White Supremacy? But first, who is white?

In the midst of writing about the creation and undoing of apartheid by the South African government, I can't help but retreat into my own thoughts about the absurdity of apartheid. The question that keeps making me laugh with frustration is: if the Afrikaner and British people in South Africa hated each other so much, why did they keep making laws that explicitly keep them together?

It seemed to me that in South Africa, the very idea of white supremacy was riddled with contradiction. Didn’t the British consider the Afrikaners lowly peasants and didn’t the Afrikaners see the British as leaders of an evil empire? Did the Afrikaner government really want to give the white British equal opportunity? Or did they simply forget that their British rivals were also “white?”

On our second visit to Pretoria, we went to various historical sites around the city. One such place was the Voortrekker Monument, opened in 1949 by the Afrikaans-dominated South African government. The marble walls are engraved with depictions of the Great Trek from 1835 to 1852 made by Afrikaner pioneers. Though the events give a heavily biased Afrikaner perspective, demonizing the Zulu people and the British, there is no denying the suffering that the Afrikaner pioneers endured during this time. If I learned anything from this monument, it was the stark contrast in histories of the Afrikaners and the British. The Afrikaners, whose ancestors had escaped from political oppression in Europe, were tough farmers who lived closely with the land. The British were privileged colonizers who came to South Africa to establish influential sea-ports and reap the benefits of the natural resources.

The sentiment surrounding this monument expressed the Afrikaner feeling of entitlement to the lands of South Africa. At the time of colonization and expansion in South Africa, the only people greedy for private property and mass accumulation of wealth were the only two white groups around. Yet, when the 1948 Afrikaner government came into power and established apartheid as a national policy, it succeeded in denying black South Africans the equal rights and entitlements but it failed to suppress the British, the Afrikaner people’s most serious competition for gold, land, and power.

Thinking about this just adds another of layer of absurdity to the concept of apartheid. I am glad for everyone’s sake that it was abolished; what foolishness the South African people had to endure.

-Emily Haghighi