71. Nelson Mandela Part 1- The History of Apartheid

Summary

Flipping Tables: Nelson Mandela Part 1 – The History of Apartheid

Host: Monte Mader
Date: August 10, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this profound and meticulously researched episode, Monte Mader explores the complex and brutal history of South African apartheid, the mechanisms of racial, economic, and theological oppression, and the global resonance of these themes today. Rather than focusing solely on Nelson Mandela, Monte sets the stage by unpacking the centuries of dispossession, colonial policy, religious manipulation, and violence that shaped South Africa. Mandela’s story (to be detailed in Part 2) is presented as inseparable from this wider historical context. With a focus on how language, law, religion, and power intertwine to uphold injustice -- and how these mechanisms repeat globally -- the episode is a clarion call to vigilance, activism, and moral clarity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Framing: Terrorism, Theology, and Table-Flipping

• Mandela and the Terrorist Label:
  Mandela remained on the U.S. terrorism watch list until 2008—decades after his presidency and Nobel Peace Prize—because both he and the ANC were officially considered terrorists long past apartheid's end (00:00).

  "That word terrorist is the reason this will be a two part series...we cannot understand what was done to Mandela without understanding what was done to the country." – Monte (01:20)

• Apartheid as Theology Before Policy:
  The white architects of apartheid justified segregation and domination as obedience to divine instruction, merging Christian nationalism with racial politics until state and church became indistinguishable (04:30).

  "Apartheid was a theology before it was a policy... That is not Christianity; that is a form of Christian nationalism." – Monte (04:50)

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Colonialism and the Myth of the “Empty Land”

• The False Narrative:
  South African textbooks (until the 1980s) promoted the lie that whites and Bantu-speaking Africans arrived simultaneously in an “empty” land, erasing millennia of indigenous history to justify land theft (23:15).
• Archaeological Evidence:
  San (Khoisan) peoples have lived in southern Africa for over 20,000 years, the Khoikhoi for 2,000, and Bantu-speaking farmers since at least 300-500 CE—well before Europeans arrived (25:20).

  "The land was not empty. The land was teeming." – Monte (28:15)

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Colonial Expansion, Genocide, and the Systematic Theft of Land (1652–1800s)

• Dutch East India Company: Initially instructed to trade peacefully, the Dutch quickly shifted to theft and slavery, leading to wars with the Khoikhoi and a brutal slave society (29:50–34:00).
• Commando Raids: White “trekboer” militias conducted genocidal raids, seizing land and children, and dehumanizing the San as “vermin”—a word choice designed to facilitate mass violence (39:10).
• Nine Frontier Wars: The Xhosa resisted for a century, but through military defeat, famine, manipulated prophecy, and legal trickery, lost almost all their land (42:45).

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British Takeover, Slavery, the Great Trek, and Theology of White Supremacy

• Abolition and Reaction (1830s-1840s):
  British removal of labor restrictions and the abolition of slavery led Afrikaner “Boers” to trek into the interior, forging the myth of the “chosen people” leaving “bondage" — an explicit Biblical reference (48:50).
  • Quote (52:20):
    “The placing of freed [blacks] on equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion...it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow beneath such a yoke.” – Anna Steenkamp, niece of Great Trek leader
• Blood River and Covenant Theology: Afrikaner victories over the Zulu interpreted as God’s endorsement, leading to holidays, monuments, and a narrative of divine racial destiny (56:00).

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Diamonds, Gold, and the Machinery of Racial Capitalism

• Diamonds (1867+) and Gold (1886+):
  Black labor was needed and controlled through scrip, contracts, housing compounds, and draconian laws to maximize profits (61:00).

  "The profitability of the country's dominant industry depended structurally on paying black workers as little as possible and preventing them from bargaining." – Monte (68:10)

• Color Bar: Segregation formalized; skilled jobs reserved for whites, black laborers are temporary sojourners by policy (71:00).
• Concentration Camps: Both Boer and black civilians suffered under British during the South African War, with tens of thousands dying in camps (75:00).

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Codification of Racial Oppression (1910–1948)

• 1913 Natives Land Act: Prohibited black land ownership beyond tiny “reserves”; 67% of the population confined to 7% of land (85:15).

  "Awakening on A Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself not actually a slave, but a pariah on the land of his birth." – Sol Plaatje (89:40)

• Color Bar, Urban Segregation, and Voting Rights: Systematic legal removal of black rights, consolidation of white power, and destruction of black farming (92:00–96:00).

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Apartheid: From Idea to System (1948+)

• National Party Victory (1948):
  Won election through rural gerrymandering, not popular majority, instituting Apartheid by minority over majority (102:20).
• Legal Framework:
  • Prohibition of interracial marriage and sex (104:10)
  • Population Registration Act: Arbitrary, destructive racial classification; families split (106:00)
  • Group Areas Act and Pass Laws: Forced removals, relocation, and daily humiliation
  • Bantu Education Act: Enforced inferior, limiting education for blacks (“There is no place for him in the European Community above the level of certain forms of labor.” – Hendrik Verwoerd, 117:20)

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Theology and Christian Nationalism’s Role

• Dutch Reformed Church: Provided the theological justification, mis-interpreting Biblical passages (Tower of Babel, Deuteronomy 32:8, Acts 17:26, “Curse of Ham”) to defend permanent racial separation (111:00).

  "Paul is not saying, hey guys, God drew our little borders... He is dismantling the very hierarchy the verse is now recruited to defend." – Monte (114:10)

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Banality and Bureaucracy of Evil

• The Bruderbond: A small, secret society coordinated Afrikaner nationalist policy across church, government, and media—showing how a few determined actors can control policy (124:10).
• Pseudo-Legal Atrocities: Forced removals of millions, arbitrary reclassification, and state violence all cloaked in law and administrative “neutrality.”

  "A civil servant can sign an order for the resettlement of a black spot without ever thinking the words, I am putting 8,000 people into a field with no homes." – Monte (158:10)

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Everyday Apartheid and Resistance

• Life Under Apartheid: Everything segregated—schools, hospitals, cemeteries, benches; 17 million arrested for “pass offenses”; forced removals create new graveyards of infant mortality and trauma (135:00–144:00).
• State Terror: Laws allowed indefinite detention, torture, and assassination. Anti-apartheid activism answered with brutal violence, censorship, and murder (146:00).
• Key Moments in Resistance:
  • Defiance Campaign (1952): Mass, non-violent protest (150:00)
  • Freedom Charter (1955): Vision for inclusive South Africa (153:00)
  • Women's March (1956): 20,000 march against pass laws (155:45)
  • Sharpeville Massacre (1960): Police kill 69 unarmed protesters, leading to global outrage and the banning of the ANC (157:00)
  • Soweto Uprising (1976): Schoolchildren massacred for protesting language policies; international spotlight, radicalization (163:20)
  • Steve Biko and Black Consciousness: Psychological liberation, leadership murdered (170:00)
  • United Democratic Front (1983–89): Mass coalition renders townships ungovernable, culminating in states of emergency and mass detention (174:00)

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The Power and Danger of Language

• Weaponized Terms:
  “Terrorist,” “agitator,” “communist,” “heathen,” “savage,” “vermin” — each label is used to dehumanize and justify violence (181:00).

  “Once that label lands, the labeled person's grievance no longer requires an answer...You don’t have a land dispute with vermin.” – Monte (182:10)

• Religious Framing:
  Dissidents labeled demonic; violence framed as religious obedience, making compromise or empathy a form of apostasy (185:10).

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Collapse and Lingering Impact

• End of Apartheid:
  Economic crisis, international sanctions, and sustained protest finally force reform; apartheid laws repealed through the late 1980s; Mandela released in 1990 (196:00).

• Lasting Inequality & White Victimhood Myths:
  Despite limited land reforms, white South Africans still own 72% of farmland; myths of “white persecution” weaponized for American political purposes (205:10).

  “Current ownership patterns are direct downstream product of statutory racial dispossession, not accumulated purchase.” – Monte (208:40)

• U.S. Response:
  Reagan and Thatcher resisted sanctions, labeling the ANC as terrorists, only relenting when financial interests were threatened (190:00).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Apartheid was a theology before it was a policy... that distinction matters and this series will keep drawing it, because the same Bible produced Desmond Tutu.” (04:45)
• “You are not superior if you rig the game. If you’re superior because you don’t let anyone compete… you’re weak.” (90:10)
• “The best leaders I have ever met have all been women.” (158:50)
• “Are you mad yet? Because I am.” (94:10)
• “The word changes, but the job doesn’t. 'Heathen,' 'terrorist,' 'agitator,' each word is designed to make the person’s grievances unspeakable.” (181:00)
• “Once that transfer is made, the question stops being, what are they asking for? It becomes, what are we going to do about them?” (182:40)
• “Desmond Tutu and H.F. Verwoerd were quoting from the same book. One of them built the machine, one of them chaired the reckoning. The text didn’t change. The interpretations did.” (189:30)
• “Black South Africans own less land, not because they’re not capable, not because they’re not smart. It was literally stripped from them systematically by law for years.” (209:10)
• “If you stand by when they come for trans people or immigrants or black people, it will eventually come for you.” (159:00)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00–07:30: Mandela, the terror label, and theological foundations of apartheid
• 23:00–34:00: The “empty land” myth and colonial dispossession
• 39:00-46:00: Genocidal frontier violence and dehumanizing language
• 52:00–58:00: The Great Trek, Theology of White Destiny, and Blood River
• 61:00–75:00: Diamonds, Gold, and the Machinery of Racial Profit
• 85:00–96:00: Land Acts, Color Bar, political exclusion
• 102:00–112:00: 1948 election and codification of Apartheid
• 111:00–117:00: Christian Nationalism and manipulated scripture
• 133:00–144:00: Forced removals, daily humiliations, and mass arrests
• 146:00–150:00: State violence: detention, torture, assassination
• 150:00–159:00: Patterns of resistance: Defiance, Freedom Charter, Sharpeville
• 163:00–170:00: Soweto Uprising & Steve Biko
• 181:00–189:00: Language as a weapon; labels and social death
• 196:00–209:00: End of Apartheid, land issues, and U.S. response

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Flippin’ Takeaways (224:00)

Monte distills the episode into five critical lessons:

1. “Empty Land” was a manufactured myth to justify theft.
2. Apartheid was an economic system with a racial rationale, not the other way around.
3. The church created and sanctified apartheid, not merely tolerated it.
4. “Terrorist” is often a procedural label, not a description.
5. Every escalation was a response to a closed door: peaceful alternatives were outlawed, not simply abandoned.

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Final Notes & Tone

Monte’s tone is by turns scholarly, passionate, irreverent, and furious—especially in the face of hypocrisy, moral cowardice, and the stubborn persistence of white supremacist and Christian nationalist ideas. She layers history with pointed commentary, drawing parallels to contemporary U.S. rhetoric and policy and urging listeners to recognize and resist patterns of injustice, especially those justified by religious or nationalist language.

Memorable signoff:

"Challenge dogma. Challenge ideologies. Challenge the words and the labels that people put on you or anybody else."

Next Episode:
Part 2 will focus on Nelson Mandela’s life and personal journey.

