Apartheid’s ideology of separate development was grounded in theologically-ordained racial difference.

Evidence

“Apartheid” was coined – the vision conceived – almost 20 years before the Nationalist Party took power more or less on its platform in 1948. At a Dutch Reformed Church conference on missionary work in 1929, Giliomee points out in his voluminous work on The Afrikaners, the Rev. C. J. du Plessis made the case for missionary work in “the spirit of apartheid that has always characterized [the Church’s] conduct.” He understood this “spirit of apartheid” as driving the separate development of a nation’s unique spirit, its “own” (eie) sensibility. That of blacks differed from whites’, and apartheid sought not only to recognize this but to center it as the grounds for national development. If there was equality in this, it was the sort of equality articulated in the US Supreme Court’s majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), namely, the equal right of access to unequal resources, possibilities, accommodations. At the heart of apartheid, black people had a right equal to that of white people: to their own language(s), sensibilities, cultural expression, places of habitation, schooling, recreation, even places or pews of worship, no matter the radical inequalities, supposed and produced, of those resources relative to whites’. Because those differences were seen as God-ordained, the divine command of the deity. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1507

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘equal right of access to unequal resources’ formulation connects directly to Plessy v. Ferguson and to the reading list’s interest in how nominally egalitarian doctrines cloak hierarchy. — connects to: Apartheid’s ideology rested on God-ordained separate-but-equal racial development — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1507; Academic intellectuals guided the theological framework that formalized apartheid — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1542
• DEFINE: Clarifies the theological meaning of the Afrikaner term ‘eie’ (own) sensibility as the core of apartheid ideology.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of religious legitimation of stratified social orders.