Apartheid or Apartness #1 Suppression and Apartness

1. Suppression

Desmond M. Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of South Africa gestures during the session 'Believing in the Dignity of All' at the Annual Meeting 2009 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, February 1, 2009.

Mabheka – He Who Looks; all the way from South Africa, finds that at last the wait is over. “The hideous reality that was apartheid is now being brought into the open” he says. “The Truth and Reconciliation Hearings that were held here in the mid-1990’s, chaired by our delightful Anglican “Gadfly Archbishop” Desmond Tutu, were but a foretaste of the truth, the beginning.”

Surely the apartheid forces were inhuman and blacks but also white people got beaten up by them. Often people do forget that also whites got hurt in the system that wanted to keep separation while others wanted to move forwards.

Sign in Durban that states the beach is for whites only under section 37 of the Durban beach by-laws. The languages are English, Afrikaans and Zulu, the language of the black population group in the Durban area.

Ordinary South Africans knew that there was much, much more than these original commission hearings revealed. And that is the problem in history that as with all terrorism, if it is not Germany, Turkey, South America or South Africa, at certain times certain ‘cast-out’ groups of people had to face terror, while the world seemed not to want to see how they had to live and undergo the horrors. In several countries, at certain times, but even still today, people have to endure the inhuman humiliation, beatings and assaults and have to see their friends disappear, never to be seen alive again.

Mabheka writes: “we had seen those whom we loved be murdered by apartheid agents, and we had wept bitter, bitter tears. What we had endured was a hell that was only hinted at in the hearings.”
“We have pressured the government to bring all that happened out into the open. Patiently, gathering the information, our judiciary bided its time until all was ready.
And now is the time! Justice will be awarded to those who died, and to those who suffered and grieved.
This initial trial is only the beginning of the revelation of what happened here. It will be sickening. But this is a story that must be told.”

2. Apartness

Apartheid (Afrikaans: “apartness”), name given by the Afrikaner National Party (Nasionale Party), came in office in South Africa after 1948, to the policies that govern relations between the country’s 3,800,000 white inhabitants and its 17,700,000 nonwhites, mainly black African, inhabitants. It is also used to describe the long-term objective of the territorial separation of races that is advocated by Afrikaner church and intellectual circles.

Zulus in South Africa during traditional dance

The whites kept ignoring that the original inhabitants of South Africa, the San and Khoikhoi, later joined by Bantu groups migrating from the north, had to get their rights to their land.
Certain Conservative Reformed and Evangelist churches advocated that the white race was or is the superior race and provided the theological justification of the system. They think Jesus is God and that he is a white man, though Jesus (Jeshua) the one born in Bethlehem, spoken of in the Bible as son of God and not god the son, was a Nazarene Jew, and as such not a white man, or from the Arian race. Though more than two hundred years ago certain Christian churches wanted their flock to believe that the white believers were the only (directly) chosen by God and could use the blacks as slaves. They understood wrongly the slave system spoken off in the Old and New Testament. But they also did not keep to the ordinances or laws given in the Holy Scriptures about the relation of slavesand their masters and the way to become a free man.

The basic tenet of South African policy has always been the complete domination of state and society by the white population, and the two major parliamentary parties have vied with each other on how best to maintain white power.
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To be continued:  First part of 20th century

Preceding article: 100 years old ANC having to face a new challenge of free people

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Read also:

Afrikaner Volkseenheid or Afrikaner nationalism

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Related articles

• How the ANC Lost Its Way (time.com)
  while South Africa has seen steady economic growth in the 17 years after apartheid, it has also experienced an abiding racial divide. That partition is expressed in enduring prejudice on both sides and persistent economic segregation.
• A celebration trading on past glories (thehindu.com)
  Britain had angered African activists and intellectuals by handing power to Afrikaners (descended from Dutch and German settlers) when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910. “It was the betrayal of black people,” Mr. Sparks added. “This is the only instance when Britain granted independence to a minority group, because it was stricken with guilt about the Boer war.
• The international demonisation of Afrikaners during Apartheid (afrikanervryheid.org)
  Under the Afrikaners, the blacks enjoyed a standard of life far above that of any other African state. By any measure infant mortality, literacy, life expectancy, you name it South African blacks were better off than their neighbors so much so that the latter began to leave their civil-war torn countries for peaceful South Africa.
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  The Afrikaners only wanted peace, which was offered multiple times to the blacks. After being met with ever more terrorism, Afrikaners disengaged from 20 areas that were designated as black homelands. Each of these territories was offered full independence; four of them took it Transkei, Venda, Bophuthatswana, and Ciskei. But instead of focusing on building their nations, the blacks continued to resort to terror.
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  Since 1991 more than 3000 farmers have been murdered in more than 18 000 attacks, and the international community is turning a blind eye to the situation the Afrikaners is finding themselves in.
• Why South Africa’s Over the Rainbow (time.com)
  The decline of the ANC is all the more dramatic considering the moral heights it once occupied. In the years it was fighting apartheid, its mission was clear and its righteousness unassailable. ANC members were freedom fighters repressed by a regime whose racism recalled the worst of European imperialism. Mandela, locked up for 27 years only to emerge with forgiveness for his oppressors, was a secular saint. There was no equivocation here. With the ANC and Mandela on one side and apartheid on the other, South Africa was literally a question of black and white.
• One hundred years of South Africa’s ANC – the good, the not so good and the ugly (theglobeandmail.com)
• The Apartheid Mastermind (tremainz.wordpress.com)
  Read this very carefully guys and take a close look at yourself and the environment that you live in today)Botha speech 1985: