APARTHEID

By Susu Jeffrey / Original to Rise Up Times / December 2, 2023

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning apartness, literally apart-hood. It is pronounced apart-tate. Apart-tate rhymes with hate.  Apartheid is a word from the European colonial period when the Dutch East India Company established a trading post in 1652 in the Cape of Good Hope. Dutch settlers replaced local blacks with white-run farms worked by slaves from across the Dutch empire. The settlement was expanded to form the Dutch Cape Colony.

The Netherlands was a great sea power and blacks were trafficked like tobacco. But by 1806, with the British-Boer Wars, rulership of the colony changed to the British Empire. However the Cape Articles of Capitulation negotiated that previous Dutch legislation remain in effect despite the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, otherwise effective throughout the British Empire. Social inequality was increased in the 1890s with the discovery of diamonds and gold. The Union of South Africa was established in 1910.

While whites battled each other World War II brought black workers into industrial centers where they demanded political rights and were labelled communists and terrorists.

Until 1994, laws upon laws were passed in South Africa to keep minority whites in power regarding race mixing, racial assignment (black, colored or white), legal residence, immigration, jobs, education, transportation, theaters, healthcare, cemeteries, etc. The scale of social engineering was so ubiquitous that it was mocked by the world rugby association.

Apartheid was ended in 1994 with a new constitution but in reality with the 1995 integrated South Africa Rugby World Cup win with Nelson Mandela’s slogan, “One Team, One Country.” Apart-tate is routinely mispronounced except by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman who is respectful about the correct pronunciation of people’s names and international labels.

Apartheid in America

In a thumbnail version of American racism it took 97-years and three Supreme Court cases to legally outlaw racism in America. In the Dred Scott case 1846-1857 Scott, whether free or slave, was found to have “no rights that white men were required to respect.” The Fort Snelling slave from the then-free territory of Wisconsin therefore had no right to bring a case into federal court.

By 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson the “separate but equal” theory was proclaimed. Separate prima facie cannot be equal. In Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, five school cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Washington D.C. were combined by the NAACP to successfully challenge the separate doctrine.

And we all paid lip service to equality among Native, black, brown and white people until George Floyd was murdered by armed authority on a May day in 2020. From Dred Scott to George Floyd, Minneapolis, Minnesota has led the apartheid headlines in the free world.

What About Israel?

Some people see the “Hamas-Israel War” as a land grab and genocide by Zionists against Palestinians. Others see Arab nations freezing-out Palestinian immigration.

Internationally, Israel is generally considered a client state of the United States. Is this the beginning of World War 3?

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