Apartheid Studies: What is it all about?

The emerging field of Apartheid Studies (AS) which I pioneered seeks to account for the persistence of oppression, harm, and injustice in human society. How does oppression persist? Two key central claims of AS are that i) there is never adequate manpower for oppression, and ii) the costs of oppressing others are always high. That is, oppressors are always in the minority and, meanwhile, the maintenance of oppression is inherently costly. Apartheid’s systemic challenge, thus, is to find and maintain a minimum cost state, a minimum expense state (i.e., a restful state) where oppressors can get away with doing less and less supervision and central commanding of oppression. Oppression can only persist in this “holiday state”. But, because oppression must be maintained if it is to persist, there is always a cost — always a high cost — to oppressing others. This is a circular dilemma for oppressors, for which apartheid constitutes a solution of sorts. The solution for apartheid is to invoice the costs of oppression on the oppressed themselves. This is what achieves the restful state — the sabbatical state illustrated in the Introduction and Chapter 3 of Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto. Hence, we say that apartheid is oppression on holiday. Hence, we speak about entropy, about the sustainable development of oppression (SDO). The study of this human condition is what constitutes AS.

A key image in AS is that of Africans queueing at the Pass Office for the hated dompas. How does one queue for the very thing that harms him or her? Why? That is, what we have learnt is that oppression principally reorganises society by means of what I call decimalisation (society set apart on two sides of an uncrossable decimal point or threshold), whereby it forces the oppressed into a constantly overcrowded state of life. This overcrowded state of life is socio-economically expressed as queues. Queues force the poor and oppressed to take turns, and therefore to self-organise and self-sort on the basis of this turn-taking. Scarcity in human society naturally leads to queues, and queues are a form of socio-economic self-organisation by victims themselves that enables them to live with harm (the same way the public health establishment talks of learning to “live with” viruses, in an endemic state). Essentially, the oppressed have a tendency to queue and pack themselves most densely. Basically, apartheid is like a ratings agency that compels its victims to assure the system that there is no crisis — after all, “these people” can take up the least space in the world, in the fashion of the tightly packed holdings of a slave ship, and live on less and less, resiliently, from hour to hour, day to day, and month to month. When victims self-organise and self-sort densely like this (what we have called hexagonalisation), they release the oppressor from the onerous obligation to supervise and centrally command the act of oppression. Densed life is the inverse of sabbaticality (i.e., the life of oppressors on holiday, the life of “Province X” — see Introduction and Chapter 6 of Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto). Here, in the dead zones of the world, marked by attritional life organised around a-dollar-a-day, low wages, minimum wage, basic income, low LSM, and precarity, the oppressed seek “rest” and entropy through queues and demotion. But this “rest” that the poor and oppressed get is not real rest. It is an imitation. It is fake. There is no real rest in austerity, tightening of belts, basic income, and resilience. Instead, austerity, tightening of belts, and resilience give you persistent, permanently low maintenance oppression — the sort that allows life to go on. The clear difference is that permanent oppression, courtesy of apartheid, is sustainably developed. Oppression, due to the peculiar conduct of turn-taking and self-organisation by the victims themselves, can go on and on forever. It does not need to end. It is not a crisis. Permanent oppression, therefore, is apartheid’s gift to mankind. This, in a paragraph, is the subject of Apartheid Studies.

The idea of AS was born in a terrible time: on 17 August 2012. This was the day after the Lonmin Massacre, when 34 miners were murdered in cold blood on that hill in Marikana by the South African Police Service (SAPS). What stuck with me that day, and has never left me since, was HOW LIFE WENT ON despite what happened and despite scenes of the massacre being shown on a loop on the news. I had assumed that the event would cause the world to grind to a halt, so that whatever had happened would never, ever, happen again. I even half expected some apocalypse to occur. Instead, while there was some acknowledgement that the bloodshed at Lonmin was tragic, there was also a collective shrug of the shoulders. I ate my cereal. Parents dropped children off at school and later picked them up. Shops opened, and so on. I saw women in heels, lipstick, and wigs. The observation about how life went on troubled me no end, and I became certain that in such behaviour lay the answer to the question of why oppression persists in human society — specifically why it persists the way it does. In South Africa, crucially, you cannot talk of oppression without invoking apartheid. And so, AS was born. There are several other interlocked reasons behind the birth of AS, laid out in my book, Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto.

Anyhow, the proposition of AS is simple. Previously, there have not been any serious or systematic attempts to utilise the notion of “apartheid” as a framework, paradigm, or methodology. There are no courses or modules at any of South Africa’s 25 universities on the subject, and there is no Centre or Institute or Chair in AS in South Africa or anywhere in the world. It is a shocking absence. If there is Holocaust Studies, for example, surely there should be Apartheid Studies? This is not a competition but merely to posit an omission. In 1994 Nelson Mandela said “Never, never, and never again” to apartheid. But how do you say “Never again” to something that you do not study? So, AS fills this gap. In my work, I define apartheid anew and propose use cases for AS. The whole thesis of AS is that the virulence and prevalence of apartheid stays the same. That part never really changes. What changes is apartheid’s detectability. So, the problem that faces us is a prevalence-virulence-detection question. Essentially, AS is geared at making apartheid detectable again so that we can address the prevalence and the virulence. Ultimately, apartheid must be put on trial.

To learn more about the emerging AS theoretical framework, see, Mboti, Nyasha (2023) Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto (Africa World Press), which can be ordered here: https://africaworldpressbooks.com/apartheid-studies/