(Author: David Benatar, Vol. 66, #3, Chanukah 2011)
It is often suggested that the example of South Africa’s transition from Apartheid to democracy in a unitary state is a model from which we can learn lessons for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian (and broader Arab) conflict. In fact, the most important lessons that can be learnt from the example of South Africa are not from its actual history but instead from a history it never had. In what follows I describe a counterfactual history of Africa. Some (but not other) critics of Israel could learn from this allegory.
A counterfactual history of Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa was once a continent populated by dark skinned people. They had migrated from the cradle of humanity in east Africa spreading west to the Atlantic ocean, east to the Indian ocean, north to the Sahara and as far south as the Fish River, while still retaining a presence in the birthplace of the human species. They were not the first human inhabitants of the continent. They were preceded by Neanderthal humans, to whose demise, it must be said, they had contributed. Unjust though that species-cide was, it had occurred millennia before the lighter skinned Arabs and even paler skinned Europeans arrived. At the time of the Arabian and European invasions, the Black people were the rightful owners of the lands they had long inhabited.
The Black Africans resisted the invaders, but they were no match for the powerful Arabian and European forces. The conquerors put many Blacks to the sword and forcibly relocated many others to Europe, North Africa and the Arabian peninsula. A small remnant was left in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. They shared this land with KhoiSan migrants from the Western Cape and with descendants of the invaders who soon outnumbered them. While there was some intermarriage, a core of Black Africans preserved their traditions and language in their ancestral home.
The fate of the exiles was, on the whole, worse. Most were enslaved in the lands to which they were exiled. In time they earned their freedom, but they lived for centuries as secondclass inhabitants of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, often despised by those in whose midst they lived. Sometimes conditions were relatively hospitable. Under such conditions Blacks experienced some prosperity, were tolerated by their paler skinned neighbours, and enjoyed some protection from the kings and princes in whose domains they resided. But even then they were not full citizens and lived under significant restrictions. Moreover, these periods of relative quiet rarely lasted in any one place. There were periodic massacres and other persecutions. These conditions, along with forced expulsions lead to regular migrations to other places where they could find temporary refuge. Often these migrations were within Europe or the Arab world, but there were also small groups that dispersed to even more remote places, including India, China and, later, the Americas.
Wherever they went, however, they continued to remember their ancestral home in southern Africa. They referred to it daily in their prayers. They yearned to return. While isolated individuals did find their way back, large-scale migrations back to Africa were not possible for many centuries.
While the numbers of lighter skinned people grew, first steadily and then exponentially, the numbers of Black people remained small. This was partly a product of the regular massacres, but it was also an indirect result of lesser but sustained persecution. The discrimination that Blacks endured provided incentives for those who could to marry lighter skinned people, so that their children or grandchildren would be shielded from the oppression Blacks experienced. As a result, Blacks accounted for an infinitesimal proportion of all humans.
But those Blacks who survived preserved their identity in exile. While they forgot their ancestral African languages, they developed their own dialects of the linguae francae of the people amidst whom they lived, often carrying those languages with them in their migratory journeys. Their African traditions were more resilient than their African languages. Some accommodations were made. For example, whereas polygamy had been common in Africa, and while it continued among Africans in Arab countries, where it was also the norm, it was effectively abandoned in Europe. Such adaptations aside, Blacks preserved distinctive African religion and cultural practices. This did not endear them to the majorities in their “host” countries, who viewed their practices with suspicion, fear and contempt, and persecuted them further on account of these differences. Indeed, when the Enlightenment finally came to Europe, even many defenders of rights for Blacks argued that they should enjoy full citizenship – but only if they foreswore their African traditions.
It is thus not surprising that with the emergence of nationalism in 19th Century Europe, exiled Africans were also taken up by nationalistic ideas. Some among them began to propose the recreation of a Black homeland in Africa – a place where Blacks could both rule themselves and protect themselves against aggression. These were heady times. Some pioneers moved back to Africa in greater numbers than before. They made their way to the Eastern Cape of South Africa where they joined the remnant that had either never left or others who had returned in dribbles over the intervening centuries. But Blacks remained a minority even in the Eastern Cape, where the Khoi-San and the descendents of Arab and European settlers were now native and who were known collectively as the Blancos, on account of their relatively lighter skin.
