Is fear a reason for apartheid? Or ignorance? Or is it rooted in intolerance and hatred?

While chatting about this subject a couple of weeks ago on a forum, someone suggested that going to an exclusive (read: all white) school was actually a good thing, because how could you become a racist if you’ve never had interaction with a black person… How could you hate something you know nothing about? That doesn’t sound right to me, in fact, I know it’s wrong, but yet…. But yet… there seems to be something there.
None of the people I went to school with are racists. At least I don’t think so, but at the same time they live in small secluded little worlds that don’t allow them to interact with people of different colour or ethnicity. It’s not hatred… it might be fear… I simply think its ignorance. Is that the same thing as racism?

I don’t know.

I do know this: I don’t like segregation. I don’t think it’s good for the country, or the community or the individual.

And yet I still see it all the time. My nephews go to an all Jewish school – and they have little to no interaction with kids of different faiths or class or colour. To them life is all about keeping up with the Jankolowitz’s.

How sad I think, in a time when it’s cool to diversify, to be a part of something bigger, to be exposed to a larger world.

I love my childhood friends, we’ve grown up together, been through so many of life’s important moments, and I see the same traits in them. And it bugs the hell out of me.

Is this the legacy of segregation? Not hatred, but simply apathetic ignorance.
Shit, I hope not. It’s gonna take a long time to sort out this country, any country, if it is.

For the last fifteen years we’ve heard all about Apartheid. In fact, I’d be willing to wager a small amount that in the last decade and a half, people have used every possible medium to spout the varied evils of the previous administration. From the Newspaper headlines screaming “Third Force at work!” to flowery speeches on the television assuring us that the new administration is diametrically opposed to every single nuance of governance that came before, a lot has been shoved in our faces about how evil Apartheid was.

Even the rest of the world has been brought into the inner huddle to whisper in darkened rooms about how racist South Africans are (most of them with bloodstained hands from their own very recent racist romps) and it’s often the first thing someone asks me if they find out I’m from South Africa; “Why did you hate the blacks so much?” “Did you support Apard-hide?”

Even my United States born-and-raised word processor recognises the word without a hitch. That tells me something, it really does. Whichever poor schmuck it is within the monolithic Microsoft that handles Spell Checking had to at some point make a judgement call over whether to include Apartheid as a viable word. Because of the widespread knowledge, I imagine the call was an easy one. Score one for the liberals I suppose.

In many ways, Apartheid is and was more evil than the other regime it’s often compared with – Nazism. Before I’m lynched by the new age boeremag I suppose I should probably explain.

As ideologies go, Nazism was at least constant and unbending. Hardly any of the SS troopers would have said “Some of my best friends are Jews but…” or “Yes, some Jews are ok but it’s those damned kykes you have to watch out for.” No. They were unbending and unrelenting in their hatred and although evil, at least it wasn’t petty.

That’s at the root of the evil of Apartheid for me; the sheer pettiness of it all. It’s not the grand things like segregation, “dom pas” or even the no-mixed marriages thing. It’s the “Some of my best friends are black but…” and “Yes, some blacks are OK but it’s those damned k****s you have to watch out for.”

And that includes the senseless and utterly petty things that we as kids were bombarded with and never even realised.

You’re a South African – you remember buying a ton of those little sweets from a tuck-shop don’t you? You know the ones. Those ones you suck and they turn different colours? What were they called again?

These days they’ve fallen under the purview of the PC crowd and they’re called “black balls” but you remember them being called “nigger balls” don’t you?

What about eenie, meenie, mienie mo? How does that one go? Catch a what by his toe? Oh tiger you say? Really? Always?

Don’t think I’m unfairly dumping all of this on South Africa. The reason I mentioned the other side of things at the beginning was that it’s not just our side of Apartheid that’s petty; it’s the others as well.

Every American that hears South Africa and wonders about Apartheid while not caring about “Indian Casinos” or the British guy with the stiff upper lip who asks me why I hate blacks (while forgetting his own fairly recent colonial past) supplies the mindfield with more than enough explosive for the whole damned thing to come full circle one day.

I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade but petty apartheid is still out there – mostly alive and well in the minds of the over 20s around the world. To pretend anything else is just naive. I’m sure over the next twenty or thirty years it will die down just like every other stupidity that mankind comes up with but for now the small things live on and on and on.

I probably shouldn’t forget to mention that perennial South African favourite “Ag pleez daddy” with the charming chorus belted out by almost every South African boy of a certain age:

“Popcorn, chewing gum, peanuts an’ bubble gum
Ice cream, candy floss an’ Eskimo Pie
Ag Deddy how we miss
Nigger balls an’ licorice
Pepsi Cola, ginger beer
And Canada Dry”

Like I said, it’s the little things.