29 March - 4 April 2001
Issue No.527
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 29 March - 4 April 2001 Issue No.527 |
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Settler logic
South Africa is slowly recovering from its apartheid past, but there are still reminders of the country's similarities to Israel, writes Abbas Shiblak* from Cape Town
On a sunny afternoon, the small island in Cape Town's Table Bay resembles a shimmering jewel in the cold blue Atlantic Ocean. The trip to Robben Island takes less than half an hour from the mainland, an incredibly short distance considering the island's history. Here was the notorious prison where Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the South African liberation struggle spent long years in jail under the apartheid regime.
Our guide welcomes us with a smile, but her memories are painful. "Do you know what one misses most in jail? It is to touch and hold a child -- your child." She herself was detained for "aiding terrorists" and torture by her interrogators caused her to miscarry. She was not allowed to hold or see a child for more than eight years while detained under draconian security laws.
Near the prison is a "Karamat," a small Muslim shrine, a reminder of the days when the Dutch, the first colonial settlers from Europe, used the island to imprison troublesome national and religious leaders from the Malay population deported as slaves to the Cape colony. The ten Karamats positioned around Cape Town, which protect the town and its people against evil, according to local belief, were built around the graves of those exiled leaders who died resisting European colonialism and slavery.
Today's island tours play up the current policy of working for peace and reconciliation and skim over the early chapters of South African history, but strong reminders of the country's colonial past remain.
Underpinning the apartheid economy were the multinational giants, which made enormous profits by exploiting the rich natural and human resources of the country. Companies such as Anglo-American, De Beers, Central Holdings and others continue to attempt to dictate the pace and direction of the country's political, economic and human development through a political party known for its sense of nostalgia -- the Democratic Alliance Party (DA). The DA is a mishmash of white extremists, supporters of previous white governments, former Rhodesians and the white liberal technocrats who still dominate the major institutions.
Today's racism is subtler than it was in the past, but that does not make it any less dangerous to Africans. The gulf between haves and have-nots remains, with economic apartheid replacing political apartheid despite the African National Congress (ANC) government's attempts to combat it through parliamentary legislation. The ANC is regularly opposed by the economic giants and their political puppets in the DA, as well as by Western business interests. AIDS is decimating the population of sub-Saharan Africa, but despite appeals by South African President Thabo Mbeki, Western -- mainly American -- drug producers are fiercely resisting calls to supply their life-saving drugs or the licences to produce them at prices which poor countries can afford.
The parallels between apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel are numerous. With the racist apartheid policy established in 1948, the white settler National Party (NP) government announced its intention to divide the country into racial enclaves with settlers controlling 90 per cent of the most fertile land and all of the country's mineral wealth. These enclaves, or "Bantustans," were to be given tightly controlled, limited political autonomy but were in essence nothing more than impoverished hellholes from which the settler economy could draw a pool of easily exploitable and cheap black labour -- slavery in modernised form.
The townships -- sombre ghettos into which those forced to seek work in the towns were forced to retreat at night -- look like the refugee camps of Gaza and Lebanon. The infamous South African "pass," or identity document, was used to control who could enter settler towns, restricting the freedom of movement of Africans in their own land. People were forcibly removed from land that their families had occupied for generations, while security forces made no effort to disguise their brutality and political assassinations were common currency... It is no wonder that when the Palestinian Al-Kasaba theatre group recently adapted the South African play "Suzwe Bamsi is Dead", they found that nothing much in the script needed to be changed.
The apartheid system at least acknowledged the other as a second class citizen of sorts, whereas the Zionist scheme seems to have gone one step further, setting out to totally abolish the reality of the other. Zionists have created a later model of yet another settler colonialist state -- a colonialist state which is as profoundly racist, if not more so, than the first.
* The writer, a Palestinian, is an Arab League representative in London.
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