Back in Europe, there was increased momentum towards the creation of a Black national home in southern Africa, a movement known as Azanianism. At the time, southern Africa was under Ottoman rule and the creation of a Black state there seemed unlikely. Some European states suggested that a Black national home should instead be established in Siberia. Others suggested that one be established in the Middle East. But Black leaders remained adamant that the state should be established in their ancestral land.
Following the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the dream of a Black state came one step closer to fruition. Britain was granted a mandate over Southern Africa, including Rhodesia, South West Africa and South Africa. Black nationalists in Europe began a campaign that resulted in a British commitment to establishing a national home for Blacks in Southern Africa. A few years later, Rhodesia and South West Africa were granted independence under monarchs appointed by Britain. Black nationalists’ sights were set on South Africa. Their vision was of an open, democratic society with a Black majority, but one in which minorities would enjoy full rights and equal protection under the law.
Nevertheless, the non-Black majority in South Africa became increasingly agitated about the prospect of a Black national home being created in their midst and resisted the influx of Blacks returning to South Africa. There were occasional massacres of Blacks who, in response, formed their own defenses. The British, for their part, tried to please both sides, but instead earned the resentment of both. For example, in response to Blanco pressure, they restricted the number of Blacks who were permitted to return to South Africa, but still remained open to the possibility of a Black national home in that area.
Before long Europe was torn apart by a war that soon spread to the rest of the world. Adolf Hitler began his conquest of Europe – unopposed until Britain declared war on Germany. But Hitler’s war was not just against other European states. It was also a war against Black Germans, as well as those Blacks who lived in the lands he conquered. Persecution of them steadily increased. Blacks tried desperately to flee. Some succeeded in migrating to elsewhere in Europe and some immigrated to America, but entry permits to these various countries were in short supply.
Many Blacks, now convinced that they had no place in European society, sought to return to Africa. However, the British policy restricting their migration there resulted in Blacks still being trapped in Europe when Hitler’s persecution of them turned genocidal. In the last few years of the war, they were being exterminated by their millions in death camps. The total number Blacks in the world was reduced from about 18 million to about 12 million. Their troubles did not even end with the termination of the war. Indeed, Blacks seeking to return to their homes in Germany, Poland and elsewhere were set upon and sometimes killed by those who resented their return and had often appropriated their property.
In 1947, the newly formed United Nations voted in favour of the partition of what remained of the British Mandate in South Africa. In accordance with this resolution, two states were to be created – a Black national home to be called Azania, and a Blanco state for the lighter skinned ethnic groups in the rest of South Africa. The Azanian movement accepted this resolution, even though it would have liked a larger share of its ancestral home. A small national home, it reasoned, was better than none. The partition plan was rejected, however, by the Blancos. With the Azanian declaration of independence in 1948 and the creation of Azania in May that year, the armies of five Blanco states in Southern Africa invaded the embryonic Azanian state.
In the course of the hostilities, many Blanco inhabitants of Azania fled. Historical evidence suggests that there were many reasons for this migration. Some fled because they feared being killed by Azanian soldiers. There had been some such atrocities. In other cases Blancos fled to make way for the invading Blanco armies, hoping to return to their homes in the wake of a Blanco victory. That victory, however, was not to be. The small Azanian state prevailed against its aggressors. The lands that would have formed the basis of a Blanco South African state fell under Blanco Rhodesian rule.
In the wake of these hostilities, the Blacks who lived in various Blanco countries in North Africa were increasingly under threat, owing to their (perceived) connection with the new Azanian state. Thus, in the years following the creation of Azania, thousands of Blacks from North Africa made their way to Azania, often abandoning all their property and possessions, for which they were not compensated. They were absorbed into the Azanian state. However, those Blancos who had fled Azania were not similarly absorbed in the Blanco states surrounding Azania. Instead, they were kept in refugee camps, in appalling conditions, where the birth rate skyrocketed.
Those Blancos who remained in Azania enjoyed formal equality. To be sure, they did not enjoy full equality in all respects. Many were perceived, sometimes justifiably and sometimes not, to be a fifth column sympathetic to the enemies on the borders. And there were ugly elements in Azania who had racist views towards Blancos, but these racist elements were largely kept in check by the robust liberal democracy that characterized Azania. Azanian Blancos enjoyed the vote and full representation in the parliament as well as equal protection under the law. The courts often ruled against the state in their favour. Their language was recognized as an official language. While most were not conscripted into the Azanian Defence Force (ADF), some volunteered.
