Apartheid

6
Preface
Apartheid is often explained – by institutions, groups and individuals who tend to
either trivialize or mystify it – either as purely a state phenomenon, or basically a legal
phenomenon, or an ideological phenomenon, or, again, as a mere matter of violent racial
conflict. Among other things, this investigation attempts to refute all four of these important
misconceptions.
Firstly, I hope to show that a powerful portion of civil society is needed to support
apartheid and that the latter cannot exist without the cooperation, empowerment, and
enrichment of a considerable number of civilian – as well as many state-employed – members
of an oppressive racial minority. This does not mean that, for instance, all white South
Africans were in favor of apartheid or supported it. On the contrary, some opposed it and even
gave their lives for opposing it. But the overwhelming majority of Whites in the country
accepted apartheid and supported it, at least indirectly, during almost the entire period of
white domination. The same applies to Israeli Jews with regard to their very similar system of
violence and discrimination against Palestinians. In this sense, there was never only an
apartheid state responsible for apartheid, but in each instance also a wider apartheid society.
Likewise, apartheid never was fundamentally based on law. It was always based on
practice, and so, ultimately, were the apartheid laws. In fact, legislative, executive, judicial,
business, and information powers and institutions are generally used and abused in apartheid
societies in order to support, uphold, implement and reinforce such practice. The spectrum of
that practice reaches from entirely unprovoked physical violence over legalized theft to
insidious ideology. Thus, apartheid law never has become an organic legal or even political
entity, but, rather, it has remained a constantly shifting, haphazard result of strategies, full of
internal contradictions, inconsistencies, even containing conscious, unconscious and halfconscious
lies, such as the South African law that made the white ‘nation’ the most populous
‘nation’ in the country, with only around 15 per cent of the country’s actual population.
Apartheid laws are mainly the results of the conflict-engendering interests and
perceptions of different elites within the oppressive minority and of the fluctuating
environment of resistance against the realization of those interests. For example, when
apartheid became explicit government program and policy in South Africa in 1948, the
country was geographically surrounded by European colonies, run by white (British and
Portuguese) supremacists allied with or sympathetic to the South African regime. By 1980,
however, each of these colonies had turned into an independent enemy country. The laws of
apartheid changed accordingly. Among many other new developments, the apartheid elites
had now introduced ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence’ for the majority of black South
Africans in the so-called ‘Homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’, small pockets of land, poor in
agricultural quality, reserved for huge numbers of black people whom it could not possibly
support. The new developments also included an attempted political courtship of the relatively
educated, urban black ‘elites’ within the directly white-ruled South Africa, who were,
according to the novel plan, to be turned against the rural and urban proletariats and to be
raised to the social level of ‘Coloureds’ and people of Asian descent. All of these schemes
were eventually to fail spectacularly, except the creation of new, small black elites, which
have now appeared in South Africa’s political, business and culture spheres, and have often
been turned against the poor masses, but have also risen far above the level that ‘Coloureds’
used to occupy under apartheid.
Only in times of crisis for the apartheid system do the differences between the
apartheid elites fade in importance. Even then, however, fundamental contradictions within
the apartheid society, within the apartheid system, persist to make laws and decrees retain
their ad hoc character. The cheap labor supplied by members of the oppressed indigenous
majority, for instance, may be tempered or even halted when an increase in resistance