For full resources and ad-free content: patreon.com/montemater

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Transcript

[A]

Nelson Mandela was removed from the United States terrorism watch list on July 1st of 2008. He was 89 years old. He had been President of South Africa. He had won the Nobel Peace Prize 15 years earlier. Until the bill was signed, every visit he made to the United States required a specific waiver from the Secretary of State because the paperwork of the State Department classified him as a terrorist. The African National Congress was designated a terrorist organization by the United States government in the 1980s, and it stayed on that list for more than 20 years after apartheid ended. Margaret Thatcher called the ANC a typical terrorist organization in 1987. Dick Cheney voted against a Congressional resolution calling for Mandela's release in 1986 and defended that vote as late as 2000. That word terrorist is the reason this will be a two part series. And it is the reason part one is not about Nelson Mandela at all. Because we cannot understand what was done to Mandela without understanding what was done to the country and the history leading up to it. We cannot understand what was done to the country starting in 1948, which is where most of the stories begin. Apartheid was not an aberration. It was a codification of 300 years of what people were already practicing. It was the moment a system had already stolen land and labor and cattle and language and the names of people who lived there, sat down, wrote the theft into a statute, gave it a name and blessed it in church. Part one, we're going to talk about the machine. We're going to talk about colonialism, the history of South Africa, who built it where, what it did to human beings, and the thread that runs all of it that leads us into apartheid. And part two is going to be about the man who helped break them free. One more thing before we really jump in, because it's the spine of both of these episodes. Apartheid was a theology before it was a policy. The white men who designed it did not believe they were committing a crime. They believed they were obeying an instruction. Their churches taught them that God had divided humanity into separate nations and appointed the boundaries of their habitation. That this division was permanent and holy and that erasing it was rebellion against divine order. They had a proof text, they preached it and they legislated from it. It is very tied to the theology of the time. And it made its way into the legislation and the justification of the actions that would follow. Now, that is not Christianity. That is a form of Christian nationalism, a religion fused to a racial and political order until loyalty to the nation and loyalty to God become indistinguishable. From each other and the church becomes an organ of the state. That distinction matters and this series will keep drawing it because the same Bible produced Desmond Tutu. And that's what this whole show is about, about flipping tables, flipping narratives. Let's start talking about South Africa and Nelson Mandela in this two part series on flipping tables. Hello and welcome back to Flipping Tables. Welcome to all the new listeners. Thank you for the recent shares to the show, the recent reviews and comments I've been getting, so appreciate it. My name is Monty Mader. If you stumbled upon me outside of social media, I am a former Christian nationalist who now tries to work to make the world better, more sane. I teach a lot about the Bible, a lot about history, so that we can all make better decisions that are not rooted in ancient prejudices or in really bad translations of the Bible or the abuse of other people. Not a fan of misusing that. A couple announcements before I jump in today. The first is again, thank you so much to my Patreon supporters. You're the reason that this show exists. Patreon.com Monty material has been a wonderful place for community. There's going to be some more pop ups coming up in August and if you've been following me on social media, you know that as of the time of this release, I will be doing the Women's Walk Across America, walking from Jefferson City, Missouri to St. Louis, Missouri, helping participate and rally support around a woman named Emily Waugh who decided she couldn't sit still in her home. And even though she's a mom of two, she needed to protest that what we are seeing is not normal in the world. So she created an extraordinary event to hopefully encourage ordinary people to get out of the house and move. You can follow my walk there or get involved with it because this walk will go all the way till November 8th. You can go to womenswalkacrossamerica.com to find me there. I will be doing a Q and A meet and greet in Jefferson city and in St. Louis during those times. So if you're not familiar with my website go to montemater.com, go to the contact page and if you sign up for my newsletter you will get all the up to date information about any events that I'm holding um, in the upcoming weeks. Also, we just finished the Bible study series around how we got the Bible in the Old Testament. We went book by book. Where did they come from? When were they written? Who wrote it? Amazing series. I was so impressed with people being so attentive and so passionate about the topic. I'm taking a summer break from those Bible studies. As a reminder, the Bible studies are always free. Always, always, always. They will always be free to you, but they are kind of my, my, my labor of love, if you will. They will always be free. The replays are always available on Patreon. That is a benefit that users get over there. But I wanted to talk about the upcoming lessons that will resume in September. On September 2nd at 6pm Central, we're doing purity culture, chewed gum, sex, women and purity culture and the Bible. And then starting on September 16, we will do how we got the Bible. So the New Testament books, there will be multiple series. It took us five lessons to get through the Old Testament. The New Testament will probably be, I would imagine, three of those lessons. You can go to Crowdcast Iohnti Mater to follow that page. And then anytime I schedule a class, you'll get it. You can RSVP for the lessons. Again, they are always free. There is always a 24 hour replay so that if you can't make it at that time, you can watch it whenever. And I'm gonna jump in. These next two podcast episodes are a little bit long. Um, I was really passionate. I've. I've been working on this script for a very long time of. Really passionate about speaking about it. One of the things about how I grew up is I was never taught about black leaders. I was never taught about black history. I still know so little about Africa as a continent and I'm working on that. And so often, you know, I, I did an interview with Jane Elliott last year and she talked about, she's like, we, she's like, of course you have racism you have to deal with. You were raised in the US it would be weird if you didn't. And I realize how big the gaps in my knowledge are. And I've been so inspired by Nelson Mandela's story since learning about it really about five or six years ago, learning about his story in depth. And I wanted to spend some time not just on his story because he's inspiring, but also because I think the story of South Africa and Mandela are so reflective of so many themes that we talk about here. Just war, colonialism, racism, white supremacy, whitewashed history, who gets to who's a hero, hero versus who's a terrorist, how language is often weaponized against those who resist unfair regimes. I think it's just so reflective of so much that's going on right now that I really wanted to dive in like this. Full script. And again, we're doing half and half because otherwise it would be a three hour episode. This full script is 96 pages long. So that's why we're doing it and diving in and then very excited. I have a two part here for Nelson Mandela. And then in three weeks I'm doing an episode on mistranslations in the Bible. And that one's going to be fun. All right, let's talk about South Africa. The version taught in South African schools well into the 1980s held that white settlers moving north and Bantu speaking Africans moving south arrived in the interior at roughly the same moment, meeting somewhere around the Fish river in an empty country which neither had a prior claim to. That was actually in textbooks. That was the official government yearbooks of South Africa. It was the historical foundation of the entire legal architecture in a land of dispossession. Because if nobody was there, well, then we didn't take it anything. We just, you know, it wasn't being used. Nobody was here. The archaeology, however, says otherwise. Hunter gatherer communities, the people the Dutch would call the Bos and who are known today as the Son, have occupied southern Africa for more than 20,000 years. The Rock art in Draskenberg and the Cedarburg runs tens of thousands of individual paintings, some of them thousands of years old. Pastoralist communities hurting fat tailed sheep and longhorn cattle. The Koikoi were established at the cape by roughly 2000 years ago. Also brief note. I have a whole pronunciation guide to this. I do practice these. I do have pronunciations. If something is mispronounced or sounds really rough with accent, it is not done out of disrespect. It is. It is me trying, but only having so much time to review these pronunciations. Bantu speaking agriculturalists working iron and farming sorghum and millet were settled in the Limpopo valley by around 300 to 500 CE. More more than a thousand years before, a European ship anchored at the Cape. By 1220, the Kingdom of Manpungubwe on the Limpopo River. Limpopo, near the modern border with Zimbabwe and Botswana, was a stratified state trading gold and ivory into an Indian Ocean network that reached all the way to China. Archaeologists working the site recovered a gold foil rhinoceros from a royal grave. The stonewalled settlements of Tulamela and the northern Kruger of Bocconi and the Mupu Malanga of hundreds of sites across the high felt, our physical record of centuries of dense agricultural settlement. By the 17th century, the region held the Kosa in the southeast, the Zulu, the Swat Sea, the Nede Bella and the across the eastern seaboard and the Highveld, the Suthu, the Swatna across the interior plateau, the Venda and the Songa in the north, the Koikoi and the San in the west and southwest. Chiefdoms, kingdoms, councils, courts, inheritance law, cattle based economies, iron production and long distance trade. The land was not empty. The land was. It was teeming. This empty land thesis was manufactured, taught and defended for one purpose. To convert the robbery of a nation and its empires and its wealth into quote discovery. On April 6, 1652, Yon von Rebake anchored in Table Bay with three ships, roughly 90 people, acting on instructions from the Dutch East India Trading Company, the largest corporation on earth. We just talked about them in the opium wars. A joint stock enterprise with its own army, its own navy and the legal authority to wage war and sign treaties in its own name. The instructions were pretty narrow. Build a fort, plant a garden, establish a station where ships on the Amsterdam to Batvia run can take fresh water and vegetables and reduce the scurvy that was killing the crews at sea on that very long trip. The orders were explicit that this was not a colony. No war was to be made on local inhabitants. The cattle were to be obtained by fair trade with the koikoi. Within five years. The company abandoned every one of those restrictions. In 1657, the VOC released nine employees from their contracts and granted them farms along the Lisbeak River. The first free Burkers. The land they were granted was Koikoi grazing lands. It had not been sold, ceded or discussed. In 1658, the first slave ships arrived the AMS fort, carrying enslaved people taken from captured Portuguese vessel bound from Angola, the Hasselt and the Dahomey. The Cape became a slave society within six years of its founding and it would remain one for 176 years, importing an estimated 63,000 enslaved people from Madagascar, Mozambique, India, Ceylon and Indiana and Indonesian area. By 1659, the Koikoi understood what was happening and went to War. The First Koikoi Dutch War ran through 1660, the second from 1673 to 1677. In the negotiation that followed the First War, the Koikoi leader Doman asked Dutch a question recorded in Van Riebeeck's own journal. If the Dutch had come to trade, why were they taking the best land and what would the Koikois cattle eat? Van Riebeek's answer, also recorded, was that the land had been won by the sword in A just war and would be retained. Van Reebeck's other solution was a hedge. He planted a boundary of bitter almond and thorn along the eastern edge of the settlement to keep the Koikoi herders and their cattle out of the colony. Sections of it are still alive in the Kirchenbotch Botanical Garden. The first physical border to draw, drawn to separate people by origin at the southern tip of Africa, went into the ground in 1660, and it was a plant. What guns did not accomplish, disease certainly did. The 1713 smallpox epidemic, carried ashore in laundry from passing ship, tore through the Koikoi communities. With no acquired immunity, mortality in some groups was almost 90%. Further epidemics followed in 1755 and 1767. Within a century of N. Riebeck's landing, the Koikoi social order in the Western Cape had effectively ceased to exist as an independent society. The society, the survivors were absorbed into the colonial economy as servants and herders under labor regulations that bound them to the farms they worked on, restricted their movement, and made their children liable to indenture until the age of 25. That legal category, a nominally free worker who cannot leave, cannot move without a pass, and whose children can be bound to the employer, is invented at the cape in the 18th century. It is the direct ancestor of the 20th century past system that we will get into later. The paperwork of apartheid is much older than the years that we typically prescribe to it. By the 1700s, the colony was expanding beyond the company's control. Trek bowers, semi nomadic white pastoralists pushed east and north with cattle and wagons, claiming Lone Farms, 6,000 acres, running out the grazing and moving on ahead of them. The frontier was not aligned. It was a zone of raiding, negotiation, intermarriage, and a lot of violence. The instrument of frontier expansion was the commando, an ad hoc mounted militia of armed burgers raised to recover stolen cattle and punish resistance. Commandos operated with minimal oversight and routinely returned from punitive expeditions with captured children, who were then distributed among participants as indentured labor. Colonial records from the 1770s onward document Commando expeditions against the San communities in the Northern Cape that were explicitly exterminatory in intent. This is genocide. They're going in and wiping out villages. Historians estimate the San population of the Cape interior fell by tens of thousands over the 18th century through a combination of combat, violence, shooting, starvation as game and water were taken, and, of course, capture. And this is where the word gets manufactured. The people being shot were classified by colonial correspondence as vermin in the US Towards Native Americans, it was savages Barbarians, South Africa, they're vermin, right? You have to dehumanize people so that you can exterminate them and steal from them and feel justified. The Dutch term used in official documents for hunting them is the same one that's used for hunting game. The colonial record does not disguise this. It states it. They didn't see a problem with it. Nine wars were fought between the Cape Colony and The Xhosa between 1779 and 1879, the longest sustained military resistance to colonial conquest anywhere in Africa. The Xhosa lost land in every one of those wars. The