The Undivided Past (32 page)

In 1948, the victory of the
Nationalist Party ushered in the culminating era of South Africa’s white-dominated
politics. Many of the Nationalist Party’s leaders had opposed going to war with Nazi Germany, and some had remained sympathetic to Hitler throughout the conflict. The result was that South Africa embarked on the construction of what the historian
George M. Fredrickson has described as “the most comprehensive racist
regime meant to be a permanent structure that the world has ever seen,” as new laws were introduced to complete the machinery of segregation.
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The Mixed Marriage Act of 1949 banned unions between whites and all non-Europeans, while the
Immorality Act of 1950 declared illegal any form of sexual relations between men and women across the color line. Soon afterward, the Suppression of Communism Act allowed the government to proceed against anyone who sought to bring about political, industrial, social, or economic change “by the promotion of disturbance and disorder,” which effectively outlawed any form of black political protest against white supremacy, and the Illegal Squatters Act gave the government power to remove Africans from any chosen area.
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These were draconian powers, and for almost forty years they would be ruthlessly wielded. “Our view,” Prime Minister
J. G. Strydom explained in 1952, “is that in every sphere the Europeans must retain the right to rule the country and keep it a white man’s country.”
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Despite the
biblical doctrines of
monogenesis and common
humanity, the legislative entrenchment of apartheid from the late 1940s was given religious sanction by the
Dutch Reformed Church, which insisted that
God had instituted the boundary lines between the races. This meant, as the South African prime minister
D. F. Malan explained to the
African National Congress, that racial identities were “permanent and not man-made,” since Afrikanerdom was “but a creation of God,” and that “our history is the highest work of the Architect of the Centuries.” Likewise, the minister for Bantu administration,
De Wet Nel, insisted apartheid was “not a mere abstraction which hangs in the air. It is a divine task which has to be implemented and fulfilled systematically.”
⁸⁵
To give effect to these views, children in South African schools were taught
“Christian National thought,” a bizarre amalgam of extreme neo-
Calvinism, intense scientific racism, and nostalgic neo-Nazism. Even
Smuts, whose views on race were—and are—controversial, thought apartheid “a crazy concept, born of prejudice and fear.”
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Small wonder that to Sir
John Maud, British high commissioner to South Africa from 1959 to 1962, such views combined the confessional bigotry of the European wars of
religion with racist opinions reminiscent of Nazi Germany: Prime
Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s government, he said, owed “more to the seventeenth century than to the twentieth century,” and there was “an ominous
Hitlerian smell about it,” while he found the minister for external affairs,
Eric Louw, “disturbingly reminiscent of Dr.
Goebbels.”
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Such were the attempts made by
white men to construct nations and empires on the basis of racial identities and hierarchies; but since the racial theories and
categories on which they were based were both mistaken and contradictory, it is scarcely surprising that in practice it proved difficult to “regulate the intermixture of the races of man.” It bears repeating that no late-nineteenth-century nation was inhabited by a single, homogeneous racial group: the United Kingdom was populated by Celts as well as
Anglo-Saxons; the United States, in addition to being a nation of blacks and whites (and
Native Americans), was becoming a multiracial melting pot; and the German Reich not only contained Aryans and
Jews, but also many non-Aryans, while many Germans were living outside the fatherland in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was equally impossible to realize the larger, transoceanic racial groupings being advocated at this time. The shared sense of Anglo-Saxon solidarity or “Britannic ethnicity” between the metropolis and the “white” dominions was undercut by the growing demands of the settlers to establish their own national identities. The transatlantic feelings of Anglo-Saxon brotherhood were undermined by British anxieties about America’s industrial and financial might, and by its isolationist tendencies and residual hostility to the
British Empire. And the Teutonic fellowship linking the Anglo-Saxons of America,
Britain, and Germany did not survive the
First World War, one indication of which was that the
Rhodes Scholarships awarded to Germans were abolished and redistributed to the British Empire.
