Apartheid

234
The Roman system of citizenship at first sharpened the racism and classism of the
Greek one: ‘All in all, a system of civic privilege and obligation tied to birth and wealth...The
right to enter this order depended on the ability to show Greek ancestry on both maternal and
paternal sides...’ 415 Thus, the Romans favored the Greeks in the same way that the British
would the Dutch and other Whites in South Africa.
Of course, there was now a new and even more superior kind of citizenship than the
Greek one. Yet, slowly but surely Roman citizenship became more inclusive. At the
beginning of Roman rule in Egypt, only Alexandrian citizens had special status along with the
Romans. Later, more and more Greeks based in the other cities and in the countryside gained
citizenship. The last to benefit, however, were the Egyptians applying for Roman citizenship.
Few in numbers, they even had to attain Greek citizenship before they could apply for the
Roman one. According to one ancient source, the Egyptians were the only ‘aliens’ (i.e. non-
Greeks and non-Romans) in Egypt who had to go through this lengthy and expensive
procedure. The number of Egyptians with either Greek or Roman citizenship at any time
during the first half of Egypt’s apartheid millennium must have been minuscule, if not even at
times zero. Thus, the essential paradox and untenable characteristic of apartheid is starkly
revealed; the most indigenous people are the most alien, and the more indigenous you are, the
more alien you are.
Then, in 212 CE, Emperor Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to almost all of the
free (i.e. non-slave) inhabitants of the empire. From now on, the formal line of class division
was between honestiores and humiliores, the upper and the lower classes, which also,
however, maintained the privileges of birth and wealth. 416
Egyptians were thus still discriminated against, but it is hard to say how badly they
fared on an ideal overall scale of oppression. Perhaps their lot from Caracalla’s rule onwards
could best be compared with that of Blacks after having been freed from slavery in the USA
in 1865, or with that of Blacks in South Africa since 1990, or with that of Palestinians who are
formally under Palestinian Authority rule since 1995. But even from Caracalla’s rule onwards
the citizens were mainly Greek.
The racial lines of separation were in any case blurred considerably in law. Egypt, at
least Roman-ruled Egypt, therefore went through the opposite process as compared with
South Africa: from being an apartheid society by law into becoming one mainly in practice.
(If, on the other hand, South Africa had remained a British colony, nearly two hundred years,
until the introduction of democracy in 1994, like almost all other British colonies in Africa, it
would probably have mirrored Egypt’s development under European rule during antiquity
quite closely. 417 )
415 Bowman 1996 (1986): 126. In Chapter I.4, we saw how this kind of racism, which admits the possible
inevitability of racial mixing, was and is also dominant in Guatemala, and indeed in the rest of Latin America,
although here either the paternal or the maternal side would, could, and will often suffice.
416 Ibid: 127f; Bingen 2007: 289; McCoskey 2004: 326. Just like the elite Jews in modern Israel 2,000 years later,
the Romans in Egypt prohibited indigenous people from doing military service, though only up until Caracalla’s
reign. See Lewis, N. 1983: 20. On the dangers of over-emphasizing the marginal or occasional fluidity of racial
categories in Greek-ruled Egypt, see McCoskey 2002: ‘…the categories of “Greek” and “Egyptian”… [were in
fact] conceptually distinct and indeed representative of inverse positions of social power.’
417 On the consequences of Caracalla’s reform for Egypt, see Parsons 2007: 215. It probably had more effects in
Egypt than elsewhere, though little changed in the hierarchy of races. On British colonies in Africa see Iliffe
1995: 233ff. The British and the French, as opposed to the Portuguese, the Belgians and the South African
Whites, were keen on establishing friendly relations with the new rulers in de-colonialized Africa. Already
before World War II, the former had cleverly realized and carefully calculated that keeping the colonies, with
their demographic and political pressures, would no longer be profitable for the colonialists. But they, along with
the US and other western powers, were also actively preventing any kind of African unity from developing in the
wake of colonialist withdrawal, thus reserving and protecting continental cooperation, coordination and unity,
which were simultaneously being developed in Europe and North America, as guarded and unique western
privileges. Thus we have today the established European Union and NAFTA, as well as NATO, but an African