The Blanco states of Africa waged an ongoing war of attrition against Azania. Then, in 1967, the armed forces of three such states were mobilized on the borders of Azania. The Azanians launched a pre-emptive strike and routed their enemies in a war that lasted a mere six days. During this war, the Azanians conquered the area to the north of the Kei River – an area that became known as the North Bank – as well as a strip of land to the southeast of Azania (the SE-strip). In doing so, the many Blancos living in these areas fell under Azanian rule. However neither they nor any of Blanco states signed a peace treaty with Azania, nor even recognized the right of Azania to exist.
In 1973 the Blanco armies again tried to destroy Azania but after some initial successes in the war, they were driven back. Blanco South West Africa, for example, lost the Namib Desert to Azanian forces, and Rhodesia lost the Victoria Falls.
In the ensuing decades, the Blanco states tried various techniques to advance their explicitly stated goal of destroying Azania. They resorted to terrorism, targeting Blacks both in Azania and elsewhere in the world. Just as they had previously murdered Azanian Olympic athletes in Munich, so they killed children in Azania, and hijacked airplanes. And they kept the South African Blanco refugee problem festering.
But they also began to delegitimize Azania. An early success was the United Nations “Azanianism = Racism” resolution. No reference was made to any other form of nationalism being racism. The French, it seems, were entitled to a French state, the English to England, and the Blanco inhabitants of Africa were entitled to any number of Blanco states in Africa. But Azania, the one liberal democracy in Africa, was by some double-speak determined to be a racist state. Ironically, all the Blanco states of Africa were deeply repressive states. Many treated women as second-class citizens. In all of them non-Blancos were treated much worse than any Blanco was in Azania. Indeed, the most vile, racist stereotypes about Blacks were peddled to children and perpetuated in the state-controlled media of the Blanco states. This persisted well into the 21st Century. Some of these states and their leaders were in the grip of bizarre conspiracy theories – including one that the United States had attacked itself on 11 September 2001.
The delegitimization campaign steadily advanced. Azania was deemed an “Apartheid
State”. The term “Apartheid” referred to the policy of discrimination and segregation that the Arab minority in Palestine had imposed on the Jewish majority in that country. The Jews had engaged in a nominal armed struggle but, almost without exception, attacked only military targets. Moreover, attacks were relatively few. The overwhelming majority of the Jewish protests were peaceful. Palestine became isolated internationally and eventually Arab leaders in Palestine realized that there was no future for Palestine if the policy of Apartheid were to continue, and thus they entered into negotiations with the Jewish leaders. This led to a relatively smooth transition to liberal democracy, which became known as Israel.
Sloppy critics of Azania seized on some superficial similarities between Palestine and Azania and condemned Azania as a racist Apartheid state. These critics altogether ignored the differences between Azania and Palestine. For example, whereas Jews had had no political rights in Palestine, Blancos in Azania enjoyed all political and civil rights. Blancos in the territories conquered by Azania were, of course, not citizens of Azania, but they had never concluded a peace agreement with Azania. Indeed, they had persisted in hostilities and their position worsened as a result. Following a series of suicide bombings perpetrated by Blancos in the heart of Azania, the Azanians built a separation wall to keep out Blancos from the North Bank. Although that wall was very successful in preventing further such bombings, critics of Azania demanded its demolition. They also demanded an “end to the occupation”, although what exactly they meant by that was regularly left unclear. Sometimes they meant the occupation of the North Bank and the SE-Strip – even in the absence of any peace treaty to end the hostilities in which these areas had been won. But sometimes they meant the “occupation” of Azania by Black Africans who were said to be colonial settlers who had robbed the local Blanco population of their land in the great Catastrophe of 1948.
Even those who said that they recognized Azania’s right to exist, nonetheless criticized it for allowing Black “settlers” to build homes in the North Bank. Black Africans, it seems, were thought to have no right to live there, even though their ancestors had lived there two millennia before. Yet there were incessant demands for the right of those Blancos who had fled Azania (and their descendants) to be allowed to return to their homes in Azania. Because this would have spelled the end of a Black majority in the world’s only Black state, the Azanian people consistently refused. The Black refugees from Blanco states and the losses they had incurred in fleeing, never entered world discourse on the Azanian-Blanco problem.
