NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, WINTER 2000
PAGE 9
APARTHEID
MEANS SLAVERY
F ebruary is considered B lack H istory M onth . I t is also the month
TEN YEARS AGO THAT NELSON MANDELA WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON AFTER
A QUARTER OF A CENTURY IMPRISONMENT. HE WAS ELECTED SOUTH AFRICA'S
FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT IN 1964.
“The South African government is an insult to humanity and deserves the
contempt of all civilized beings “
-T he P rocessive (1985)
"We must all live together as brothers, or perish together as fools. "
-M artin L uther K ing J r .
The irresistible press of history extinguished the apartheid government of White
South Africa which spent most of the 20th Century resisting it with a system of slavery
that, with brief but periodic exceptions, became repulsive to civilization in the 19th
Century. White South Africa had imposed itself too long on the world and on its captive
people, and finally history finished it off, although the trauma apartheid inflicted will
persist for quite some time.
White South Africa was itself an anachronism, a lost colony left behind and
isolated by the crumbling empires of Europe. It was a final vestige of a colonial system
that began five centuries ago when Europe started its surge across the planet. Much of
Africa was emptied to provide slaves for European colonies in the Western Hemisphere,
and most of Africa itself was colonized by European nations. For centuries, Africans who
were not sent across the oceans as slaves were enslaved at home.
The two great wars of the 20th century devastated European power and broke up
its empires into independent states, most of which reverted to some form of home rule.
The African colonies collapsed in the same manner until, almost alone on the continent
and in the world, the white dominated government of South Africa remained.
From the start the draconian concept of apartheid, which means separation, was
White South Africa's defense against cultural extinction, a final entrenchment by an
embattled political system struggling to survive awhile longer. The entire brutal state
apparatus that was designed to deny any political identity or power to the black majority
(70% of the population) could only be a stall against the inevitable tide of their disquiet,
and served as a final laceration that ensured their rise to crush it. The systematic arrests
and murders of emerging black leaders spawned the appearance of others: the
detention, torture and killing of children to stifle newer generations of insurgents only
guaranteed their growth. Each step to maintain the regime was a greater atrocity that
created a proportionate response. By the time reforms were offered to appease revolt
they were long past the needs or desires of those in revolt and most of the time too late
to stop them. Once the insurgents' power was recognized by acts of reform, they were
too powerful to resist. All of the terrible crippling pain, fear and hatred that had been
stifled and stored up for so long seemed perpetually prone to explode into rage, and the
death dance between oppressor and oppressed speeded up, ruthlessness and reaction
evolving inexorably toward dénouement.
Survival was the major object of apartheid and the question why White South
Africa would want to survive was as irrelevant as why any organism should wish to
endure. White South Africa could not afford to compromise or its visceral history would
be lost. Its white culture, however much it repulsed most of the rest of the world, deceived
itself that it was vital and historically legitimate. That its memory would undoubtedly be a
legacy of intolerance and contempt was not necessarily apparent to itself. Nations like
persons are not greatly noted for honest self appraisal.
The real fear was that after white rule was dismantled genocide would be enacted
against whites. There also was apprehension that the antipathy that had developed
between the black factions and between them and blacks who worked for whites might
erupt into a civil war or an immense pogrom. A native tyranny as harsh and ruthless as
white rule was a great anxiety as well; history was a disquieting precedent — slow painful
evolution toward political freedom was the hope but the tendency of regimes released
from foreign domination has usually been in the opposite direction. The people of Africa
have not fared especially well under the home rules that replaced European dominance,
but the possibility of positive change is at least within their own borders.
In the end, the response of most of the world to the White South African apartheid
government was critical and supportive of the revolt of the black masses. But that had
LANDEFELD (CHALK CIRCLE *1, APRIUMAY1966)
been a long time coming. The U.S. government had conducted itself shamefully during
the Cold War years, and so also had the Soviet Union up until its own dissolution. Each
in its own manner subverted or openly enforced its will upon vast populations throughout
the world, and each engaged in the subversion of weaker governments. Each condemn
ed the deplorable regimes in alliance with the other and defended the same ruthlessness
of its own allies.
As in most civil wars that occurred since World War 2. the struggle in South
Africa was a miniature Cold War. For a long time rejected by the United States, South
Africa's black liberation movement turned to the Soviet Union for weapons and equip
ment. The U.S. failed to realize that by siding with oppressive regimes it pushed the
oppressed into the arms of the USSR; when Moscow helped the insurgents the U.S.
claimed Soviet aid as an excuse to overtly or clandestinely furnish armaments to the
ruling status quo to destroy the revolt while exaggerating its threat to U.S. interests.
This is what occurred in South Africa for almost half a century.
And as it was with all such superpower disputes during the Cold War, the
escalating trouble in South Africa threatened to be an incipient cause of nuclear war.
The way it ended was that the white regime in South Africa disappeared as a final
European enclave in the Third World. Sanctions were imposed, trade halted, investments
withdrawn, loans canceled, ambassadors recalled and relations severed. Finally the white
regime was forced to surrender its rule. Apartheid departed history with a whimper rather
than a bang.
-M ichael M c C usker
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