[LINK] "Rethinking Maties' apartheid past"

[rfmcdonald]

Mandisa Mbali and Handri Walters's Mail & Guardian article takes an interesting look at the way that anthropology in South Africa--here, exemplified by museum displays at Stellenbosch University--were used to justify apartheid. Portraying indigenous cultures as static and separate, meriting permanent separation from the rest of the world on the grounds of their intrinsic inferiority, is a trick that wasn't practiced only in South Africa, I fear.

Paradoxically, though, the South African state implemented segregationist policies just as scientific racism was declining in influence in the rest of the world. This raises the question: On what intellectual basis did Afrikaner intellectuals at institutions such as Stellenbosch justify apartheid? Were such justifications based on ideas of essential cultural difference or scientific racism?

According to Saul Dubow, a professor of history at Queen Mary College, University of London, scientific racism was far from the only, or most common, way in which apartheid was intellectually justified. Indeed, it is important not to overstate the impact of eugenics and racial science on the development of apartheid policy. For instance, Christian-nationalist theological rationales were also often used and were frequently provided by leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church. Such justifications drew on the Old Testament to promote the idea that Africans were morally inferior in order to support separate development.

Cultural justifications for apartheid were presented by influential Afrikaans-speaking anthropologists, including those who were based at Stellenbosch. Volkekunde, a brand of Afrikaans anthropology that had found a home at Stellenbosch from 1926 to the mid-1990s, aimed to address both the "native" and the "poor white" questions of the 1930s by proposing separate development. These anthropologists' thinking was that this approach would ensure the "cultural" preservation of each group.

Max Eiselen, a Stellenbosch anthropologist, was a key figure in the development of volkekunde and has been described as one of the intellectual "architects of apartheid". In justifying separate development, Eiselen emphasised cultural differences over those that were racial and understood to be biologically defined.

Following a stint as an ­anthropology professor at Pretoria University, he went on to become secretary for native affairs while Hendrik Verwoerd was the minister for native affairs in the early 1950s. Eiselen is perhaps most bitterly remembered by Africans, and all opponents of apartheid, as the ­chairman of the Commission of Bantu Education.