The Undivided Past
Page 24
In the same way that Hitler’s regime lethally implemented the racial thought that had intensified in Germany during the forty years before the First World War, so too did the Afrikaner leaders of South Africa appropriate the pre-1914 racial theories of white empire and turn them into virulent public policies, based on the idea of an authentic and homogeneous (and embattled) Afrikaner “Volk” standing against the lesser black race. The initial impetus for more complete segregation was the migration of blacks from the countryside to the cities during and after the First World War, which resulted in the imposition of “influx controls” on migrants, along with confinement to segregated townships or compounds for those allowed to remain in urban industrial areas. Beginning in 1924, laws were passed giving working-class whites a measure of security against black competition: “industrial colour bars” were constructed, setting the wages of whites at artificially high levels and giving them exclusive access to skilled jobs. Further repression of blacks soon followed: the Masters and Servants Act imposed greater controls on the nonwhite workforce; the Immorality Act declared intercourse between white and nonwhite a criminal offense; and the Native Administration Act allowed the government to deport any African who was judged to be promoting hostility between blacks and whites.81
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.82 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.83 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.”84
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.”86 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.”87
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.88
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.89 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.”90
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.91 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 co
lonized 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.92
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.93
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.94 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.95
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.96 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.97 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.98
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.99 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.100 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.101
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.”102
As the South African economy became the most industrialized on the continent, it proved more difficult to maintain these simplified, artificial boundaries. By the early 1960s, Sir John Maud was convinced that apartheid must collapse because it was “inconceivable that in this multi-racial state the criterion of advancement will forever remain the colour of your skin.” The attempt to keep whites and blacks separate, insisting on the superiority of the former and the inferiority of the latter, must give way, “for the simple reason that it is not only evil, but cannot be made to fit the facts.” The South African economy, Maud believed, could not in the long run work on the basis of apartheid, any more than the American economy could have survived on the basis of slavery. He was also convinced that the perverted religious teachings of the Dutch Reformed Church, lending bogus legitimation to racist doctrines by spuriously claiming divine sanction, would not prevail against the traditional biblical injunctions stressing the equality and brotherhood of man, which had underpinned the campaigns to abolish the slave trade and slaver
y more than a century before. “Christianity,” Maud concluded, in his valedictory dispatch to the British government, “is a much more serious threat than Communism to white supremacy.” In the end, he was sure, common humanity would prevail over racial divisions.103
THE FALL OF RACE
The attempts to establish empires and nations on the basis of unambiguous racial identities, distinctions, rankings, inclusions, and exclusions were undertaken on the assumption that there was no such thing as a humanity common to all people: indeed, according to those proponents of racialist schemes in the European empires, or the American South, or Nazi Germany, or South Africa, the objects of oppression belonged to races so alien, inferior, and reprehensible as to be barely human. Yet even the most fiercely enforced of these views, policies, and polities, whether based on religious, biological, or historical evidence, have ultimately proved unstable and unsustainable, resting as they did on intellectual foundations that were at best uncertain and contradictory, and at worst plain wrong. Even as these regimes were being created, their policies and presumptions were subjected to ever more critical analysis and scrutiny, and from a variety of perspectives. Some of the earliest and most persuasive defiance of racialist thought came from Christians who believed that racial hierarchies and identities could not be reconciled with the religious teaching that all people were equal in the sight of God. Among them was Sir John Maud, who believed that racist policies violated the teachings of the Bible. Evangelical whites in the American South, Hitler’s stooges among the German clergy, and fellow travelers in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa might piously claim otherwise, but they were in a minority; and the hostility of the Christian churches to the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis, and to that of nonwhites in South Africa, would prove decisive in mobilizing opinion against those regimes. As the fourth assembly of the World Council of Churches would put it in 1968, racism “denies our common humanity in creation and our belief that all men are made in God’s image.”104