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Moreover, the expanding empires of the late nineteenth century were complex phenomena, driven and governed by many varied and contradictory impulses, of which race was only one. The projection of European (and latterly American) force overseas was an uncertain matter, which meant that in the tropical “colonies of rule” the
imperial powers were obliged to govern with and through indigenous hierarchies: in reality, empire was
often more of a collaborative endeavor with dark-skinned rulers than the strident rhetoric of racial superiority suggested.
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Race thought and categories were also challenged by the countervailing policy of imperial trusteeship, which insisted that the point of empire was not to proclaim and assert the superiority of white people but to put colored people first. This was partly a religious and ethical impulse, underscored by the missionary belief in the
God-given unity of all
humankind, and it was partly political in that the
British Empire’s official position was that the interests of the natives were “paramount,” and took precedence over those of white settlers or
“immigrant races.” And the measures passed by the dominions to make them “white men’s countries” were greeted with skepticism and disapproval in London, where the needs of white settlers formed only one element in a complex imperial equation, and where the official view remained, as the colonial secretary
Joseph Chamberlain explained in 1897, that the empire made “no distinction in favour of, or against, race or colour.”
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The idea that there was a single, binary division in the European empires between the superior (white) colonizers and the inferior (dark-skinned) colonizers was also too simplistic to fit the facts. In the four great “white” dominions of the British Empire, there were distinct Scottish and Irish identities (there were also distinct
Protestant Irish and
Catholic Irish identities), and there were significant
Jewish enclaves in big cities from Johannesburg to Sydney. Even more significant, and divisive, were the (largely Catholic) French in the province of Quebec,
Canada, and the Afrikaners in South Africa, against whom the British had fought, and with whom reconciliation was never more than partial. There were other divisions among whites: between civil servants and businessmen, financiers and entrepreneurs, soldiers and settlers, capitalists and workers.
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It was the same with those lumped together under the implausibly
monolithic identity of “black.” There were myriad tribes in Africa, some of whom were dark-skinned, but others that were
Arabs, and there were many different castes and races in South Asia. Moreover, colonizer and colonized interacted, regularly fraternized, and even married across these allegedly impermeable boundaries of racial identity.
Whatever its ideology, empire could never have existed in practice as a simple subjugation of nonwhites: colonizer and colonized collaborated and commingled in various ways.
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The undoubted reality of this imperial mingling explains why several of the most strident European proponents of
race thought, categories, and superiority were opposed to European overseas expansion. From their perspective, empire was
not
the preordained vehicle for the assertion of white dominance, but rather a slippery slope to white degeneration. Among mid-nineteenth-century writers, the likes of
Robert Knox and the Comte de
Gobineau were highly skeptical of the virtues of imperial acquisitiveness. Likewise, when the United States became an imperial power, many advocates of racial segregation in the South, and of the restriction of
immigrants from Europe and Asia, opposed annexing the
Philippines, arguing that the nation already had its hands full in coping with inferior races at home, and should not get involved with other such wretched peoples abroad. At least to some extent,
Adolf Hitler also shared these views: in
Mein Kampf
, he was retrospectively critical of Germany’s decision to join the Scramble for
Africa and to acquire colonies. Following the arguments advanced by Knox and Gobineau, he thought the
Aryans should avoid tropical regions inhabited by non-Europeans.
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Even in the American South, where the line between whites and blacks was legally sanctioned, the reality was more complex than the letter of Jim Crow would suggest. In part this was because the “black experience” was becoming more varied.
Agricultural laborers remained preponderant, but there was the beginning of an urban black
middle class, with its own newspapers, businesses, churches, and banks. Blacks were also migrating to the rapidly industrializing North, where the pay was better and there were opportunities to become pastors, teachers, or doctors, and this trend intensified during the
First World War. Despite the de facto discrimination in the North, many states tolerated intermarriage, public facilities remained legally unsegregated, and blacks could vote.
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The notion of a unified, monolithic white race was also being eroded and undercut: by the widespread anti-Semitism especially marked on the East Coast, by the continued hostility of the
Anglo-Saxons to the recently arrived immigrants from
Ireland
and central and eastern Europe, by the disenfranchisement of poor whites as well as blacks in the South, and by uncertainty about the racial status of Hispanics in the southern and western
territories acquired by the United States from
Mexico. When California entered the Union in 1850, such people were deemed to be white, but in New Mexico they were regarded as
Native Americans, and statehood was delayed until 1912, long after the qualifying number of inhabitants had been reached.
