Apartheid the South African Mirror

Apartheid the South African Mirror. Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB), 2007

• ”From south Africa to the world. No country represents racial segregation as clearly as South Africa. For two reasons: firstly because an apartheid system was built there unashamedly and with absolute impunity; and secondly because the rest of the countries around the world used South Africa, which they subjected to an international boycott, as the paradigm of political and ideological racism, as if by focusing attention on the country they expiater their own sins of discrimination. By pointing their finger at the South African whites, the human-rights-defending first world nations concealed the functioning of discrimination mechanisms back at home and redeemed their democratic consciences.” 7

• “Johannesburg today, having overcome legal apartheid, still maintains a terrible discrimination between the rich neighbourhoods which are mainly white, and the poor neighbourhoods, which are nearly all black.” 7

• The book invited readers to “reflect on racism and the forms of discrimination and segregation induced and very often imposed by the North-Western tradition, and especially from the Enlightenment and European modernity, based on supposedly essential, biological and/or cultural differences between different human groups.”11

• In 1870s to the 1930s there “were authentic ‘human zoos’ that with varying degrees of paternalism presented groups of indigenous people from their colonised areas.” 16

• Since the mid 17th century, the territories of today’s Republic of South Africa were simultaneously subjected to two different colonising processes, the first led by the Dutch (later called ‘Boers’ or ‘Afrikaaners’), while the second responded to British Interests.” 19

• “the diversity of interests caused continual tensions between the two ‘white tribes’. The discovery of very rich diamond deposits in 1875, in Kimberley, and shortly after, in 1886, of the most important gold mining region in the world around today’s Johannesburg, had the immediate and lasting consequences. It exacerbated tensions between the British and the Boers to the point of military confrontation being reached (the ‘Anglo-Boer’ wars of 1880-1881 and 1899-1902).” 19

• “The international economic depression of the 1930s, aggravated in rural areas by a ling and very serious drought, had accelerated an intensified migration from the countryside to the cities, especially to Johannesburg, where thousands of impoverished Afrikaaners found themselves competing with the blacks for poorly paid jobs and access to the best jobs, while the whites of British origin enjoyed a dominant position in the main economic and professional sectors.” 22

• “It was not a case, according to this discourse, of considering certain races superior or inferior to others, but of recognising the essential differences between them, not only in biological terms but also and very especially in cultural terms” 22

• “The group areas Act (1950) established a more radical urban segregation system than that existing previously, prohibiting people from different racial groups living in the same area.” 25 This broke up families that were inter racial.

• Violence was rising and people were being killed. Sharpeville (township in Johannesburg) had a tragic incident with police killing 69 people and injuring many more out of ‘self defence’. 30

• There were 2 ‘black’ organisations fighting for the end of apartheid and they were disbanded by their leaders (Nelson Mandela being one of them) were sent to jail on Robben Island for over 20 years.

• “In 1988, during the height of the rise of anti-apartheid movements on a domestic and international scale alike, Nelson Mandela had offered the government, from prison, the opening of negotiations for a peaceful transition to a democratic system.” 35

• “Despite the profound political transformations carried out since 1994, many of the inequalities reinforced and consolidated by apartheid continue in force in South Africa today.” 36

• “Unlike any relatively similar situations, the option taken by the first democratic Pariment was not that of amnesty and forgetting, but that f promoting and demanding the full revelation of the historical truth as a basic condition to advance towards reconciliation and pardon.” 37

• “Another specific area where the tragic legacy of apartheid has manifested itself has been, for a long time, the South African authorities’ approach to HIV/AIDS.” 38

• The book say that AID spread so quickly within the black peoples population because of cramped and unsanitary living conditions and the violence and sexual violence that was occurring.

• “the South African experience shows that it is possible to come out of the hell of apartheid but that the wounds of racism last a long time and are difficult to cure.” 39

• “It is not too hard to see that the main groups affected by the prejudices and discriminatory practices continue to be, fundamentally, the same as before: those who have skin of a darker colour than the majority of Europeans; those, also, from the most impoverished areas of the planet. i.e. regions that have been colonised – or neo-colonised – for a long time.” 39

• “From this perspective, South African apartheid can be seen not only as an extreme manifestation of the old racism of Western roots but also as a dramatic but clarifying precedent, metaphor and paradigm of some central aspects inherent to the current world order.” 39

• “The blacks now in power in South Africa cannot, given the resources in their command, adequately compensate blacks for three and a half centuries of expropriation, exploitation, and deprivation to the extent that would be required to make them truly equal to the whites.” 66-67

• “Were we to succumb to this catchall usage, however, we would be unable to appreciate the special features of the Western ideological racism, such as its close relationship to the enslavement and colonial domination of people of colour and the way that its anti-Semitic embodiment reflected the trauma of capitalist modernism.” 68

• “Grasping for one’s identity in a world that threatens to reduce anyone who is not part of the elite to a low paid worker or a consumer of cheap, mass produced commodities creates a hunger for meaning and a sense of self worth that can most easily be satisfied by consciousness of race and religion.” 70

• The racialization of everything – Ash Amin

• “Typically, in some parts of the world, biological racism has given way to cultural racism.” 74

• Racism and the empire of fear – Les Back

• “today’s political leaders who miss no opportunity to exaggerate the threat and terror and as a means to justify war against it.” 85

• Art affects: passageways between the epic and the ordinary – Edgar Pieterse

• “The unending variation and complexity of affect resides in the individual and collective emotional registers that people lug around with them and out into circulation as they make their way through the world.” 103

• To look and not to look, to see and not to see – Pep Subiros

• “Throughout the nineteenth century, the art produced in South Africa reflected the change experienced by European perception of colonised people.” 110

• “Some artists, however, such as Samuel Daniell, see in the indigenous peoples the incarnation of the notion of the ‘noble savage’.” 110

• Artist: Jane Alexander