Fish river, the Kaiskama and the K. Each treaty moved the boundary further east, and each new boundary was breached by settlers within a decade, who, because historically European nations not great at honoring treaties, it turned out at this time, and when the America would come become the United States of America, we were not good at honoring those treaties either because again, the whole ideology is that white people are superior and so therefore anything who, anyone who resists them is a terrorist. They're a danger, they're a threat, they're a savage, they're vermin. And once you've successfully dehumanized your opponent, well, then you can do anything you want to them. The final destruction of the Chosa independence did not come from a battle. In April of 1856, a teenage girl named Nongawuse and at the Gara river reported a prophecy. If the Xhosa destroyed their cattle and their grain, their ancestors would rise, the dead would return, and the whites would be swept into the sea. Eek. Over the following 15 months, a movement swept the Xhosa nation. An estimated 400,000 cattle were slaughtered. Fields were left unplanted, and it turns out the dead did not return, but famine did. Roughly 40,000 Xhosa people starved to death. The population of British Khafre Ria fell from about 105,000 to under 27,000. Survivors walked into the colony looking for food and were signed into, you guessed it, indentured labor contracts. Governor Sir George Gray used the catastrophe to seize land, break up the chiefdoms, and settle the empty districts with white farmers. Because of course they did. Of course they did. How many times has a. A prophecy or some kind of spiritual command either been used to exterminate people or get people to do crazy things? Historians still argue about what the cattle killing was. Millenarian religious movement. Was it mass psychological collapse under colonial pressure? Or as some evidence suggests, a rational response to a lung sickness epidemic that had arrived on Dutch ships in 1853 and was destroying the herds. We don't know for sure. Could have been this prophecy, could have been the pressure. It also could have been a sickness that was killing the cattle and they were trying to get ahead of it. What happened happened, and we're not 100% sure of the reason for it. In 1795, a British fleet took the Cape from the Dutch. It changed hands twice more and was formally ceded to Britain in 1814. The British brought their own version of the same project. Four to five thousand settlers landed in the Eastern Cape in 1820, deliberately placed on the Xhosa frontier as a human buffer. They also brought legal reforms, reforms the Dutch descended farmers experienced as an existential attack. Ordinance 50 of 1828 removed the past requirements and labor restrictions on the koikoi and gave people of color at the Cape formal league, formal legal equality with the white people. In 1833, the Imperial Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire at the Cape. It took effect on December 1st of 1834, followed by a four year apprenticeship period that ended in 1838. Roughly 39,000 enslaved people at the Cape were freed. Their owners were compensated, and the compensation was payable only in London, which meant most Cape farmers sold their claims to agents at a steep discount. So they felt robbed twice. So they felt like they lose their enslaved labor, but they also don't get compensated like they're supposed to be. So many issues with so many levels of ick. Humans can be, you know, capable of such incredible things. And we can also be the absolute worst. Between 1835 and 1840, something between 12,000 and 15,000 Dutch descended farmers with their families, their servants, their wagons left the Cape Colony and moved into the interior. This is called the Great Trek. Becomes the founding myth of Africana nationalism. It's this Exodus narrative kind of mirrored after the Exodus narrative in the Bible. A chosen people leaving bondage under a hostile empire to find a promised land. Fuck off. Anna Steenkump, a niece of one of the track leaders, left one of the most quoted explanations of why they went. She named the emancipation of the slaves, and specifically, and these are her words, the placing of freed on equal footing with Christians contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion. Eek. So that it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow beneath such a yoke. Sound familiar? That language kind of seems like some of the things we hear now, directed especially at, especially the Muslim community. So the theology, the economics, the politics all get wrapped into one. And the complaint is that racial Equality is the problem. It's unfair, it's unjust and it's against God. According to this claim, that sentence was written in 1876 about events in 1834. It is 114 years before the national party wins an election and the doctrine, ooh this fully formed by that point. On December 16, 1838, a four trekker commando of roughly 470 men under Andres Pretorias Metazulu army at the Ngome river in what is now KwaZulu Natal. The Trekkers formed a lachar of wagons on a defensible bend with a cannon. The Zulu attacked with short stabbing spears across open ground. Around 3,000 Zulu soldiers were killed. Three trekkers were wounded, none died. The river ran red and the whites named it Blood River. Before the battle the commando swore a covenant that if God delivered the enemy into their hands they and their descendants would keep the day as a sabbath forever and build a church in his honor. That's what God wants us to do. Wants us to steal native lands and kill them and then build a church. That's what it is. They kept it. December 16th became Dingain's day, then the day of the vow, a religious public holiday on which Afrikaners gathered to commemorate the moment God ratified their claim to the land. We see such a history of this. You see this a lot in the Bible too is this idea of might makes right where well if we win, clearly God wanted us to win. It's often a justification too for supporting horrible people in leadership, especially if they have a lot of money because it's like, well I mean it's, and it's a logical extension of prosperity gospel, right? If, if we believe that, oh well if you do the right things, God's going to bless you. Then if someone is extremely successful on earth and they have tons of wealth and power, well then God's blessing them. So God's blessing them for a reason? No, sometimes it's because they're willing to lie, steal, kill to get more money or to get power and they'll do whatever it takes. And very often they're the worst people. But this is kind of an extension of that. This is a South African version of hey we won. Which means God wants us to have it. The four trucker monument outside of Pretoria opened in 1949 is engineered so that noon on December 16 a shaft of sunlight falls through an aperture of the dome onto the cenotaph inscribed Ont Virju Sweet Africa. We for the South Africa a national holiday, a monument, an annual solar alignment Built to commemorate a military victory, understood as a covenant between white people and God. And that's what we're dealing with. And this is why, when we get to part two, when SI's way chooses the date for its first operation, it chooses December 16th. So remember that date for both this episode and the next one. In 1867, in a farm near Hopetown on the Orange River, a 15 year old named Erasmus Jacobs picked up a pebble. It was 21.25 carats. Oh boy. In 1869, an 83.5 carat stone, the star of South Africa, was traded out of the same district. In 1871, diggers hit the pipe at Colesberg Copje. And within two years, 50,000 people were living on the diamond fields of what became the Kimberley, digging a hole that would eventually be the largest excavated by hand on the planet. Diamonds change the economics of the subcontinent and with them, the purpose of black labor. The early diggings were open to all comers. Black and white diggers held claim side by side. That wasn't going to last, right? If we know anything about history, what white, your white people aren't going to allow that to happen. And I say this like very sarcastically because I'm trying not to get angry this early in the episode. As claims consolidated and the digging went deeper, capital took over. Of course. By 1888, Cecil John Rhodes De Beers Consolidated Mines controlled effectively the entire South African diamond output. Consolidation required a workforce that was what, cheap and controllable. And because uncut diamonds are small and portable, searchable, the answer was a closed compound. From 1885, black mine workers at Kimberly were housed in fenced guarded barracks for the duration of their contracts. Forbidden to leave strips searched on exit, denied the right to bring their families. White workers got to go home at the end of a shift. The migrant labor system. Men recruited from rural districts hundreds of miles away, housed in single sex compounds, contracted for fixed terms, returned home when the contract ended. Is invented in the diamond fields in the 1880s and is the central labor institution of South Africa for the next hundred years. It is the reason apartheid's architects would later insist black black South Africans were temporary sojourners in white cities. The rage I feel the more I live live, the more I learn history. It's so infuriating and, and it's not so much like I'm not holding people responsible now for what happened then. What I'm holding you responsible for is the people that want to deny the truth. They don't want to talk about it. They don't even want to acknowledge it as wrong. The fact that we have freaking okay, tangent right now. We have fricking conservative creators online pastors saying slavery wasn't that big of a deal, slavery wasn't that bad. And some of them are defending slavery Now I've got a fucking problem with you now. I'm blaming you because you can't even bring yourself to tell the truth because it makes some like part of you feel guilty because you're white. I don't. I personally do not feel guilty about slavery. Why I wasn't alive. Also, I call it out for the horrific crime against humanity that it is. Right. I can, I can tell the truth. Right? I'm. What am I protecting? Who? I don't want to protect those people and their reputations. Well, they weren't all bad. First of all, I didn't say that abolitionists were a real thing. But like, what. I don't get it. I don't understand why the, the white people's guilt of like. Well, this makes me feel guilty. It doesn't make me feel guilty. It makes me feel mad. Makes me feel mad that people did that to other humans. That's. Anyways, back on Track. In 1886, a prospector named George Harrison found gold in an outcrop on the farm Lug Lacte on a ridge called the Vit Vosterant. And this was the largest gold deposit ever discovered. Within a decade, Johannesburg had gone from a grassland to a city of 100,000. The Ransgold was different from the gold rushes of California or Australia. It was low grade ore in a reef dipped steeply and had to be followed thousands of feet underground. Extraction required enormous capital, deep level engineering and cyanide processing. And the price of gold was fixed by the international standard, which meant mining houses could not raise prices to cover the costs. The only variable they could control was, you guessed it, wages. This is the single most important economic fact in South African history and it explains all the history that we're going to go into. The profitability of the country's dominant industry depended structurally on paying black workers as little as possible and preventing them from bargaining. Every subsequent law, the past system, the color bar, the land acts, the homelands, the prohibition on African trade unions served that requirement. This has always been about profit. We see that with our corporations now, right when you, if you were to rob a rich person, you're going to go to jail for white collar crime, for fraud, embezzlement. But if they rob you of your wages, it's business that's exactly what's happening here, right? The justification is exactly the same. The Chamber of Mines was founded in 1889 and immediately began coordinating recruitment to eliminate competition for labor between mining houses, which is to say, prevent wages from rising. Another sidebar I see so much conservative talking points about, especially because, you know, people like Zoran Ramdani ran as democratic socialist. We've got a lot more of this conversation coming up where people are like, hey, American taxes should pay for Americans to have things, right? Americans should have nice things, and people are losing their shit. We see a lot of people saying, oh, we're going to be communists. We haven't been able to raise the minimum wage. We've been fighting for years for livable. We can't even get corporations to pay people livable wages. And you're worried about a communist overthrow plot? Seriously, you're chasing a paper unicorn, brother. Anyways, real black wages on the gold mines in 1969 were, by several economists, calculations lower than they had been in 1911. So 58 years later, they're lower. Not. And not in relative terms like not adjusted for inflation. Flat out lower. Racism supplied the justification because of course, cheap labor was the point, profit is the goal. And of course, all of this is always bathed in religious language. Britain and Boer republics fought twice over the interior. The first war was from 1880 to 1881 ended in a Boer victory at Majuba Hill and a restoration of Transvaal self government. The second began on October 11, 1899 and was fought over gold. The South African War of 1899-1902 was the most expensive war Britain fought between Napoleon and 1914. Some 450,000 Imperial troops were deployed against roughly 60,000 Boer fighters. After Boer's shift to guerrilla operations in 1900, Lord Kitchener adopted a strategy of systematic destruction. Burning farms, killing livestock and clearing the civilian population off the land and into campsite camps. Yes, man, concentration camps have been around for a long time. Approximately 30,000 farmhouses were destroyed. The countryside was emptied. The camps, these camps are where the phrase concentration camp kind of enters modern usage approximately to how we would understand this. You could think of this as displacement camps or, I don't know, the modern detention center, sugarcoating of it. By the end of the war, around 28,000 Boer civilians had died in them. Roughly 22,000 of them children under 16 or mostly of measles, typhoid, dysentery and overcrowded tent camps with inadequate rations. Emily Hobhouse, a British welfare campaigner who toured the camps in 1901 published a report that forced a government inquire inquiry that made the camps a scandal in Britain. And there's a second set of camps that most telling. Skip. Black South Africans, farm laborers, tenants and their families were cleared off the same land. They were interned at a separate camp system of at least 66 camps. The record death toll is 14,154. Historians consider record so incomplete that the true figure is likely well over 20,000 people. Rations in the black camps were lower. Inmates were required to work. Hobhouse's inquiry did not surveil these camps. And the British government did not publish their statistics with the same care because they didn't want anyone to know. The war ended with the Treaty of vereniging in May 31. On May 31 of 1902, Article 8 is one sentence long and it decided the next 90 years. Here we go. You ready? The question of granting the franchise to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self government. Okay. Black South Africans had supported the British in large numbers, many under the explicit expectation that imperial victory would bring political rights. They this was out loud. This was not oh, I think they're going to give us. This was something that was discussed. Article 8 deferred the question until after the defeated Boer republics had been given self government. Which