South Africa’s public discourse often treats Apartheid as a uniquely evil system that was unmatched in its destructiveness. This exceptionalism claims that our history justifies policies – like never-ending race-based laws – that other states recovering from injustice have largely rejected. In reality, we must learn from what has worked elsewhere after tyranny and discrimination: secure property rights, limited government, and market-driven growth that lifted millions out of poverty.
This theme recurs in our public discourse.
Apartheid, we are told, was so profoundly destructive and evil that it alone demands continued racial legislation and state interference in the economy in the democratic era, with hundreds of race laws and “transformation” targets.
While other post-injustice societies might have moved toward colour-blind public policy, we are told South Africa’s unique trauma supposedly requires perpetual racial engineering to rectify the past. Our history, apparently, is too special for ordinary policy lessons.
That claim does not hold.
Why Apartheid was unjust
Apartheid took one inborn, arbitrary characteristic – the mere colour of a person’s skin, without any reference to their culture or values – and made it the determinative factor in the rights and privileges the state would recognise or supress.
This was not private discrimination, which a free society must tolerate. It was state policy, imposed on millions, while the same state apparatus demanded obedience and loyalty from those it systematically disadvantaged. There was an assumed yet brazenly non-reciprocal social contract, with the law elevating skin-colour above the relative merits and demerits of the individual taxpayer.
Bad law produces bad outcomes, and Apartheid did just that.
It restricted movement, reserved jobs, controlled urbanisation, and distorted markets. The predictable result was entrenched poverty among the legally disadvantaged. That poverty, in turn, contributed to much of the inequality visible in post-Apartheid South Africa.
The system was racist in design and damaging in effect. It deserved to end, and it did.
Not unique
What Apartheid did – using state power to discriminate on the basis of inborn characteristics under a non-reciprocal social contract – was, sadly, normal across much of modern history.
With the rise of the territorial state as we know it today over the last three centuries, governments worldwide have wielded public policy to favour or disfavour groups based on race, ethnicity, class, or origin. The Enlightenment ideas of individualism, non-racialism, and egalitarianism had by this time already been well-developed, yet they were routinely ignored or violated in practice.
The 20th century alone teaches all the relevant lessons.
In Rwanda, the government either orchestrated or stood by as roughly over 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi, were slaughtered in 100 days in 1994. Nazi Germany industrialised the murder of millions based on race and identity. Soviet communism, despite its egalitarian rhetoric, pursued class and ethnic purges on a massive scale. In Zimbabwe, the Gukurahundi campaign killed an estimated 20,000 Ndebele in the 1980s for perceived political disloyalty tied to ethnicity.
Jim Crow in the American South enforced racial hierarchy through law. Colonial-era atrocities elsewhere followed comparable logic.
Other post-colonial African cases – Biafra, the Ethiopian Red Terror – produced death tolls and displacements far exceeding Apartheid’s toll, often rooted in similar group-based state violence or neglect.
Discrimination based on immutable traits was not a South African invention but is a recurring temptation of modern state power.
Apartheid’s relative restraint
None of this excuses the principle of Apartheid. Racism and unequal treatment before the law are wrong regardless of scale.
That being said, one feature may have made South Africa’s system stand out. Not in greater evil, but in relative restraint.
There was no genocide or systematic policy of extermination. Search the records of the National Party and its thinkers, and you will not find genocidal intent or sentiment. Claims of such intent have almost always relied on fabricated quotes, such as those misattributed to PW Botha.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and related estimates put political deaths from 1948 to 1994 at around 21,000, with roughly 7,000 occurring before 1990 and the rest during the turbulent transition years (much of it black-on-black violence between the African National Congress and Inkatha). Security forces were responsible for a minority of these.
Compared to the industrialised killing of the Holocaust, the engineered famines and purges of communism, or the rapid ethnic massacres in Rwanda and elsewhere, Apartheid’s repression was brutal but contained. It was a system of racist control and hierarchy, not annihilation.
That does not somehow render it benign. It still caused real suffering and economic harm, but it places the regime in perspective among 20th century injustices. It was on par with many, and significantly less destructive than the worst.
Against exceptionalism
The insistence on uniqueness serves a purpose: It shields certain policy choices from scrutiny. If Apartheid was uniquely evil, then South Africa supposedly cannot adopt the remedies that have worked consistently after other social traumas around the world.
We cannot look to post-communist Eastern Europe, where countries like Poland and Estonia embraced private property, open markets, and limits on state power, producing rapid prosperity despite the horror of Soviet domination.
We also cannot truly study South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan, which protected property rights under authoritarian rule before democratising into high-income economies.
The Asian Tiger model of “developmental statism” was not akin to what the exceptionalists in South Africa want ours to be – rent seeking, redistributionist, score-settling, radical – but was profoundly productivity-focused, with respect for established commercial dynasties and stability.
If South Africa were to adopt the Asian Tiger model, exceptionalists like Julius Malema, Jimmy Manyi, and Panyaza Lesufi would be among the first shipped off to the gulags.
So, rather than trying what has always worked – free markets and free societies (not one example exists anywhere of a “poor free market economy”) – or what has sometimes worked, being free markets and unfree societies, we are told South Africa’s path must be different: more race laws, more redistribution, more state direction, more radicalism.
With a diluted form of this model already well-entrenched, we can take stock.
Thirty years after 1994, the results include persistent high unemployment, recurring energy crises, capital flight, and world record-setting violent crime rates.
The legacy of Apartheid exists, but other societies faced deep scars too – sometimes deeper – and chose policies that expanded opportunity rather than entrenching group preferences. Exceptionalism conveniently excuses what evidence shows has not delivered broad-based prosperity.
Apartheid undermined equality before the law and the conditions for widespread wealth creation. But its wrongs do not immunise South Africa from the universal lessons of history and economics. Bad ideas about state power and group identity have failed repeatedly, whereas dispensations respecting secure individual rights, rule of law, and private enterprise, have succeeded across diverse contexts virtually without exception.
South Africans deserve policies tested by real-world results, not insulated by myth.
The 20th century is a treasure trove of lessons with a clear outcome: state discrimination and overzealous government harm the vulnerable most. Prosperity results only from rejecting both.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/3311469669]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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