previously, all of Ireland had suffered from
centuries of imposed English or British apartheid in a way more similar to South Africa and
Graeco-Roman Egypt, i.e. with a relatively small invader minority caste.
England first invaded Ireland in 1169, i.e. at the height of crusader power. Although
the Irish were no infidels in the eyes of the Catholic Church in Rome, they would soon be
seen as such by the English. In the 14 th century, in the small toehold that the English had
established on the island since the first invasion, the English government at the same time
exacerbated oppression and prevented English settlers from integrating with the locals by
outlawing the Irish language and also by making intermarriage and trade between British and
Irish people illegal. The authorities even prohibited the settlers from wearing Irish dress and
hairstyles and banned Irish poetry, music, and games. At the end of the 16 th century, the
English started bringing in settlers in large numbers, in order to partly replace the ‘rude,
beastly, ignorant, cruel and unruly infidels’, as the English would contemptuously refer to the
Irish. In the following century, Oliver Cromwell overran the island with his troops, killing one
quarter of the country’s indigenous Catholics. Innocent women and children were massacred
along with resistance fighters, whole communities forcibly moved to reservations. At the end
of the 17 th century, already, the indigenous Catholic majority of Northern Ireland owned less
than five per cent of the land. In the rest of Ireland it owned 14 percent. The Irish were
relentlessly being pushed back to the less fertile land, as well.
The reviled ‘Penal Laws’, introduced in 1692, barred Catholics, i.e. the indigenous
people, from teaching, owning or buying land, voting, working in public service, in
government, in parliament or in the military, and from practicing the legal profession. The
laws also severely restricted Catholic land ownership and education for Catholics. Most of
these ethnicist laws were not repealed until 1829. But even after that, the conflict continued,
for instance due to many members of the vast Catholic majority remaining tenants to
Protestant landlords, similar to what South Africans are experiencing at present (‘economic
apartheid’ and ‘land apartheid’), and of course due to continued British colonial rule. The
potato famine of 1845 cut the Irish population by two million through emigration and
starvation (one million each) and fuelled further resentment against the many English
absentee landlords who levied high taxes or leases on ‘their’ indigenous farm workers. Similar
to the ancient Egyptian language under Graeco-Roman rule and the Khoisan languages in
57 Maalouf 3 2003 (1983): 279ff. The trauma of the temporarily overlapping and equally brutal Mongol invasions,
which were partly coordinated with the crusaders’ warfare on Arabs and Islam, accentuated the closing-in of the
Arab and Islamic worlds. On KwaZulu, see Chapters II.1.1-2, below.