Apartheid

I have always enjoyed political history and learning about different political situations around the world and am continually amazed at the extent people will go to reach their selfish ends. It's usually out of fear or ignorance of other people, other cultures, other political beliefs, and more often than not to retain a non-legitimate hold on power.

The history of South Africa is marred by harsh inequality, a history that I knew little about. What I had learned about apartheid was by watching The Power of One in middle school, and that was that. My friend Derek, whose family is from South Africa, talked about the situation there off an on throughout college, but I never grasped the reality or the extent of what happened and what humans are capable of doing to eachother.

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, an amazing museum not to be missed for anyone traveling in the area. It told the story pretty much from the start: an influx of migrant workers in the 1880s, Afrikaners settling the area, and a native population who were viewed as a nuisance. Fast forward through independence in 1910 and the development of segregation, to full-blown racial apartheid by 1960 and a government run by a party whose official line was white supremacy.

The thing that keeps getting me, and that I enjoy learning about, is the extent the state went to keep power. Creating an apartheid state meant all of the official bureaucracy that went along with it, including an entire appeals court to appeal the racial designation you received (interestingly, no "white" person petitioned their designation be changed to "black"). In the 1970s citizens and students began protesting and the state cracked down, and by the time the 1980s came South Africa spent three entire years under martial law, literally keeping power by military force. The government even went to the extent to invade/influence politics in neighbouring Mozambique, Namibia (controlled by SA through a UN mandate), Zambia, and Angola, bombing and assassinating "state enemies."

We learn about similar events throughout history, from Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and East Germany, to Chile and Argentina, Rwanda, and beyond. The United States is still getting over its history of segregation and Brown v. Board of Education was only 50 years ago. Studying history is to learn about the past so that we don't make the same mistakes in the future. It's funny though how history tends to repeat itself...