I’m not the biggest fan of the racism was made up to cause class division thesis, but in reading the history of SA apartheid they like literally had a meeting and were like okay so we need to do a racism to unify the white nationalities & divide the workers
However, it needs to be said that the system in which apartheid was enacted was already one where the 80% of the population that was native got 3 seats in the election while the white parties had close to 200.
The Boers were back to the land, semi refugee whites whose identity was tied to the land in SA. They idealized agrarian life, and had disdain for black Africans, but wanted to live their life in near isolation from them (impossible obviously).
The British were interested in classic imperialist concerns, which meant, ironically, they had to enact against the white Boers the same kind of land dispossessing and deracinating policies as they did the natives .
The British used military tactics against the Afrikaners they normally reserved for native populations they were massacring, and even invented new ones in their war against them.
The Afrikaner leadership saw the British as a corrupt imperialist capitalist regime bent on using cheap black labor to force down wages & on forcing both black & white South Africans off the land & into the cities:!
Now, as far as an assessment of the British situation goes, this is 100% accurate, but where it goes from ironic accuracy to the Fantasia of racism is that the Afrikaner response wasn’t ‘we should team up with the natives and fight the British together, preserve our land’ etc
It was ‘let’s try to form solidarity with the British workers on the premise of whiteness, in order to use bargaining power against both black Africans and the British metropole’ and the rest, as they say, is history
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