meant in practice deferring it to the very people that had guaranteed. That had guaranteed to refuse it. Right. So the people that are already refusing equal rights get to make that decision. The British bought reconciliation with the Africanors by trading away the franchise of African majority. The act of Union came into force May 31st, 1910. Four colonies became one country. The vote was restricted to white men everywhere except the Cape which retained a non racial qualified franchise on a common roll. A provision that would be dismantled in 1936 for Africans and and 1956 for colored voters. And we'll get into this separation later but. But colored in South Africa in apartheid was a specific category of people that we'll define later. The South African Native National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein in January 8, 1912. In direct response, Pixlika Isaica Sema convened it. John Langali Ballela Dube was elected its first president. Sol Plachi was its first Secretary General. It renamed itself the African National Congress in 1923. It was founded by lawyers, teachers, ministers and chiefs. And for its first four decades it petitioned, published and sent delegations to London and asked. On June 19 of 1913, the Union Parliament passed the Natives Land Act. The act prohibited Africans from buying Lease and. Or in any way acquiring land outside of its designated reserves. It prohibited whites from buying lands inside the reserves. The reserves amounted to about 7% of the surface of South Africa for roughly 67% of the population. So, yeah, oh, you can, you can buy land. It's just on these reserves over here. Now, they make up 67% of the population and only have 7% of the surface of South Africa to split between them. The native trust and land act of 1936 raised that figure to 13.6%, and even that allocation was never fully delivered. The act also outlawed sharecropping and labor tenancy in the free state, which destroyed a functioning class of independent African farmers, thousands of families who had been producing surplus grain on rented land and outcompeting white farmers in local markets. Which was the actual complaint, right? They were out competing white farmers, and they were like, you got to stop them. I don't want the competition. Were evicted with their stock and put on the roads in the middle of a highfeld winter. Sol Plachi traveled the country documenting it and published native life in South Africa in 1916. His opening line is the most quoted sentence in South African political writing. Awakening on A Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself not actually a slave, but a pariah on the land of his birth. That's truly how they were made into by law, and most of it because the white Africaners wanted all the good land. They wanted most of the land. They wanted the wealth. They didn't want competition in farming. And so in industries where many of these African farmers would beat them out, edge them out, they decided to pass laws that meant they couldn't compete anymore. By the way, you're not superior if you rig the game. If you're superior because you don't let anyone compete like women or people of color, you're not actually superior. You're weak. As he recorded families sleeping beside rows with dying animals because it was a criminal offense for a white farmer to let them stop on his land except as servants. He recorded infants dying of exposure and being buried at night in secret because burial required permission to be on someone's property. The 1913 Land act was the foundation stone. Everything after it just built, the building moving up to the sky. It converted a majority population into a landless labor reserve by statute. And it fixed the ratio 13% of the country for the overwhelming majority of its people that would define South African life until 1994. The land in question in South Africa today is still the same question from 1913. The legislation kept coming. The Mines and works act of 1911 established the statutory color bar reserving skilled mining jobs for white people. Right? No, we want the good paying jobs. Yeah, they might be better at this job, but we want it. Don't let them work here. God. So pathetic. The Native Urban areas Act of 1923 established segregated urban locations and formalized influx control. The 1922 Rand Revolt and armed uprising by white mine workers against the employment of black workers in semi skilled jobs put down by artillery and aircraft with over 200 dead was fought under a banner that read workers of the world Unite and fight for a white South Africa. Are you mad yet? Because I am. The settlement that followed entrenched the color bar by law. The 1927 Immorality act criminalized sex between white and black people. Again, it was always these small government people, right, that are like, it's the will of God. Not anything to do with my own personal insecurity and prejudices. Herzog's 1936 representation of natives act removed African voters in the Cape from the common roll after 83 years. But none of this was apartheid. Yet technically, all of it was in place before the party that invented the word took office. And before I dive into the National Party at Prayer, I'm going to take my first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you would like these episodes ad free and bonus content pop ups with me and the replays of the Bible study, you can subscribe to patreon.com montemater this episode is supported by FX's the Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties and excess. At its center is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's the Shards, now streaming on Hulu. So I'm going to talk about the theology that led to what happened in the 1948 election. The Dutch Reformed Church was the dominant church of Afrikaans speaking South Africa. Its membership overlapped almost entirely with the national parties. Critics call it D National Party in Gibed, the National Party at Prayer. That was not a metaphor about tone. Cabinet ministers were elders. Theologians drafted policy. The church supplied the moral vocabulary the state legislated in. If you remember we talked about before, where corporations would buy sermons in the United States and there was a lot of ministers or serving in political roles and politics is writing theology back and forth. It's exactly the same. The doctrinal path runs like this. You might have learned over the course of flipping tables that a lot of organized religion is manipulation for power and politic. In 1857, the NGKC Synod considered whether black and white converts should take communion together. Scripture and church order said yes, right? Remember, Jesus is a brown guy who has a gospel for the world, for everyone. You know, that's. That's what that was teaching, you know, welcome the Gentiles. Paul preaches to the Gentiles, all races. Bring them in. The Sina ruled the practice should continue. But that was where the weakness of some members made it necessary. Separate congregations could hold separate services. It was framed as a temporary pastoral accommodation to human frailty. Like, oh, well, you know, you can't do this right now. Then you can hold a separate service. Within a generation, that accommodation became structure. Separate mission churches were established for Black members in 1881, for colored members, for Indian members. By the 20th century, one denomination had become four, sorted by race. Because there is nothing more Christian than segregating people. By race. I mean, I mean clearly in the. In. In what the three, verse 14, it clearly says that. And the concession made for the week had become the doctrine of the strong. Can you imagine being so pathetic and frail that someone having like a different skin color bothers you this much? Where you are so afraid of them competing with you. You don't want them in the workforce, you don't want them in public life. You're so afraid that your crush might fall in love with them that you don't. You don't think they should date anybody in your race. And you're bothered. You are. You have your pantaloons in such a bunch that you can't worship with them. When you say you believe in a God that loves the world. I cannot. I. I can't imagine being that weak. I sure can't. Within a generation, the accommodation had become the structure again. Separate missions. Now there's different churches sorted by race. The theological justification was assembled from three places. And I promise you that you have heard some of these before because people in the US use them as well. Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel. God scatters humanity, confuses their languages. Read as a curse in most Christian and is a story about human arrogance in. In basically almost every telling of it. It was read at the Cape as a divine institution of separate nations. With the corollary that reversing the scattering is rebellion. God scattered us on purpose. If you bring us together, you're rebelling. Against God. It doesn't say that. That's not the point of the story. Also, people weren't actually building a tower to the sky. Deuteronomy 32. 8 says, when the Most High divided the nations, their inheritance. When he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people. And most of all. Acts 17:26, from one man. This is Paul in Athens, by the way, from one man he made all the nations that they should inhabit the whole earth and marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. This carries so much weight in, in Jim Crow, slavery, apartheid. Paul is not saying, hey guys, God drew our little borders of our land, which men did that? And this is where he wants us to stay forever. That's not what that means. What Paul is saying is that God has created humankind to fill the earth, and in his knowledge and wisdom knew how long the empires would be on the earth. He knew where they would live. He knew where they would be. It is not a limitation to cut people out. When you're reading these passages and you hear people talking about this, always ask, who does this benefit? Who does it hurt? And number two, my favorite question when I'm reading, because I love reading the Bible and studying this stuff, it just, it really excites me. I love learning. But the second question I always ask is, does it sound like a dude wrote that or does it sound like God wrote that? And when someone translates something to me, I'm like, does that sound like something a good God would say? Or does that sound like something a dude would say? And of course, but of course these verses get used to justify this mistreatment. Robbing people of their livelihoods, not letting them work, stealing their land, stealing their political power. This was preached from Africana's pulpits for decades, quoted in Synod reports, cited in parliamentary debate, read in the original. Paul is making an anti nationalist argument to a Greek audience convinced of its own racial superiority. And he's so literally, Paul is arguing against nationalism. And that verse constantly gets plucked and used for nationalist arguments. And the Greeks had a very high opinion of themselves, of themselves. And Paul is addressing that. He is dismantling the very hierarchy the verse is now recruited to defend. The first half of the sentence is the argument apartheid theology built its entire house on. The subordinate clause. Paul is arguing, we all come from one man. We are all the same human race. God knows about us all. We're all part of this picture. There was a fourth text, cruder and more popular than the official. Again, you've heard this before too, because the Mormons had a spin on this. A lot of Christian fundamentalists had a spin on this. The so called curse of ham in Genesis 9, in which Noah curses Canaan to be the servant of servants. Nothing in the text says anything about race or Africa. It has been used as the standard scriptural defense of slavery in the Americas. It was circulated widely in South Africa as folk theology. So essentially when the curse of ham. So when ham gets cursed for seeing his father's nakedness, what people have said. And again, this passage says nothing about race. Nothing. But so many fundamentalist doctrines in different Abrahamic religions have said that the curse of ham turned their skin black and that black people are descendants of the curse of ham. And since they were cursed to be the servant of servants, they deserve to be enslaved. It doesn't say that either. So insane. The institutional carrier was the Africaner Bruder Bond, founded in 1918, a secret, all male, of course exclusively white Afrikaans, of course, exclusively protestant organization dedicated to Africana, cultural, economic and political advancement. It was never large, it was a few thousand members at its peak, but membership was drawn from the ministry, from universities, civil service, the state broadcaster and the party. Every prime minister and state president of South Africa from 1948 to 1994 was a Bruderband member. The economic engine was poverty. Poverty is a weapon. If you have not read Poverty by America and Eviction by America by Matthew Desmond, I highly recommend you do. Poverty is a policy choice and it is a weapon. Decades of drought and destruction of war and the mechanization of farming had driven hundreds of thousands of Africaners off the land and into the cities where they competed for unskilled work with black South Africans. And again, what I don't want them competing for these jobs. Kick them out. By the early 1930s, roughly one in three Africana was classified as a poor white. The Carnegie Commission of 1932 studied the problem across five volumes and made it a national emergency. The solution offered by Africana nationalism was a job color bar underwritten by the state and a state that Afrikaners controlled. The problem was framed as a race problem and solved with race legislation, and the poor white constituency became the electoral base of the National Party. DF Mullen, an ordained NGK minister before he was a politician, broke away from the to form the purified National Party of 1934. In the same period, a movement called the Ossevan Bruthvak, at one point claiming hundred several hundred thousand members, ran paramilitary opposition to South Africa's participation in The Second World War. On the Allied side, some of its members were interned for sabotage. One of the internees was a young lawyer named John Forster, who would be the prime minister from 1966 to 1978. All right, we've got the structure now. We're going to start apartheid kind of at its. At its quote, start date, its birthday, if you will. 1948. The word apartheid, Afrikaans for apartness, separateness, that again, they're justifying with theology as they do, had been circulating in nationalist writing since the 1930s. In 1947, the party's sour commission produced the Platform. In the general election of May 26, 1948, the National Party, in alliance with the Afrikaner Party, won 79 seats to the governing United Party. 65. They lost the popular vote, by the way, also a theme in these nationalist movements. The National Party and its ally took roughly 41% of the votes cast. Smuts, United Party and Labor took over 50. The National Party won because rural constituencies were weighted, because the electoral map was drawn to overrepresent the plettelant, and because seats, not votes, form government. A minority of whites only electorate in a country where whites only electorate itself was around a fifth of the adult population took power. And they would hold it for 46 years. And also remember, like this ends in 1994. This is not a long time ago. Apartheid was installed by a system in which the majority of people it governed had no vote. Right. Really easy to keep power if you don't let people vote. This is why they want to take women's votes away here. And the minority who did vote did not give it to a majority either. They legislated immediately after taking over. And it was. The way that this happened so quickly is absolutely unreal. All right. 