Reply #67: Your discussion of apartheid South Africa is entirely misleading [View All]

In an effort to provide mining labor, hut-taxes had already been imposed in the nineteenth century to drive the earlier inhabitants from their land.

By the time of the Second World War, land tenures reflected a complicated history including seizures by conquest and the struggle between English and Afrikaaner for political dominance.

Despite some Jim-Crow traditions, already in place at the time Gandhi lived there at the beginning of the last century, South Africa had a number of long-established racially diverse communities, as in Capetown (for example).

However, the Afrikaaner Nationalists were Nazi sympathesizers during the War, using a "triskelion" symbol modeled after the swastika, and in coming to power after the war they embarked upon a drastic re-segregation, that systematically stripped nonwhites of citizen-rights and land-holdings by force.

Thus, large numbers of communities were evicted with little notice by armed troops, a fact which was too common for anyone to ignore by the 1960s.

The underlying ideology was simply that people would be reclassified according to an elaborate racial scheme, and that the majority population would be resettled in supposedly independent ancestral homelands (the "bantustans"), entering South Africa only as laborers under an elaborate controlled pass system.

Despite this "homeland" mythology, the scheme actually involved deporting large numbers of people to starve in poor regions, in which many of these people had never lived, and that never had nor could support large populations.

Associated with this ideology, there was an extremely involved collection of stereotypes (alleged as "fact" about these supposed "tribal groups"), some of which you reproduce in your post: for example, the claim that these folk could never lived in the rich but conquered agricultural regions because the crops they wanted to eat would not grow in those climates.

One could, during the anti-apartheid struggle, reliably identify pro-apartheid South Africans after hearing or reading just a few sentences of their sentences, without needing to encounter explicitly racist statements, because they were invariably interested in detailed tribal classifications and supposed tribal beliefs and customs.

In reality, of course, many traditional modes of self-identification had vanished with the relocations and urbanizations associated with dispossession from land and increasing incorporation into modern urban cash economies.

The defeat of this "homeland" scheme, of course, was critical: had most of the majority population been deported to these wastelands, which were then to be declared "independent," the anti-apartheid movement would have suffered a major setback.

Only in the case of Kwazulu did the Afrikaaners make significant progress towards construction of one of these mythic "homelands," and they succeeded in that case only by offering significant inducements to Inkatha and it's leader Buthelezi. By accepting funds from the Afrikaaner government to support the establishment of Kwazulu as a homeland, Inkatha thus became the only significant majority population organization to support the apartheid government's "homeland" scheme. Whatever the boundaries of Zulu territory were once, the Afrikaaners choose the boundaries of Kwazulu and chose its "royal leader."

Similarly, the boundaries of the adjacent Zimbabwe reflect no ancient kingdom but are the boundaries of the former Rhodesia, which were established by Rhode's conquest and subsequent colonial-era agreements.