Azania demonstrated its willingness to swap land for peace. For example, it returned the Namib Desert to South West Africa in exchange for recognition and peace. However, Azania was expected to cease its occupation of the North Bank and the SE-Strip in the absence of any treaty. Eventually Azania did withdraw unilaterally from the SE-Strip, but the upshot of this was that an extreme white-supremacist racist Blanco group, sworn to the destruction of Azania, seized control of it. They then used the Strip to launch daily rocket attacks on towns in Azania. Although these resulted in relatively few deaths, they caused immense fear, as well as damage to property. Eventually, after exercising restraint for a number of years, Azania retaliated against militants in the SE-Strip. The problem was that these militants embedded themselves in the midst of civilians. Thus, despite Herculean efforts by the mighty ADF to minimize civilian casualties, these casualties were nonetheless considerable. Of course, there were misdirected missiles. There were also undisciplined ADF soldiers who were indifferent to civilian life and sometimes even targeted civilians, but the official policy and practice generally demonstrated immense restraint. The aberrations were no worse than those of US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan or of any democracy in any war and were immeasurably fewer than the atrocities committed by repressive Blanco African regimes. However, howls of condemnation were reserved for the only Black state on the face of the planet – a tiny state surrounded on all sides by mortal enemies sworn to its destruction. Criticism directed at the racist Blancos was distinctly muted. Only Azania was demonized and boycotted. Indeed, the United Nations Human Rights Council devoted 80% of its resolutions to condemning Azania, and purported Azanian human rights violations were a standing item on the Council’s agenda. Atrocities in the rest of Africa were barely mentioned. Genocide, mass rapes, brutal political repression, and the execution of homosexuals and adulterers in other countries were passed over in favour of condemning Azania. Nor was that particularly surprising. A significant number of member countries on the Council were among the most egregious violators of human rights in the world, and they clearly had no interest in condemning themselves.
The unholy alliance
One would have thought that the fault lines of world opinion about the Azanian-Blanco conflict would have been as follows: Racists of various stripes, as well as repressive regimes would sympathize with the illiberal, anti-democratic and racist Blanco states. Left wing academics, trade unionists and socialists, as well as Jews who had recently emerged from under the Arab yoke in Palestine would sympathize with the Azanians – a country that, for all its flaws, was a thriving liberal democracy, an intellectual and technological hub in an extremely dangerous neighbourhood.
If you thought that, you would be only half right. The racists, the totalitarian states and the dictatorships did all sympathize with the Blancos, but so did a surprising number of left-leaning academics, socialists, trade-unionists and Jews. These naïve fellow travelers happily joined the racist and repressive regimes in condemning Azania. Some of these fellow travelers no doubt thought that their criticism of Azania could be distinguished from that of the racist and repressive states. “Some of our best friends are Black”, they said. Indeed, some of the fellow travelers were Black themselves, and were deeply uncomfortable among their Blanco friends about some of the more regrettable tactics the Azanians used to defend themselves. Nevertheless, they failed to appreciate a fundamental point. When one encounters a lynch party about to hang a Black man, joining adding one’s voice to the chorus of condemnation, even with legitimate criticisms, only feeds the frenzy that is a lynching. If one is so stupid as to join a lynch mob and thinks that one’s criticism can be distinguished from that of the mob, one bears responsibility for the outcome. One may have no racist intent, but the effect of one’s actions can nonetheless be racist.
This is not to say that criticism of Azania is never permitted. However, there is an ethics of criticism, which governs how and when one should direct one’s criticism. It also includes duties to dissociate oneself from those would demonize Azania with the aim of destroying it. If everybody else is entitled to self-determination, then so are the Blacks who, after centuries have made their way back to their ancestral home. They are not colonial settlers but returning exiles. Of course, we also need to consider the rights and interests of the Blancos who have lived in Azania in the intervening centuries, but we should not lend support, witting or unwitting, to their racist, revisionist history which depicts Black Azanians as illegitimate interlopers and oppressors. We need to recognize that Azanians have a right to defend themselves against the mortal enemies that surround them. Sometimes they overreact, and we may legitimately criticize them for that, as long as we reserve still greater criticism for those who seek to destroy them.
David Benatar, a frequent contributor to Jewish Affairs, is Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town.