1949, Prohibition of Mixed Marriages act number 55. Marriage between white and non white persons voided. Another little sidebar. I am so sick of nationalist white supremacist baby back bitches claiming that their main motivation is to protect the white women. Go away. Seriously, go away. Protect us from what? Protect us from what? Because I see those same baby back bitches supporting the people who are in the Epstein files and having no issue with those men getting arrested. And they are the same men who are like, well, what were you wearing? Or sending me death threats? So seriously. And you guys have such a long historical heritage. All the way off, all the way. Women will look out for ourselves. Thank you. Because we've been doing that up to this point. Point up to this juncture. And I hate to believe that. I hate to feel that way, but the more I learn and the more stories I follow and the more. Like every scandal about a politician. We've got Max Miller in Ohio who threw boiling hot water on his wife, held a gun to her head, broke his daughter's collarbone, and. And all these men coming out of the woodwork to defend him. Oh, well, it was no. Protect us. Again I say, protect us from whom? From what exactly? Check your boys, man. Get your dues in line. Then we had the Immorality Amendment act number 21 of 1950 extended the existing ban to criminalize all sexual contact across the color line. Nothing says godly like the race is not mixing as the Lord hath ordained. Clearly said it in the Bible somewhere. I'm sure Paul did. Ridiculous. Between 1950 and its repeal in 1985, more than 11,000 people would be prosecuted. Police staked out bedrooms, broke down doors, seized bed sheets as evidence, conducted physical examinations. Suicide. Suicides among the accused were common enough to be a recurring feature of the press. Another note, especially because you're going to hear a lot of themes, you're like, wow, that feels actually really familiar that, you know, you see it reflected in American history. You see it reflected in the language. Now when someone says they, they believe in small government, which I do, by the way. Small government for whom? Again, it depends on who you believe the government is built to protect. I believe that a government's only job, they have one job, is to protect the safety, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of its citizens. Period, End of sentence. That's their only job. And because of that, the government should be providing social safety nets. The government should be making sure that people are paid fairly, that they have work protections, and that they're safe from threats both in and out of the country. Right? That's what a small government is. A small government is not in your bedroom. A small government is not in your doctor's office. A small government is not telling you who you can love or what pronouns you can call yourself or what you can wear. I don't give a shit. You are an independent human being. You get to do whatever you want. The government should have absolutely no say in that. None. Zero. That's a small government. If you believe in a small government in terms of like, not having clean water and not having clean air because you don't have regulations because it benefits the corporations and the wealthy who want to destroy your environment and then they get to leave, you don't believe in small government. Right. Especially if on the tail end of that. You believe the government should have a say in all of your issues of faith. Right? By forcing faith on you in public institutions or every personal decision you make. You don't actually believe in small government. You believe in government enacting your belief system. The Population registration Act number 30 of 1950, every person in South Africa classified as registered by race. And here's how we're going to get into these separations. So there's white, colored, native, later, Bantu later, black with Asian added later, and colored eventually subdivided into seven subcategories. The act is the keystone of the entire system because every other law that happens around it depends on knowing which category you're in. And this is not biological criteria, it's social. Right. The definition of a white person in the statute was in part a person who, quote in appearance, obviously is or is generally accepted as white. Like and, and we know there are people who are not white who are white passing. Right? This isn't based on biology. We're all the human race. We, we make up these constructs, we make up gender constructs, we make up social constructs, we make up race constructs. And then we decide that it's somehow divine. Biological law. Classification boards therefore assessed appearance habits, education, speech and associates. So if you're a white passing black person who hangs out with a lot of white people, you might pass versus if you hang out with your family who's visibly black. The pencil test. Crazy. Pushing a pencil into a person's hair and seeing whether it fell out or stayed was common. To see what texture your hair was, officials examined the shape of nostrils, the color of the skin behind the ear and the crescent of the fingernail. In the first decade, thousands of people were reclassified. You could have been like living in a one area of the system forever and then these arbitrary boards are just like, nope, you're in this one. Families were split, literally. You could be part of the same family and be in a different racial category. A darker skinned child classified as colored while parents and siblings remained white, which meant that child had to go to a different school, different bus, different hospital, different suburb, different. And under the prohibition of mixed Marriages act, that family could not legally have existed. Right. They're not supposed to be in the same family. There are documented cases of siblings who never saw each other again after a classification history hearing because it was illegal for them to live together. In 1955, a man named Ronnie Vanderwalt, a professional boxer who had lived as white, was reclassified colored on the eve Of a fight, lost his career, his license and his home. People are so group areas. Act number 41 of 1950. The state assigned every urban area to a racial group and empowered itself to remove anybody who did not belong there. This is an instrument of mass force removal. And listen, quite frankly, I would absolutely hate to live in a society where it's just white people. Like, I just. That to me is a nightmare. Like the. Like. Ugh. The. I want people to just pause for a moment and appreciate the technology, the art, the music, the food, the culture that black people bring white folks. We just don't have an equivalent. Right. We've got like our daredevil thing where we're jumping out of planes and such, but we do not have an. I would not want to be in a culture without black people and native people. And I love Hispanic and Latina people. I cannot imagine this. And I can't. Again, I can't imagine the weakness of fortitude that you have to. Have to think this is a good idea because you're so freaking insecure. Everyone needs to look like you and believe like you and you think you're superior to anyone else. Suppression of Communism act. Oh boy. Number 44 of 1950 banned the communist party and defined communism so broadly. It covered any doctrine aiming at political, industrial, social or economic change in South Africa by the promotion of disturbance or disorder. Under that definition, communism has nothing to do with Marx, really. It's just you disagreeing with the way things are. Right. We're seeing that a lot now where like people like Abdul El Sayed, who's running an amazing campaign, literally his campaign is money out of politics, money in your pocket. Medicare for all, which, P.S. we would save so much money having health care provided in this country and our tax dollars should be paying for it instead of other countries. And so people are like, it's communist. It's. It's not. He just disagrees with how the system is. We also have the Department of Justice and the administration currently talking about how they're going to start, like surveilling people with anti Christian sentiments or communist sentiments or anti capitalist sentiments and like arresting them before they can commit crimes like we have. We have like, we're talking about thought police now who simply disagree with the system and think it could be better. And now you're a threat. Yes, I do think that Americans should have a lot more say in where their taxes go. Yes. I think that the richest nation in the world that has plenty of money. We've. We don't have a Money problem. We have a priority problem. Has plenty of money. Should be providing education and health care to its citizens. Yep. I do believe that tax law should favor the lower and middle class, not billionaires. I believe corporate subsidies shouldn't be a thing. And if we're going to bail people out, why don't we bail out working people and not major corporations who drove themselves into bankruptcy? Weird thought. You know, I feel like people that work 40 hours a week should be able to afford a place to live. Crazy. Anyways, this particular act allowed the Minister of Justice to ban individuals by administrative order without trial, without appeal, restricting their movement, prohibiting them from attending gatherings and making it a crime to quote them. And this is literally just disagreeing with the system, as it is literally saying that or saying, hey, this racial segregation is wrong. You're now a communist. Congratulations, you're banned. Being banned meant you could not be in a room with more than one other person at a time. Newspapers could not print your words. Your own writing became illegal. Bantu Authorities act of 1951 abolished the Native Representative Council and established tribal authorities and reserves. The first steps towards the homeland system. Natives. Abolition of passes and coordination of documents. Act number 67 of 1952. Long name, I know. The act abolishes the various regional passes and replaced them with a single national reference book that every African over 16 was required to carry at all times and produce on demand by any policeman. Show me your paperwork. The abolition of passes made the pass universal. And for the first time it applied to women. Native Labor Settlement of Disputes act of 1953. African workers excluded from the legal definition of employee strikes by Africans. If you organized a work strike, it was a criminal offense. Fall in line. Order. Be orderly. You're disruptive. And since you're disruptive and you disagree with me and I don't like it, it, it's now a crime. Man, listen to the language that you hear, especially now, like people calling others criminal for just disagreeing with them, calling them terrorists. That word gets thrown around a lot to justify violent action against people who disagree or who stand up for what's right. Bantu Education act number 47 of 1953. State takeover of Mission schools and the establishment of a separate, centrally controlled, deliberately inferior curriculum intentionally gave schools for black students and colored students inferior. Like making sure they weren't as well educated intentionally on purpose. And we again, we see that happening here with like the school voucher programs. What Texas is doing, the goal is to make public schools fail, continue to drain their funding, continue to make the curriculum Unusable. So then when they fail and you close them, you can privatize them. And then any public schools that do remain open, you can make deliberately inferior it. The. The goal of the Republican attack on public education is not to make them work. It's to make them unfunctional so they can control who gets a good education. Example, Texas just added the Bible to curriculum in Texas dominantly the kgv, kg, kgv, kjv, and some cases the NIV and the esv. But the reading levels of Texas are really, really bad. The King James that curriculum choice is meant to make kids fail. Even the NIV is a reading level about 7th to 8th grade. So grade school students trying to read this are going to struggle and they're going to fail. Especially in a school system that's already ranked really low. The goal is to make kids frustrated and to fail. The school voucher program, the goal is to take the money, funnel it into religious institutions. Many of them created a segregation academy and then be able to shut down public schools. It's already happening in Texas. Reservation of Separate amenities Act number 49 of 1953 segregated every public facility and explicitly provided that separate facilities need not be equal. Closing a line of legal challenge that had begun to succeed in courts. Right. They're like, they didn't even bother with separate but equal doctrine that we had here. They were like, no, it doesn't have to be legal, but you do have to have separate facilities though. Natives Resettlement act of 1954. Powers to remove Africans from any area in and around Johannesburg. Extension of University Education Act 1959 barred black students from established universities and created separate ethnic colleges. The name says extension. It's not an extension. Also watch like the names of of laws and bills that people try to pass. They often disguise them really well. The promotion of the Bantu Self Government act in 1959 established eight later 10 ethnic homelands and declared them the political home of every African in South Africa. Bantu Homeland Citizenship act of 1970 stripped South African citizenship from every African and assigned it to a homeland much of which the person had never even seen. The naming convention across the statute book is worth noticing, right? Abolition of passes extension of the university education. Promotion of self government, separate development school choice. The legislation that removed rights was consistently titled as though it was granting rights. We do this now. That's not new, nor has it changed. Let's talk about the architect of this system. Hendrik French fervort, was born in Amsterdam in 1901, emigrated to South Africa as A child took a doctorate in psychology in Germany in the 1920s and became a professor of applied psychology and then sociology at the Stellenbosch. He edited D Transfaler, a party newspaper in 19, from 1937. He became a minister of native affairs in 1950 and then prime minister in 1958. State Fairfoot is the intellectual author of Apartheid as a Total System. He is the one who converted segregation into a comprehensive program of separate development with its own philosophy, bureaucracy, its own defense and international forums. He was fluent, credentialed and relentless. And racist. Introducing the Bantu education bill in 1953, he told the Senate what schools were for. This is a quote. There is no place for him in the European Community above the level of certain forms of labor. Within his own community, however, all doors are open for that reason. It is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption into the European Community. He also had. What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? And Bantu here is black again. He also said in the same period that the native must be taught from childhood that equality with Europeans is not for him. I hate these people so much. And I hate the people in America that are still like them. Them despise, loathe entirely. The mission schools that had educated the entire African political leadership, Fort Hare, Love, Healed Town, Adams College were taken over or strangled out right defunded. Make them so they don't function. See, look. It's not even functioning. We should shut it down. State spending on black education was pegged to a fixed sum then to black taxation. Per pupil spending on white children was 10 times that of black children for most of the apartheid period, and in some years worse. Classes of 80 or 100 pupils were normal and taught in shifts for horde. Other invention was the homeland policy. It was the work of considerable and evil brilliance. If the African population could