Apartheid and Segregation, though borne of two vastly different countries and cultures, embody the same principals and have both had their share of major historical events which have impacted the Civil Rights Movement through the decades. Take for example such happenings as the assasination of Patrice Lumumba in the once-Belgian colony of the Congo, and the assasinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in America. The slave trade in both countries ties them together in a bond that can never be broken, and the horrors of the Congolese Diamond mines, ghettos, and America's Jim Crow Laws, and the K.K.K. have shaped history and made the "Negro" man into a marketable stereotype.
"Apartheid : racial segregation ; specifically : a former policy of segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-European groups in the Republic of South Africa" (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apartheid)
- "Segregation : the separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group by enforced or voluntary residence in a restricted area, by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or by other discriminatory means" (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20segregation)
Apartheid was a political movement in in South Africa which effectively muffled over nine-million native tongues and civil freedoms, set into play by the occupying white-European nations. It seemed that, just when the 'American Negro' decided to take his fate into his own hands, and marching for his rights, his homeland's rights were being thrown into the dust. During this time, all native Africans, or anyone categorized as black by the Department of Home Affairs, a government bureau, was required to carry on his or her person a 'pass book' containing his photo identification, fingerprints, and any information regarding access to non-black areas. Natives of South Africa were dislocated from their tribal birth-lands and placed into new 'homelands' based on tribe or region of origin - and most often than not, these two factors were too loosely considered to be correct.
This was the shallow and meretriciously-painted mask that told the outside world that Apartheid would effectively give all blacks and coloured peoples citizenship and voting rights, if only within their respective homelands; however, in the dark and sinister heart of the beast, it was just a convenient way to keep black affairs out of white ones, and it helped secure the foreign occupation of the lands through economical means. It was a type of political rape, where the government was able to envelope all of South Africa within its hand, and spread its interminable disease of hatred for the white man throughout the jungles and dusty planes, before snatching it back, fist full of blood diamonds, rubber, and ivory. The Dutch and English sat back and got rich off of the sufferings of a nation already deprived of its children during the slave trade; now, the nation of 'Cain's descendents' was to lose all of its marketable glory as well.
With the destruction of their birth-lands, their tribes, and even to an extent, their seperate cultures as they were forced into ghettos and shanties made of tin and cardboard, or, if they were lucky, inexpensive brick or clay, and then the implimentation of a new language called Afrikaans, the blacks were thouroughly defeated. They had to speak in with slow tongues a language that was hard to grasp, hastily created by the Dutch and English to unify their peoples. They had to relearn the regions of their countries, as new European names were being scrawled over old African ones. They had to deal with the daily threat of police - for when it grew night, the raids would begin, and houses would be hit with blugeons and bullets. Local police would bulldoze from home to home, seizing any adult they found. Sometimes they would leave without a victim hanging from their arms, if they were appealed to with certain goods or valuables; sometimes, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles - even young sons - would be taken from their beds and brutally beaten, before being thrown into jail cells for detainment and posted for bail. There they would be stuck for weeks, or months - sometimes even years - before they were released back into society. All it really took was a little monetary appeasement by a family member or friend to nudge the wardens to finally look over the paper work and release the prisoner from detainment.
The modern African is a misogynist, a womanizer who lords himself over his household, goes off to work in the diamond mines and comes home with a few dollars in his pockets after bar - hopping all night. The woman is a piece of property, even moreso than the man is - a cattle's cattle. They are shackled to the state, with pockets wired directly to the government's greedy fingers.
Psychologically, these stereotypes probably arose from the mental mindset blacks have been put in as a result years of slavery and segregation. First, everything was taken from them in an instant. The ones that were able to remain were left with the shattering feeling that their world had been torn from beneath them. Before they could regain their dignity or fight for themselves, their lands were stolen, emptied of their precious natural resources, hunted for their furs and ivory tusks and renamed. Finally, even their languages, beautiful as they were, were stolen from them. The only thing a man had to his name was his wife and children. The only thing a woman had left was her soul. If a man could not be the ruler of his own life, a citizen of his own country, or recognize his rightful place within his tribe, then at least he could be the ruler of his household.
From these feelings of enmity towards the white man who had sucked their lives dry, and still did not see fit to retract his fangs and cease his thievery, arose Patrice Lumumba, the seeming savior of the Belgian Congo. When the Dutch had finally seen fit to 'withdraw' it's influences from its ancient and dilapidated conquest, and the country was put up to a free vote for its first natice-Congolese Prime Minister of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo, one man with a mighty voice and spitfire for speeches united his trodden peoples under a political banner that meant to dispell every last speck of white devil from their borders. His public addresses riled up the crowds of supporters so fearfully that, for a time, civil war broke out. In a country where a race of millions had been backed too far into a corner, they reared as one beast and began to fight with a feral and desperate anxiety.
But Patrice won his candidacy from a jail cell. It was no doubt that the Belgians had tried to break the man before he could rally the country into a full-out revolution, but they failed. After his election in June 23rd in 1960, whereupon he created the first free government of the Congo, he proceeded to struggle for his country, and for his life. However, that will to struggle on was forcefully taken from him when he was executed on January 17, 1961 by the Katanga recessionist regime.
((to be continued...))
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