Apartheid South Africa was a variant capitalist formation, not pre-capitalist

Evidence

In such “deviant” social formations (deviant only in the sense of departing from the European paradigm case), there will be political structures which combine (or may combine) forms of parliamentary democracy with other forms of political representation—or legal structures which elaborate more than one form of citizen status. The “articulation” of “free” and “forced” labor, the combination of “equal” and “restricted” franchises, the position of the chiefs and the Bantustan “internal colonies,” and the different legal statuses of “white” and “black” citizens, in the South African social formation, perfectly represent the elements of such a “variant” case—one which is in no sense “non-capitalist”; provided, that is, we read Marx’s “laws of development and motion” as laws of tendency (and countertendency) rather than as a priori laws of necessity. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — the colonial interface of mixed modes/labor statuses Hall describes here.