Apartheid Quotes

“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“I don't fancy colors of the face, I'm always attracted to colors of the brain.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“How, then, does one become an activist?

The easy answer would be to say that we do not become activists; we simply forget that we are. We are all born with compassion, generosity, and love for others inside us. We are all moved by injustice and discrimination. We are all, inside, concerned human beings. We all want to give more than to receive. We all want to live in a world where solidarity and companionship are more important values than individualism and selfishness. We all want to share beautiful things; experience joy, laughter, love; and experiment, together.”
― Noam Chomsky, On Palestine

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“At the time of his death, Biko had a wife and three children for which he left a letter that stated in one part: “I've devoted my life to see equality for blacks, and at the same time, I've denied the needs of my family. Please understand that I take these actions, not out of selfishness or arrogance, but to preserve a South Africa worth living in for blacks and whites.”
― Steve Biko

“There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stalinist past), police and communications are all die-hard Zuma loyalists. Whatever their line functions, they will also play the role they have played so ably to date: keeping Zuma out of court—and making sure the state serves Zuma as it once did Mbeki.”
― Mark Gevisser

“There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.') It was as you can see, no difficult task. I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the 'peace' movement had decided to borrow from this tattered style book. The mantra, especially in the letters to this newspaper, was: 'Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country.'

Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, 'Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one'? 'Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.' 'Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones.' 'Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.' I could go on. (I think number four may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the 'doves' to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to re-read themselves saying things like, 'The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history, writes Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress. "Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel's interest in a peace process--other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo--has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“The premise of this plan, as the Palestinian historians Samih Farsoun and Naseer Aruri point out," is that the nearly forty-year-old impasse is not caused by an abnormal and illegal occupation but by the Palestinian resistance to that occupation. Progress was thus linked to ending the intifada and all acts of resistance rather than ending the occupation or reversing decades of colonial impoverishment of land, resources, and institutions.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Amir Cheshin, former Israeli advisor on Arab affairs to the mayor of Jerusalem, explains:
"The planning and building laws in East Jerusalem rest on a policy that calls for placing obstacles in the way of planning in the Arab sector--this is done more to preserve the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in the city, which is presently in a ratio of 72 percent Jews against 28 percent non-Jews.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“A similar law had been passed in South Africa at the peak of apartheid in 1980 and had been summarily rejected by that country's (white) supreme court, as an inappropriate and illegal interference with black people's right to marry and establish families. The Israeli law was extended in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, and formally endorsed by Israel's High Court in May 2006.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“With respect to pure military considerations, there is no doubt that the presence of settlements, even if 'civilian,' of the occupying power in the occupied territory, substantially contributes to the security in that area and facilitates the execution of the duties of the military," noted Israeli High Court justice Alfred Vitkon, while arguing in favor of the legality of the settlement enterprise against the repeated indictments of international law.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“For its part, the Gush Emunim regards the very idea of Arab residence in Palestine as a form of theft.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“What black greed, what unwitting hatred, has turned Israeli Jews into torturers of the innocent? The Settlers come first, violent and cruel--but above them is a vast, rabid system, official Israel, that sustains them and protects them, that corrupts our minds and our language, God's language, with vile rationalizations.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“In other words, the principle of Jewishness has priority over the principle of equality in Israel.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“What is true of the JNF is true of Israeli law in general. More than twenty seperate Basic Laws (the closest documents Israel has to a written constitution) and other forms of legislation explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Much of what the Israelis do in the West Bank and Gaza has to do with the projection of power: to remind people every day not only that their smallest actions are subject to Israeli control, but that at any given moment--even in the middle of the night--the Israeli army can break down the doors to their homes and come in looking for suspects or suspicious possessions.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“He added: "I got a real kick out of every house that was demolished, because I knew that dying means nothing to them, while the loss of their house means more to them. You destroy a house and you destroy forty or fifty people for generations. If one thing does bother me about all this, it is that we didn't wipe out the whole camp.”
― Saree Makdisi

“The inhabitants of the villages in the "seam zone" have had to apply for a document that the Israeli army calls a permanent resident permit. As its name suggests, this document is something like a U.S. Green Card, except that in this case the person applying for the permit only wants to stay where he already is, on the land where he has been living all his life.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“According to Colonel Shaul Arieli of the Israeli army reserves, the point of making life so difficult for Palestinians in the gap between the border and the wall is to push them to leave for good.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“By the end of that day, between 2,000 and 5,000 of Jaffa's original 70,000 inhabitants remained in their homes. All the others were gone. They would never be allowed to return. As had happened at Haifa a month previously, the city's Palestinian population was forced down to the port by the Zionist forces; there they were crammed onto boats, skiffs, and trawlers--and driven out to sea, to make their way to Gaza, el- Arish, even as far away as Beirut, leaving behind everything: homes, furniture, clothing, family papers, heirlooms, photographs, libraries. Much of the city was systematically demolished after the fighting. Its souks and commercial districts were entirely flattened. The famous orange groves surrounding the city were cleared away. All that remained of Jaffa after 1948 was the central district, whose homes were parceled out to new Jewish residents: European Jewish immigrants got the pick of the choicest residences in Jaffa; Sephardim and Mizrahim-Arab Jews-got the rest.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“Jaffa will become a Jewish city," declared David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, a month after the city had been cleared of its Arab inhabitants; "to allow the return of the Arabs to Jaffa would be," he added, "foolish." Ben-Gurion had had it out for Jaffa long before 1948. "Jaffa's destruction, the town and the port, will happen, and it is good that it will happen," he had noted in his diary a dozen years previously; "if Jaffa goes to hell, I will not participate in its grief.”
― Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

