Morris - Apartheid: the History of Apartheid: Race vs. Reason - South Africa from 1948-1994

Description

The thing that looms largest over South Africas future is South Africas past most especially the nearly five decades of division and conflict that marked one of the twentieth centurys most infamous social experiments. Apartheid: An Illustrated History examines the defining experience of modern South Africas transition from colonial state to democracy. What began in May 1948 as an ambitious project to engineer white supremacy at the expense of the countrys black majority spawned forty-six years of repressive authoritarianism and bitter resistance, which claimed the lives of thousands and pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

Journalist Michael Morris draws on the work of scholars and historians as well as contemporary reporting in an unsentimental and highly readable account, vividly complemented by photographs and cartoons. A provocative postscript examines apartheids stubborn afterlife in the years since 1994, highlighting the need for South Africans to avoid simplistic views of the past.

MICHAEL MORRIS has been a journalist since 1979, and Special Writer on the Cape Argus since 1997. He is the author of Every Step of the Way , commissioned by the South African History Project to commemorate the tenth anniversary of democracy in 2004.

Title page

APARTHEID

THE HISTORY OF APARTHEID

RACE VERSUS REASON SOUTH AFRICA FROM 1948 TO 1994

MICHAEL MORRIS

JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS

JOHANNESBURG & CAPE TOWN

Introduction

Introduction

Its clear to me that theres a lot of unfinished business that we all carry in different ways. We will be dealing with the past of this country for the next 100 years, and I suppose that in our Western way, we tend to say, Weve done that, its time to move on, but the past always comes back to bite us.

Fr Michael Lapsley, 2004

In April 1990, in the dying days of apartheid, Fr Lapsley lost

both hands and an eye to a letter bomb sent to him in Zimbabwe.

The one thing that constantly looms large in South Africas future is South Africas past. Hardly a day goes by without something being said, often casually, that reminds people of how it was, how normal, how abnormal. Its always an arguable condition. If South Africans can agree on the essential facts, thats often where the agreement ends. After all, who you were or were thought to be by the texture of your hair or the colour of your skin made a world of difference, and, in many ways, still does.

The history of the past century, the fifty years that led up to apartheid, and the fifty years of its rise and fall, remains a zone of discomfort as much in public politics as in private memory and imagination. It is true for all human history that the past is obstinately present, an inescapable shadow of accumulated yesterdays nobody can quite shake off. But perhaps the special difficulty with apartheid lies in the dissonance of remembering.

For many, their stories of apartheid are conceivably inexhaustible, while others will wonder what more can possibly be said. How much longer, they will ask, can we dwell on all that? Arent the present and the future demanding enough? The exasperation embedded in this contradiction the untiring accounting against the desire to put an end to it arises possibly from a sense that there can be no such thing as enough; enough recalling, or atoning, or, indeed, of going back to make better sense of it. Even those who find themselves on the wrong side in conversations about the past, appearing either bravely or hopelessly to be attempting a defence of sorts, or trying to get at this or that subtle point to show that it wasnt all bad, or they werent strictly heartless, will feel this deprivation of attention. The same is true for the serious-minded few, conscious of the risks of allowing sentiment to run away with history, who show cool determination in testing orthodoxies that obscure often unexpected truths.

Doubtless, the victims of apartheid continue to feel it all the more urgently, especially as memorable events recede and with them, possibly, the clarity of emotion, or the public acknowledgement of how it felt at the time. For all the millions of words of testimony and recollection, admission, apology, protest and revision, the intimate confessions and the banal records of an extraordinary South African ordinariness, the idea of completion, of calling it a day and putting a lid on the constant seep of stories, is somehow impermissible.

But it may be that it is impermissible less because of a need to match some moral requirement of sustaining pity, shame or guilt than for the sobering fact that apartheid itself is not wholly spent. It is not as if anyone is cynically conspiring to breathe new life into it or could, even if they wished to but that despite its failure and its constitutional defeat, the accretion of its consequences continues to shape the lives and thoughts, the expectations and the reach even of people who were, as they say, born free, born after the fact. The motive force itself, the object of fascination and shame whatever it was, exactly is not yet exhausted. In many ways, if only because past and future can only ever be a continuum, South Africa is still living an apartheid narrative, and even, in perverse ways, recreating it. It remains the story of our time.

* * *

Formally speaking, as a political programme, apartheid only began in 1948, though the term itself originated some time earlier, in the late 1920s. But the notions that impelled it, chiefly that what made people meaningfully and usefully distinctive was the colour of their skin, were a long time in the making.

In the early 2000s, when interest in the quest for the key to human identity was heightened by the sequencing of the human genome, human geneticist Trefor Jenkins of the University of the Witwatersrand offered a telling insight into the history of the differentiation of world populations. While skin colour had been the iconic feature of race for as long as travellers noticed that populations living far away looked different from them, Jenkins observed, early travellers proceeding slowly, mostly by land, did not assign any special meaning to morphological differences in the peoples they encountered. He found that while Herodotus in the 5th century BC, Marco Polo in the 13th century and Ibn Battutah in the 14th, described both skin colour and the appearance of the people they met, they categorized them by culture and religion only as idolaters or infidels, for instance not in categories grounded in physical appearance.

There was no general term for race in the modern sense before long-distance ocean travel began in the mid-15th century. With seaborne exploration, the weeks or months of isolation that separated the familiarity of home from the strangeness of far shores yielded vivid observations about the physical appearance of newly encountered fellow humans. It was only in 1758 that Linnaeus classified Homo sapiens into four sub-species: H sapiens europaeus , H sapiens afer (West Africa), H sapiens asiaticus (Indonesia) and H sapiens americanus (north-east North America). Johann Blumenbach, a German medical doctor and comparative anatomist, distinguished in 1775 between people of south-east and north-east Asia, naming his collection of European skulls Caucasoid because he considered those from the Caucasus mountains to be beautiful, the most perfectly formed specimens, implying superiority.

In this way, observed differences were matched to a hierarchy of classification imposed in the service of what later came to be called power relations exercised by agents of change, men (mainly) who possessed ships, guns, horses, knowledge of the latest science, and the written word, and were part of an enterprise in which trade, conquest and exploitation were by and large the assumptions of progress.