Last week marked the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre which occurred during a protest against the pass laws. It ushered in increasingly discriminatory actions against Black South Africans, and can now be seen as the beginning of the end for the regime based on Apartheid.
The South African experience suggests racial discrimination begins with the appropriation of wealth and power by one racial group and its consequent suppression of other groups in order to extend its wealth and power.
The appropriation of power and wealth is naturally resisted by the existing inhabitants. In the course of struggle mutual incomprehension and fear grow, and the indigenous people are seen as strange, primitive, violent, childlike and less than fully human. This can be seen in the early pictorial representations of military or religious contact between native peoples and colonial representatives by Western artists. They leave no doubt which group has power and wealth, whether material or spiritual.
After the dominant group has made secure its appropriation of wealth and power, it comes to assume that its dominance in these respects indicates its inherent superior capacity for power and entitlement to wealth. So the relations between the races are regulated in a way that provide lasting security in power and possessions for the dominant race. It controls and decides the fate of others; the native peoples are controlled and decided for.
In South Africa the pass laws were designed to provide a reliable supply of cheap labour for industry, to ensure a homogeneous environment for white settlers in the cities, and security over the land they had occupied.
In time as the initial conflict lessens and people have time for reflection these unequal and discriminatory relationships need ideological justification. Apartheid was just one of the more explicit ideologies. White and black peoples were seen as equal but different. So should each group have its own space, right down to separate park benches. The subtext, of course, was that one group of people was more equal than others. It was entitled to better conditions and could decide under what conditions other groups might live.
Ideology usually leads to further discrimination because it allows people to act brutally with the shadow of a good conscience. In the name of apartheid millions of black people were forcibly moved from their homes into areas designated for them, pass laws were extended to cover women as well as men, and they lost what little