be reassigned to 10 separate ethnic nations, then South Africa would have what? No black majority. It would have a white nation with a large population of foreign guest workers. The Bantustans could be granted nominal independence, their citizens denationalized, and the international demand for majority rule answered with the claim that majority rule had already been granted. Over there, over here, in these reserves that you've never lived, that we've now decided are your homeland. Four homelands took nominal independence. Transkei in 1976, Bu Patswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Siskey Siski, excuse me. In 1981. Around 8 million people lost their citizenship. This is nuts. It's insane how people are like insane. This is. This is not like the 1600s. This is in the 1950s and 60s. No country on earth recognized any of these people. Now, the homeland held 13% of the land, had no industry, no mineral wealth to speak of and were geographically fragmented. They arrived on transfers from Pretoria and the wages remitted by the migrant workers they exported. But you know. Verward was stabbed to death in the House of Assembly on 9-6-1966 by Parliamentary messenger named Dimitri Safendas. SAS Fendas, mixed race, born in Mozambique. A man who had spent his life being reclassified and deported and refused entry by the very bureaucracy forward built was found unfit to stand on trial on the strength of his claim that a tapeworm had ordered the killing. And he was detained without trial for 28 years, much of it in a cell beside death row. And he died in 1999. Later scholarship makes a strong case that the tapeworm story was a defense strategy and that the assassination was political. And to be honest with you, I can't blame him. I think evil people like for hor don't deserve a nice death, quite frankly, because fuck you. And I hope he's not resting in peace. All right now, as we have like the backbone of the architecture built, I'm going to take my second of two mid show sponsor breaks and then talk about how this truly aff people again. You can subscribe for ad free episodes at patreon.com montemater let's start with forced removals. Between 1960 and 1983, an estimated 3.5 million people were forcibly removed from their homes under the Group Areas act, the Homeland Consolidation Consolidation Program and the elimination of what the state called black spots. Freehold. Freehold land owned by Africans inside areas designated white. Sophia Town, a freehold suburb four miles from central Johannesburg where black families had owned property since 1905. Produce Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masakela, Can Temba bloke, Marisane and Trevor Huddleston's parish. It was a working multiracial neighborhood which was the problem. Can't have that. Removals began at dawn on February 9th of 1955 with 2,000 armed police. Over four years, 65,000 people were trucked out to Meadowlands, 12 miles away. The houses were bulldozed and a whites only suburb was built on the site and named Triumph. Yes, Triumph. These people are such pieces of shit. And if you are the descendant of some of these people and you support these decisions, you Too disrespectfully District Six in Cape Town was declared a white area. In February 11th of 1966, 60,000 people were removed to Cape Flats. Over the following years, the bulldozers took everything but the churches and the mosques. The ground stayed largely empty for decades because nobody would build on it. Removal was not just relocation. The destinations Dimbaza, Sada, Lime Hill, Ilinge were frequently bare felt with a water tap and rows of tents or tin latrines. You were homeless, effectively. Dimbaza became internationally known in 1974 when the documentary Last Grave at Dimbaza was smuggled out. It showed a field of small graves. The film was banned in South Africa, of course. Infant mortality in some resettlement areas ran over 200 per live births at the time when the white rate was 20. Mm, mm, mm. You people are not Christians and you're evil pieces of the past laws. Every African over 16 carried a reference book that had their identity, tax receipts, employment record, permission to be in a prescribed area. Section 10 of the Urban Areas act allowed an African to be in a white urban area for more than 72 hours only under narrow conditions. Born there and continuously resident or 10 years continuous employment with one employer or 15 years continuous residence or being the wife or minor, minor child of a man who qualified. If you lost your job, your right to be in the city could go with it. If a woman's husband died, she and her children could be endorsed out, deported to a homeland she's never been in before. Between the 1920s and the repeal of the past laws in 1986, something on the order of 17 million people were arrested or prosecuted for pass offenses. At the peak in the 1960s and 70s, the figure ran to a quarter of a million arrests a year, around 700 a day, and the courts processed them in minutes. The communist criminal charge in South Africa year after year was being in the wrong place without the right documentation. I also want to address this idea of people being like, well, separate, but equals. Not bad. We should just have our own communities. And listen, here's the thing, like, especially in the us, I can't speak to every country in the world, but especially in the U.S. like, black people would kick our ass and have always done so. And what has happened is when they do start their own communities and institutions, like black Wall street, what happens? Why people manufacture an excuse to come in and destroy it. They have never actually, even when this was a thing where it's like, okay, let's just have our own communities. They were never allowed to flourish because as soon as they started kicking our asses. People went in and destroyed it. And that's the same thing here in South Africa. As soon as they started doing better, they got kicked out, they got removed. It never works. It is always a system of prejudice. And if you are somehow trying to justify any of this, stop. It doesn't work that way. Detention without trial. That sounds familiar. The General Law Amendment act of 1963 authorized detention for 90 days without charge and it was renewable, so they could just hold you for forever. The 1965amendment made it 180 days. Cool. Section 6 of the Terrorism act of 1967 made it indefinite. Remember, man, always be suspicious when people are like, we're doing this because we're getting after terrorists. Are you? Are you. Are these just citizens that disagree with you? Is it an actual terrorist group like those exist? Right. Is it a. Is it a woman in her minivan in Minneapolis? Questions? But with the indefinite hold. No charge, no lawyer, no visitors, no court review. Forever, if they wanted to. At least 73 people died in security police detention between 1963 and 1990. The official explanations entered the language as a black joke. No, seriously. They would write their cause of death as. Slipped on a bar of soap, fell down a flight of stairs, fell from a window. Hanged himself with his own shirt. Hanged himself with a strip of blanket. Not one police officer was convicted in an inquest court for any of them at the time. M.M. ahmed Timol, a teacher, went out of a 10th floor window at John Vorster Square in 1971, was ruled a suicide. It wasn't. In 2017, 46 years later, a South African court reopened the case and ruled that he had been murdered and that the original inquest had been a cover up. Because, of course, it was the Security state. By the 1980s, the apparatus include the Security Branch, Military Intelligence, the National Intelligence Service and the State Security Council. And a covert counter insurgency unit based at a farm called a Fluk plus outside Pretoria. Fluk plus turned captured guerrillas into ascaris, informers and hitmen, and ran assassination operations inside and outside the country. Its commander, Eugene de Koch, was convicted in 1996 on 89 charges, including six murders, and sentenced to two life terms plus 212 years. The civil Cooperation Bureau, a defense force front, ran parallel operations. Anti apartheid activists were shot at their front doors, blown up by parcel bombs abroad and poisoned. Oh, yeah. If you were against apartheid, they were going to kill you, right? They called you a terrorist. You were a terrorist and a communist. Ruth first was killed by a parcel bomb in Maputo. In 1982, the academic and activist David Webster was shot outside his Johannesburg home. In 1989, Griffiths and Victoria Nkenge were both murdered four years apart. The Cratic Four, Matthew Goniwe, Fort Collata, Sparrow Muncato and Cicero Mushali were abducted by a roadblock at June 27th, 1985. They were stabbed, shot and burned. A signal ordering their permanent removal from society was later traced to the military committee Project coast, the state's chemical and biological warfare program. Under water, Bassan researched race specific bacteriological agents, produced poisons for use on individuals and manufactured drugs for crowd control. Testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission described the manufacture of Clara cholera and anthrax stocks as the poisoning of prisoners cross border war. Apartheid was not contained in the borders. To the surprise of no one, the South African Defense force fought a 23 year war in Namibia. In Angola, backed by Renamo in Mozambique, raided Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swatziland and Zambia. On May 4th, 1978, the SADF attacked the SWAPO camp in Kasinga. In Angola, over 600 people were killed, a large portion of them women and children in what the UN and survivors described as a refugee settlement. They just wiped out a refugee settlement. Estimates of the total death toll from South Africa's regional destabilization campaign in the 1980s runs well over a million people. Most of them in Mozambique and Angola. Most of them from war induced famine and the collapse of health systems. South Africa also built nuclear weapons. Six devices assembled in secret with technical cooperation from Israel and dismantled before the transition, making it the only country ever to build a nuclear army arsenal and then voluntarily give it up. In the mix of all this, let's talk about the day to day. Everything is separate and I mean everything again. Also remember we used to have segregated hospitals here. And it wasn't until hospitals had to desegregate to get Medicare that all of a sudden white people don't like Medicare anymore. Look at that. Medicare and Medicaid. All right, so we have separate entrances, separate counters, separate ambulances, separate cemeteries, separate blood supplies and hospitals. Benches stenciled with slex blunks. Whites only beaches, park entrance lifts, tax. You get it? You get it? A black adult addressed as a boy or a girl by a white teenager. Oh sweet Jesus, that would send me to the moon. 60% of black South Africans live below the poverty line. While South Africa's mines produced a majority of the world's Gold In 1970, whites made up to 17% of the population and took 71 of the national income. And that was the point. Oh, I hate these people. All right, let's talk about the resistance. The full story of the ANC kind of belongs to part two because it's, you know, kind of inseparable from Nelson Mandela. But what matters here is the shape by which this would take place. 1952, the. What was called the Defiance Campaign. More than 8,000 volunteers deliberately broke apartheid laws using the wrong entrances, sitting on the wrong benches. You can think of these like the sit ins in the U. S. And submitted to arrests. It was disciplined, non violent, coordinated across the ANC and the South African Indian congress. The government's answer was the criminal law amendment act, which raised the penalty for protest offenses to include flogging. So you don't have the right to protest either, because you're a terrorist and a communist, because you don't agree with us and you won't let us have all the power and the money. 1955, the Freedom Charter. 3000 delegates gathered at Cliptown on June 25th and 26th and adopted a document that opened. South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. And no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people. It called for the vote. Land redistribution, nationalization of mines and banks, equal education and equal law. Police surrounded the meeting on the second day and confiscated the documents. Of course, the charter became the ANC's foundational program and evidentiary centerpiece of a treason trial. 1956, the Women's March. On August 9th, roughly 20,000 women of every race marched on the union buildings in Pretoria to protest the extension of passes to women. Oh, yeah, those passes. You have to travel with white ladies. It applies to you too, because the hierarchy is not built to protect you. It's built to subjugate you and exploit your labor and reproduction. Don't let them say they're going to protect you. Protect yourself, okay? They left 14,000 petitions at the prime minister's door and stood in silence for 30 minutes, then sang. The song they sang gave South Africa the phrase, you strike a woman, you strike a rock. August 9th is now national Women's day. The organizers included Lillian Ngoye, Helen Joseph Rahima Musa and Sophia Williams de Bruyne. The march did not stop. The passes again. Again. And I tell people, listen, not that there's. I think most people are kind of in some space of deconstruction or at least questioning. If you're listening to this podcast, if you're someone who still feels an allegiance to this type of hierarchy. Man's in charge, Men are the leaders. Submit to your husband all that nonsense that men created. Understand that if you stand by when they come for trans people or immigrants or black people, it will eventually come for you. Every time we read this in history, it will eventually come for you. Because in a hierarchy, someone always has to be on the top and everyone else has to be below them. And it's not going to be you babes. Okay? Just choose your own life. Seriously, choose your own life. Fight for it. You deserve it. Someone is not smarter than you or an inherently better leader because they have a dick. That's crazy talk. Also personal opinion. This is anecdotal. The best leaders I have ever met have all been women. 1956-1961 the Treason Trial On December 5, 1956, 156 people were arrested and charged with high treason. Right? We also get traitors, right? Terrorist, traitors, communists. All the words that get used now. The trial ran four and a half years and ended in acquittals for all remaining accused. Its principal effect was to remove the entire senior leadership of the resistance from active politics for half a decade. That was the point. They didn't want to win. They wanted to get them out of the Resistance. March 21, 1960 In Sharpville, the Pan Africanist Congress formed in 1959 in a breakaway from the ancient called a National Anti Pass Campaign. Men were to leave their reference books at home, present themselves to police stations and demand arrest. At the police station in Sharpville, in the Vol Triangle, a crowd of several thousand assembled. Accounts differ on the size and the mood. There's no evidence anyone was armed. Police reinforcements arrived in Saracen armored cars at around 1:15pm without an order to fire and without a warning shot, police opened fire with service revolvers and Sten guns for roughly 40 seconds. 69 people were killed. 