“To outsiders, Protestantism may seem admirable for its role in promoting racial equality and in fighting apartheid, or it may seem culpable for its role in promoting racism and defending injustice. Yet it was only incidentally and temporarily a vehicle for those causes. Protestant movements that become too deeply attached to such social and political issues tend to find that they are running out of steam. Like it or loathe it, the heart of Protestantism’s message is a spiritual one, a message of salvation and of divine power.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“Liberty is important and that is why forced segregation was wrong, but forced integration is also wrong, so apartheid was wrong because it forces segregation, and equity is wrong because it forces integration; both of them are wrong.”
― Wanjiru Njoya

“Whether read from the perspective of slavery or that of colonial occupation, death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven. As we have seen, terror is a defining feature of both slave and late modern colonial regimes. Both regimes are also specific instances and experiences of unfreedom. To live under late modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition of "being in pain": fortified structures, military posts, and roadblocks everywhere, buildings that bring back painful memories of humiliation, interrogations, and beatings; curfews that imprison hundreds of thousands in their cramped homes every night from dusk to dawn; soldiers patrolling the unlit streets, frightened by their own shadows; children blinded by rubber bullets; parents shamed and beaten in front of their families; soldiers urinating on fences, shooting at rooftop water tanks just for kicks, chanting loud and offensive slogans, pounding on fragile tin doors to frighten children, confiscating papers, or dumping garbage in the middle of residential neighborhoods; border guards kicking over vegetable stands or closing borders at whim; bones broken; shootings and fatalities - a certain kind of madness.”
― Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics

“The interests of the minority must be safeguarded. That doesn't work in Africa. The African knows and understands one principle: winner takes all-and let the minority go to the wall. That's what will happen to the white settlers in Kenya if the British capitulate to the Mau Mau killers.”
― Wilbur Smith

“Remember this, little sister, that without the white man, we would still be living in grass huts. Look to the north and see the misery of those countries that have driven out the whites. No, my sister, I will keep the white man here - but one day he will work for me, Not I for him.”
― Wilbur Smith, Rage

“The interests of the minority must be safeguarded. That doesn’t work in Africa. The African knows and understands one principle: winner takes all—and let the minority go to the wall. That’s what will happen to the white settlers in Kenya if the British capitulate to the Mau Mau killers.”
― Wilbur Smith, Rage

“Before we commence this guided tour of Mozambiquan paradise of the proletariat, this shining gem of African socialism, will you bear with me while I give you a few facts and figures. Nobody protested, so he went on. Until 1975 Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. For almost five hundred years it had been under Portuguese control and had been a reasonably happy and prosperous community of some fifteen million souls. The Portugese unlike the British or German colonists had a relaxed attitude towards miscegenation and the result was a large mulatto population, and an official policy of 'Assimilado' under which any person of colour , if he attained certain civilised standards, was considered to be white and enjoyed Portugese nationality. It all worked very well, as indeed did most colonial administrations, especially those of the British.' 'Bullshit,' said Claudia demurely. 'That's limey propaganda. 'Limey?" Sean smiled thinly. 'Carefull, your prejudice is showing, nonetheless your average Indian or African living today in a former British colony is a damned sight worse off now than he was then. Certainly that goes one hundred times more for your average black man living in Mozambique.' 'At least they are free,' Claudia cut in, and Sean laughed. 'This is freedom? an economy managed under the well-known socialist principles of chaos and ruination which has resulted in a negative growth rate of up to ten per cent per annum every year since the Portuguese withdrawal, a foreign debt amounting to double the gross national product, a total breakdown in the education system, and only five per cent of children regularly attending a recognised school, one doctor per forty five thousand persons, only one person in ten with access to purified drinking water, infant mortality at 340 per 1000 births. The only worse countries in the world are Afghanistan and Angola, but as you say, at least they are free. In America, where everyone eats three huge meals a day, freedom may be a big deal, but in Africa a full belly counts a hell of alot more'. 'It can't be as bad as that,' she protested. 'No,' he agreed. It's a lot worse. I haven't mentioned two other factors, the civil war and aids. When the Portugese were pushed out, they handed over to a dictator named Samaro Machel and his Frelimo party. Machel was an avowed Marxist. He didn't believe in the nonsense of elections, and his rule was directly responsible for the present condition of the country, and for the emergence of the National Mozambiquan resistance or as it is known to its freinds and admirers, Renamo. Nobody knows much about it, what its objectives are, who its leaders are, all we know it that it controls most of the country, especially the north, and that it made up of a pretty ruthless bunch of characters.' 'Renamo is a South African front organisation, directed, supplied and controlled from Pretoria,' Claudia helped him out. 'Committed to the overthrow of sovereign government and the destabilisation of the southern continent.' 'Well done, ducky, ' Sean nodded approval. 'You've been studying the wisdom and erudition of the Organisation of African Unity and the non-aligned nations. You have even mastered their jargon. If only South Africa had the military and technological capacity to commit half the skulduggery it is accused of, it would not be simply the most powerful country in Africa.”
― Wilbur Smith, A Time to Die

“It's a well-known fact that the only way communism can be made to work is if you have capitalists to pay the bill and manage the show”
― Wilbur Smith, A Time to Die