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The attempt to establish clear-cut racial boundaries in Germany between Aryans and
Jews was equally problematic. In Bismarck’s Reich, the fit between the
“Volk” and the nation had never been exact, and Germany’s defeat in the
First World War, with a subsequent loss of territory, reignited these issues.
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Borderlands containing sizable German minorities were handed over to
France,
Denmark, and
Poland. Millions of Germans from the former
Habsburg Empire now lived under Czech or Italian rule, and formed the majority in the newly created state of
Austria. During the 1920s, attempts were made to produce a map of what a true and complete German nation would look like, encompassing all of the “Volk,” but the results were inconclusive, and it bears repeating that the union of Germany with
Austria was forbidden at
Versailles.
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Moreover, Aryans and Jews were often mixed up together, in both their professional and private lives. Beginning in 1871, the founding father of German anthropology,
Rudolf Virchow, undertook a survey of six million schoolchildren in the Reich, recording the color of their eyes, hair, and skin, and he concluded that “pure” and separate Aryan and Jewish races did not exist. And this reality became more pronounced thereafter: the proportion of Jews marrying non-Jews had risen from almost 8 percent in the period 1901–04 to just under 23 percent in 1929. The result was that many Jews resembled the Aryan archetype, being tall, fair-haired, and blue-eyed, while many
Nazi leaders did not, including
Goebbels,
Himmler—and
Hitler himself.
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Intermarriage, and the more general desire for
assimilation, which led many Jews (among them the young
Nikolaus Pevsner) to regard themselves as Germans first and Jews a distant second, made it difficult for the Nazis to draw a simple, clear-cut line between Aryan and Jew. Any German with three Jewish grandparents
was deemed to be automatically Jewish, whereas those who were one-fourth or even one-half Jewish in ancestry could be considered German citizens if they did not practice Judaism or marry Jews or other part-Jews.
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But this was an arbitrary standard, and it was virtually impossible to produce a precise definition of who did (and did not) possess the “German blood,” even though a great deal of SS-sponsored “scientific” effort was devoted to trying to do so. The geography of race was no better delineated than the biology, as later attempts to map the full extent of “volkish” territory under the Third Reich were no more successful than the efforts made in the 1920s.
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In reality, Nazi designations of Aryans and Jews were random and inconsistent, and their policies were no different from those applied by
Karl Lueger, an earlier mayor of Vienna, an anti-Semite but with Jewish friends: “I decide who is a Jew.” Even as the German Reich expanded by conquest, and one and a half million Europeans were interrogated, measured, photographed, and medically examined to see whether they satisfied the
biological criteria of Aryan racial purity, the final “judgment about race,” recorded in
Himmler’s Racial Register, remained confused, contradictory—and arbitrary.
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It was the same in South Africa, where once again the allegedly monolithic and polarized racial categories did not stand up to serious biological or genealogical scrutiny. Just as in Germany it was impossible to draw a single line between Aryans and Jews, so it was impossible in South Africa to define a clear boundary between blacks and whites. There were those categorized as “Asians,”
immigrants (like
Gandhi) from British
India who were neither black nor white. There was also another intermediary category, namely the “Coloureds,” a substantial population of mixed origin that had developed in the western Cape out of the interaction of Europeans, Asians, Khoikhoi (“Hottentots”), and black Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were essentially Afrikaner in language and culture, but under apartheid they were increasingly segregated and discriminated against. The
Immorality, Group Marriage, and Urban Areas Acts had made it illegal for Coloureds to have sex, intermarry, or live in the same neighborhood with whites, and by the 1960s they found themselves reduced from a status intermediate between whites and
Africans to one that was closer to the latter than the former. This was not an arrangement congenial to all Afrikaners, who wanted a much more clear-cut division, and there were others who, on account of their pro-
Nazi leanings, were unhappy with the decision to categorize
Jews as whites, on the grounds that they were not part of the authentic Afrikaner
“volk.”
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