180 were wounded. Postmortem evidence established that the majority of the dead were shot in the back while they ran away. Among the dead were eight women and 10 children. The passbooks they had come to surrender lay in the dust with the bodies. The same day, the langa outside Cape Town police killed three more people. The government declared a state of emergency on March 30, detained more than 18,000 people and on April 8 of 1960 banned the ANC and the PAC under the under the Unlawful Organizations Act Act. This is the equivalent of the recent executive order saying that Antifa is a terrorist organization. ANTIFA is not an organization. Right. There's no Headquarters. There's no leader, there's no membership. It is simply people who are anti fascist because they disagree with the people who apparently are pro fascist. They are now a terrorist organization. Sharpeville is the hinge of the 20th century in South Africa. Okay? It is the day the state demonstrated that peaceful mass protests would be answered with automatic weapons and that organizations conducting it would be made illegal. Every subsequent decision about armed struggle proceeds from that afternoon. Also don't let the powerful be like, well you just have to do it peacefully. Well, I mean you can protest but just, you have to say it like this. When they will open fire on you. They, they don't get to be the moral police about how you can protest. Human rights violations. The UN Security Council took up South Africa for the first time in April 1st of 1960. March 21st is now Human Rights Day. 1961 to 1964. There's an armed struggle at the Rivonia trial. That'll be covered in part two. That's more important to that. 1967. The Terrorism act number 83 of 1967. Oh, it defined terrorism so broadly that virtually any act of opposition placed the burden of proof on the accused, imposed a minimum sentence of five years and a maximum of death and was made retroactive to June 19th. June of 1962. Section 6 authorized indefinite incommunicado detention on the say so of a lieutenant colonel. So any opposition to the apartheid system, you're, you're a terrorist and you can be locked up forever if they, if they decide that they want to. That's it. Cool, cool, cool. 1969-1977 Black Consciousness Steve Biko, a medical student at Natal, broke with the white led National Union of South African Students and founded the South African students organization in 1969. Black Consciousness argued that the primary damage of apartheid was psychological. That liberation required black South Africans to reject the inferiority the system had installed in them before any political program could succeed. Beagle's formulation was this. The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Black consciousness rebuilt a political culture in the vacuum left by the bannings of 1960. And it radicalized a generation of school children. And as I read that and read some other pieces of his work, very Malcolm X, freedom of the mind kind of that, that type of thinking. 1973 the Durban strikes. Beginning in January, roughly a hundred thousand workers struck in and around Durban. Without legal unions, without recognized leadership and without a strike fund, the strikes were illegal. Remember, the state could not jail Everybody though, because there was a hundred thousand of them. Out of them grew the independent black trade union movement, which by the 1980s was the most powerful organized force in the country. Cosatu, founded in 1985, could shut down the mines. Always remember, listen. In an authoritarian system, fascist system, even as small as the. As a independent family, labor is the key. Labor is what makes the system stop running. You want to stop a fascist or authoritarian government? You strike, you stop working. Worker strikes, general strikes. They can't arrest all of us. You want to stop a house from running on subservience? Stop over performing, refuse to work, leave. MM works every time. June 16th of 1976. Soweto. In 1974, the Department of Bantu Education decreed that half of all secondary school instruction in black schools be conducted in Afrikaans. Of course, mathematics and social studies in the language of the government by teachers who often could not speak it to pupils who did not speak it. The morning of June 16, between 10,000 and 20,000 Soweto children marched toward Orlando Stadium carrying placards. Police blocked the route. Accounts differ on the sequence. Tear gas was fired on the children. Stones were thrown, and then police fired live ammunition into a crowd of school children. Did I mention that I hate these people? All of them. And many of these are still alive. And I wish them nothing but eternal suffering. Hector Peterson was 12 years old. A photographer named Sam Nazima photographed Ambuyasa Macabo carrying his body with Hector's sister Antoinette running beside them. The picture ran worldwide within hours. And Zema went to hiding. Makubo left the country and was never reliably heard from again. The uprising spread to more than 100 townships and continued into 1977. And you know, those white were in their things being like, they're just. They're just being so disruptive. I mean, if they would just listen to police, if they just wouldn't resist, then this just when they're just being so disruptive and so ungrateful and they're law breakers, it's really like a tip. I cannot. The official death toll was 176. Credible estimates run to 700 or more, most of them children. It ended the illusion domestically and internationally that apartheid was stable. It also drove thousands of teenagers across the border to join UNCONTO with his way, which is how a school's protest became a military recruitment event. September 12th of 1977. Steve Biko was arrested at a roadblock outside Grahamstown on August 18th of 1977, held under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act. Of course, he was interrogated in room 619 of the Sandlom Building in Port Elizabeth, kept naked and in leg irons. On September 6, he sustained a brain injury during interrogation. Over the following days he was examined by district surgeons who recorded his condition and did nothing nice. On September 11, he was loaded naked into the back of a land Rover driven 1100 kilometers to Pretoria. He died on the floor of a cell there on September 12th of brain damage. He was only 30. The Minister of Justice, Jimmy Krueger, told a National Party congress that Biku's death left him cold. The audience laughed. Fun again. Do you know what I'm gonna say? I fucking hate these people. The inquest in 1978 found that no one was responsible. The doctors were initially cleared by the professional body. In 1997, however, five former security policemen applied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty in Biko's killing. Their applications were refused because their accounts were not truthful and the killing was not found to have a political objective within the meaning of the act. Nobody has ever been convicted. October 19th of 1977. Black Wednesday. The government banned 18 Black Consciousness organizations. Shut down two newspapers, including the World banned the editor Percy Kwabola and the white editor Donald woods, who had befriended bco. Woods escaped the country disguised as a priest and published the account that became a film called cry freedom. 1983-1989 the UDF in the states of emergency. The government's 1983 constitution created a tricameral parliament with separate chambers for colored and Indian voters and none at all for Africans. So wild. The response was the United Democratic front, launched on August 20, 1983 at Mitchell's Plain. A coalition of some 600 civic organizations, churches, unions, student groups and women's organizations operating legally and inside the country aligned with the freedom charter. By 1984, the townships were ungovernable. Rent boycotts, school boycotts, consumer boycotts and the collapse of state appointed local councils. The government declared a partial state of emergency on July 21, 1985 and a nationwide one on June 12, 1986. Under emergency regulatory regulations, any policeman could detain anyone for 14 days without reference to a court, extendable indefinitely by the minister. Roughly 30,000 people were detained under this emergency. Thousands. Thousands of these, by the way, were kids, children. Torture was systematic. The TRC later documented electric shock, suffocation with wet bags, beating, sleep deprivation and suspension by limbs as standard interrogation practice. Across the country, press restrictions banned the reporting or filming of unrest. Newspapers ran blank columns. The state was attempting in every sense to make the country invisible to itself. They did not want information about what was really happening. Getting out. The townships answered with their own violence, including the necklace. A patrol filled tire forced over the arms and soldiers of a suspected informer and set on fire. Hundreds of people died this way. Many of them were in fact informers. Many of them were not. The third force convert state units arming and directing one faction against another particularly through the Inkata in Natal and on the reef was denied at the time and documented afterwards. Between 1990 and 1994, during negotiations more than 14,000 people died in political violence. More than any comparable period of the apartheid era. Then come the sanctions. The UN General assembly called for voluntary sanctions in 1962. Resolution. Resolution. That's not a word. Resolution 418 of 11-4-1977 made the arms embargo mandatory. South Africa was expelled from the Olympics in 1970 and excluded from most international sport. The United States and United Kingdom holding vetoes blocked comprehensive economic sanction for two decades. Uh huh. Ronald Reagan's policy of constructive engagement helped that quiet diplomacy would produce reform. Uh huh. Sure. That's because Ronald didn't have a problem with apartheid. That's, that's, that's the real, the real rub. Cause he was racist piece of trash too. Margaret Thatcher also garbage position was that sanctions were immoral and that the anc. So this is the group fighting against apartheid, right? The African National Congress was a what? Terrorist organization. Of course. 1986 the U.S. congress passed the Comprehensive Anti Apartheid Act. Over Reagan's veto. Yeah, he vetoed it. An override of a presidential veto on foreign policy question which is rare after two years of campus divestment campaign, sit ins and arrests in South Africa and embassy in Washington. What finally moved Pretoria was not moral persuasion. It was money. Money. They were losing money. When Chase Manhattan declined to roll over South African loans in August of 1985 and the Rand lost a third of its value in weeks, the country's business establishment began flying to Lusaka to talk to the ANC directly. Oh guys, we've changed our minds. We're losing money. But again, good lesson here with authoritarian systems. And I don't care if it comes from an authoritarian family structure or a government structure pressure. It requires your compliance. And when enough people just refuse to comply, that system collapses. So as you look at the world and you're like oh my God, what do we do? We refuse to be governed by it. We say no, they can't arrest all of us. They can't. It's not possible. Every Stage of the story has vocabulary. And again, the words are important. We're seeing all throughout this, the people that are resisting, the people that are fighting for human rights, the people that think that black folks in South Africa, Africa who make up the majority of the population should have a vote are called terrorists, communists, agitators. So let me talk about how these words are weaponized because it happens around us all the time. A word is applied to people who are obstructing an arrangement or who disagree. And the person who puts that word on them is the person who's benefiting from that system. Then the word converts a political conflict into a moral and biological fact. How many times have we heard some chud on the manosphere say, well, it's a boil up. No, it's not. You, you chose a word, you made it into a moral and biological issue because you benefit from the system you're defending. Once that label lands, the labeled person's grievance no longer requires an answer. Right. You're not gonna negotiate with a terrorist, right? Oh, how easy that word gets you out of being accountable. You're not going to negotiate with a savage. You don't have a land dispute with vermin. Those words are so important. You don't have a human problem. You have a pest problem. The word changes, but the job doesn't. Let's talk about some of these words. Heathen. The earliest legal instrument of European expansion was religious. The 15th century Papal bulls that authorized Portuguese conquest along the African coast dum diversas in 1452 and Romanus pontifex in 1455 granted the right to invade, search out, capture and subdue Saracens, pagans and other, quote, enemies of Christ and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery. That's an order from the church. The legal ground for taking the continent was the people living on it were not Christians. Non Christian therefore meant non owner. This is the doctrine of discovery. We've talked about that in the past. And this word, I am not going to say we're going to call it the K word word because it is South Africa's equivalent of the N word. And so I will not be saying it, but it was a word that would become South Africa's most serious racial slur. Comes from an Arabic word meaning unbeliever. Arab traders on the Swahili coast used it for non Muslims. Portuguese and then Dutch sailors picked it up and applied it as an ethnic term to the peoples of the southeastern coast. British Colonial administration make it official. The wars were the K word wars. The territory annexed in 1847 was the British. Anyways, they named it, right? A word meaning one who does not believe. What we believe was converted into a racial category and then into an insult over the course of several hundred years. It's now a legally actionable hate speech in South Africa, which is why I will not be saying it, but know that there is an equivalent. They also use savage and vermin. As religion faded as a justification, right. Biology took over. Right. They create this theology. Theology becomes moral and then they move the moral into the biological. That's how these arguments always go. The 18th and 19th centuries produced an entire scientific apparatus for ranking human beings, and Southern Africa supplied its exhibits. Sarah Bartman, a Koikoi woman, was taken from the cape in 1810 and displayed in London and Paris as a curiosity. When she died in 1815, Georges Cuvier, one of the most eminent scientists in Europe, dissected her and her remains were displayed in the museum in Paris until 1974. Her body was returned to South Africa and buried in 2002, 192 years after she left. The scientific framing made the political conclusion feel like a discovery. Cecil Rhodes in 1887 said, the Native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa. And you can see language like this anywhere. They decided they wanted to conquer and steal the resources of. They also use native and Bantu, apartheid's bureaucratic vocabulary that was flat, technical, administrative. Natives, Bantu, non whites, plurals, separate, development, influx, control, removal. The language of the statute book is the language of like logistics. It describes sorting the population like they're shipping freight. A civil servant can sign an order for the resettlement of a black spot without ever thinking the words. I am putting 8,000 people into a field with no homes. Communist. Oh, we still get this one everywhere. This one just gets thrown around so much. In 1950, the suppression of Communism act defined communism to include any doctrine aimed at bringing about political, industrial, social or economic change in South Africa by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, which they would absolutely consider equality of the races. A disturbance or disorder. Offense is change plus disorder. Under that act, the state banned liberals, Anglican priests, trade unionists, black consciousness activists who were hostile to the South African Communist Party and eventually anybody. Anybody that just didn't agree with the Cold War made that label very, very convenient because everyone else was using it. Terrorist. The Terrorism act number 83, 1967. The Acts created the offense of participation in terrorist activities. It defined that as any