Apartheid ideology rejected even the possibility of civilizing Africans.
Evidence
The references in Interview extract 24 to the perceived post-colonial decay following the withdrawal of the white colonists in Africa is a direct echo of the sentiment in the final line of Kipling’s poem – that the noble work of ‘civilizing’ and ‘curing’ the natives will [always] ‘come to nought’ as a direct result of their apparently incurable ‘sloth’ and ‘folly’. The apartheid ideology was even less optimistic than Kipling’s, abandoning the notion that black Africans were civilizable. For example, Verwoerd justified the separate and intentionally inferior education of black South Africans with the argument that ‘there is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour … . What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?’ — Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle, Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner…, 161
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how a group’s grievance narrative persists decoupled from actual power — here an ideology that outlived its political defeat. — connects to: French civilizing doctrine rejected both assimilation and nonintervention, favoring supervised African evolution
- DEFINE: Shows the ideological stance under study: apartheid’s pessimism about black civilizability, distinct from Kipling’s civilizing mission.