Introduction

Racism is a pervasive and perennial problem in South Africa. This chapter will examine how opportunities aiming to build a better more inclusive South Africa at the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries were squandered through racism. Racism has its roots in the economic, political and social relations between people. Biological and other theories were developed later to justify the domination of one racial group by another. Studies and research carried out in recent years have demonstrated clearly the links between colonial and economic domination and institutional domination. The racist regime of South Africa is the most extreme example of this (Sjollema 1982: 100) as it was a culturally constructed evolutionary attitude of mind based on power with tragic consequences when enacted. This developed in South Africa from the time of the settlement of Europeans, particularly the 1820s, and was manifested in the century-long wars of dispossession from late in the eighteenth century against the ‘Other’, the indigenous peoples. Exercising crude, and often violent, power was symptomatic of the hegemony of empire.

Richard Elphick makes the central claim that:

This was related to two main assumptions:

Martin Meredith (2011: xiv) asserts that scientists have uncovered the origins of human life in Africa seven million years ago before a mass migration around 60,000 years ago which populated the rest of the world. Therefore the debate about who came first, white or black, is outdated.