act committed with the intent to endanger the maintenance of law and order in the Republic. Like, even if your laws are violations of human rights and absolutely horrific, you're a terrorist for not following the law. That right there, that is how ultra conservatives in this nation use that word. They. They mu. They are much more concerned with order than they are justice. And it's high time we change that. It then listed 12 results that would establish the required intent. Among them, causing financial loss to any person or the state, causing feelings of hostility between the white and other inhabitants of the Republic. If you did something that caused hostile feelings, you were a terrorist. If you embarrassed the administration of affairs of the state or caused financial loss, substantial financial loss to any one person, embarrassing the administration of the affairs of the state. That's wild. And also, again, terrorism in this act carried a minimum of five years and a maximum of death. And the burden of proof was not on the prosecutor. It was on the defendant to prove themselves innocent. Steve Bo was held under this act. He never fired a shot in his life. He was a medical student who gave speeches. The act was retroactive in 1962, five years before it existed. So anything you did prior to that, protesting, giving people bad feelings, you could be charged with terrorism. And then the word, of course, was exported and the exporters used it exactly as designed. The ANC was placed on the United States terrorism listed list. Again, the African National Congress, who's trying to, like, get the right to vote and live in their country, which they are the majority of terrorist list on the United States. Oh, you. The US ate that up. Especially under Reagan. Mandela required a waiver from the Secretary of State to enter the country until 2008. Again, Thatcher called the ANC typical terrorists. The same year, her government was declining to impose sanction on a state that was at the moment, literally running assassination squads out of a farm. Note what was and what was not counted. Um, Kanto, we Suizwe conducted a sabotage campaign against infrastructure that killed nobody in its first 18 months and over three decades, killed a number of civilians. The TRC found to be in the dozens. And MK was terrorism. The South African state killed 69 people in Sharpville in 40 seconds. Killed hundreds of children in Soweto, tortured to death at least 73 people in detention, killed hundreds of thousand across the region through destabilization. And that was law and order. Order, okay, but we still. We still have that vocabulary running around outside. Agitator, thug, extremist, radical, anarchist, rioter, mob, domestic terrorist, groomer, invasion, infestation, that's not to say that groomers aren't real. But we see that word weaponized against the queer community, even though statistically they are far less likely to harm children or offend than, say, I don't know, the sitting president. Each of them does not does the identical job that the other ones did. It removes the labeled person from the category of people whose grievances count. That's the point. Dehumanize them. Their concerns don't matter anymore. They're now the enemy. And since they're the enemy, I get to enact violence on them. Once that transfer is made, the question stops being, what are they asking for? And it becomes, what are we going to do about them? And the tell is always the same. When the person applying that label will not describe the underlying demand, what they will tell you at length is what the protesters are, but never why they're protesting, testing, never what they want. The label is doing that work for them. Nobody who has a good answer to a demand needs to make the person demanding it unspeakable. First. When we look at, like, Christian nationalist rhetoric, we add one more layer. When the frame is theological, the opponent is not merely dangerous, the opponent is demonic. You can look at my Instagram comments and see people calling me demonic every day. This. This morning I released a video about a dude that said, I serve Satan, right? That theological layer, I don't have to address what you're saying, but it makes me uncomfortable. It makes me mad. I disagree with you. So instead I'm gonna make you an enemy of God. So that does two things at once. It makes compromise with me. Like, so say someone's targeting me. It makes compromise like apostasy and heresy. You would be violating your faith if you agreed with me. And it makes violence, obedience. The Dutch reform pulpits that preached Acts 17:26 is a mandate for separation. We're not producing hatred. They were producing calm. Right? A man who believes he's enforcing the. The. The order of God isn't going to lay awake at night. I'm doing the right thing, and it's just an added bonus that I benefit from it. Again, the question is always, who? Whose power does this doctrine protect? Who benefits? Who loses? Who gets harmed? Because when we look, as we go through this history, Desmond Tutu and Hendrik Forward were quoting from the same book. One of them built the machine and one of them chaired the reckoning text. Didn't change, the interpretations did. The formal end came fast, and the underlying position had been untenable for about a Decade. Right. They've been having a lot of problems by the time this would end. Prime Minister P.W. botha. P.W. bota, Prime Minister from 1978 and State President from 1984. Ran a strategy of reform plus repression. Scrap petty apartheid, keep the structure, crush the opposition. He repealed the Mixed Marriages and Immorality Acts of 19 in 1985. Repealed the past laws in 86. Simultaneously ran two states emergencies. He ran death squads. A regional war. It didn't work because the concessions were not the demand. And the repression was no longer affordable. Right. They were losing too much money. Apartheid, if. If it had kept the right people wealthy, would have kept going. By 1985, the economy was in a debt crisis. By 1988, the SADF had been fought to a standstill. Still in Angola and the Namibian settlement that followed. Removed apartheid's Northern Buffer. In 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down which removed the last useful thing. The National Party owned the argument that it was holding the line against communism. Right. They're losing their excuses. Volta suffered a stroke in January of 1989. And was pushed out by his own cabinet in August. FW de Klerk took over on February 2, 1990, declared open parliament and announced the unbanning of the ANC and the Pacific and the South African Communist Party. The lifting of restrictions on 33 organizations. The suspension of executions and the final release of Nelson Mandela, which we'll get into in part two. Nine days later, Mandela walked out of the gates of Victor Foerster prison. Part two will start with his birth and we will give his full story there. I want to play you an audio clip of that opening in Parliament where these actions are decided and apartheid officially begins to collapse. The steps that have been decided are the following. The prohibition of the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, the South African Communist Party and a number of subsidiary organizations is being rescinded. I realized we've started something where the final result could not be predicted, but a sense of destiny. Yes, we've changed the corner. I also had as a normal person, subject to tensions and nerves, a feeling of great relief. It was done even with the advantage of hindsight. I would try take again many smaller strategic and tactical decisions. With the advantage of hindsight, I might have things done differently. But on the major issues I have no regrets. Let's recap five takeaways. Our five flippin takeaways. Number one. The empty land was curriculum, not a mistake. South African school children were taught for generations that whites and Bantu speaking Africans Arrived at the interior simultaneously in an empty country. Country. Not true. That's a lie. It was stolen. Number two, apartheid was an economic system with racial explanation, not the reverse. It was a way for white Afrikaners to keep the wealth and the land for themselves at the expense of everybody else. Again, who does it benefit? Number three, the church did not just tolerate apartheid, it manufactured it. The Dutch Reformed Church built the doctrinal case, supplied the proof text, trained the ministers who became cabinet ministers and split its own communion by race in 1857 as a temporary accommodation that became permanent. Acts 17:26, a verse whose actual argument is that God made all nations of one blood, was quoted from Africaans pulpits as the biblical basis for racial separation. And it still is in the United States. You can still find people saying that nonsense. Number four, terrorist is not a description in many of these cases. It's a procedure. Terrorism in South African law included embarrassing the administration of the affairs of the state. Steve Biku died under that act without ever having fired a weapon. Meanwhile, that government wrote that, wrote that law, killed 69 people in Sharpeville and again 73 in detention cells and hundreds of thousands across the country. So when you hear a movement labeled right we, there are terrorist organizations, extremist organizations, those, those are real things, right? But when you hear a movement labeled terrorist, extremist, thug, agitator, outside agitator, mobile, check whether the person using that word will state what the movement was actually for. And then also look at the person who's being labeled this and saying, well what were they doing? What were they protesting? If they will describe the people and never the demand, the word is doing the work of hiding the claim so they don't have to talk about it. Number five, every escalation was preceded by a closed door. The ANC petitioned for 48 years. They asked, they asked and they kept asking. The answer to the 1952 Defiance Campaign was a law authorizing flogging. The answer to the Freedom Charter was a treason trial. The answer to an unarmed anti pass protest was 40 seconds of automatic fire into people's backs. The answer to a school children's march was live ammunition. Armed struggle was not chosen over a peaceful alternative. The peaceful alternative was out, outlawed. Always take it like take a look at who makes claims like this. Always take a look. And it gives us a lot of context for what's been happening lately. Right? We've heard Trump talk a couple times about bringing that white African are being persecuted in South Africa. We got to bring them over here. I want to talk about that now that you know the laws, the apartheid, how many people were killed? The system that was built to benefit white folks. Folks. The Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 was signed on January 23, 2025, replacing an apartheid era statute from 1975. This is not a land redistribution law. It is a general expropriation framework, the South African equivalent of eminent domain applying to all property and all owners regardless of their race. Section 12 requires compensation that is just and equitable, reflecting an equitable balance between public interests and the interests of affected parties. Authorities weighing that amount must consider the extent of direct state investment and subsidy in acquiring and improving the property and the purpose of the expropriation. Section 12 3, which is the controversial one, it permits nil compensation only where expropriation serves the public interest. Offers a non exhaustive list of qualifying scenarios. The land isn't being used, for instance, if it's empty and it's not being used. Used where the owner's main purpose is speculative appreciation rather than development, or the state land an organ of state is not using. The other listed cases are effectively essentially abandoned. Unused land. These are narrow categories. Vacant land, abandoned property, a working commercial farm someone owns doesn't fit any of these parameters. So this fairness argument is crazy. In 1913, the Native Lands act confined the black majority to 7%. Later, 13% of the country. Country forced removals under apartheid displaced millions. Current ownership patterns are direct downstream product of statutory racial dispossession, not accumulated purchase. Right. Black South Africans own less land. Not because they're not capable, not because they're not smart. It was literally stripped from them systematically by law for years. And now all the land hoarded by the white Africana population has been passed down to their children. Children. This is the. Now you know why Elon is the. The way he is. This is his system that he loves so much. He's probably heartbroken that apartheid doesn't exist anymore. Right? It's the same thing that when people talk about like generational wealth, it's the same thing in the US it's the same thing. It's the same reason that reparations have to be part of the conversation. Because they couldn't own land. They couldn't move into the nice neighborhoods, they couldn't go to school here, they couldn't have a job. Job. Meanwhile, your families. My families had a chance to accumulate wealth and pass it down. Right. The numbers still reflect this disparity. White South Africans own 72% of privately held farmland while black South Africans own 4% per the census data. Broader wealth, roughly 10% of the population, largely white, holds over 80% of the wealth. The mechanism is more constrained than most eminent domain regimes. There's mandatory investigation of the proper property, mandatory consultation, mandatory identification. Disputes over amount, timing or manner of payment. Go to mediation and they go to court. Someone can dispute it. And just inequitable is constitutional language. It's not invented, right. There is no persecution of white Africaners. Their land isn't being stolen from them. It's, it's not even, it's not even an adequate justice to what was done to, to, to black South Africans. Quite frankly, the empirical record really shows okay. Of 25, 423 murders recorded nationwide in 2024-2025, 358 occurred on agricultural land. Only 42 involved people classified as part of the farming community. Because again, the rhetoric here is, is South African white farmers are being attacked. That's not true. The fourth quarter breakdown by race is the detail that ends the argument. Both murdered farmers were African, as were two farm employees. One farm manager killed. Of six people classified as part of the farming community that quarter, this is just the fourth quarter, only one, a farm dweller was white. None of this is real. The disproportionality that does exist is because white South Africans own 72% of farms, right? They own most of the farmland. So of course if there's a crime against farmers, it's going to disproportionately affect them because they own everything. Because it was stripped script so now we now have a trump suspends the entire US refugee program hours after taking office in January 2025, makes an exemption weeks later for Africaners. The first group of 59 arrived in May of 2025. So we can't have refugees from war torn nations. But people who can no longer uphold the system of apartheid get a, like a fast pass to come into the country. Part of the reason that we have to talk about apartheid, I mean even before we get to Nelson's Law life is because those ideologies are alive and well. And the more that you know about them, the more you understand them, the more you can pick up on the language, the better equipped you are to say we're not playing that here. No, I'm actually not going to play along with this language or with this rhetoric. I'm very excited to get into Nelson Mandela's life in part two of this series. Again, if you'd like to support me or the show, you can subscribe to patreon.com Monty Mater Challenge Dogma. Challenge ideologies. Challenge the words and the labels that people put on you or anybody else. And I will see you next week on Flipping Tables.