Apartheid targeted racial mixing as the central site of resistance

Evidence

Black political leaders and leaders of the South African Communist Party (many secular Jews), by contrast, were largely driven underground, imprisoned, permanently exiled, or murdered. The ANC leadership, when not in exile, languished for decades in prison, often in solitary confinement, under various pretences of treason, subversion, and Communism. Indres Naidoo’s harrowing account of torture and chains on Robben Island is a living testament to just how far the apartheid regime would go to terrorize people for the sake of securing itself. Steve Biko, the person most credited with formulating the intellectual vision for South Africa’s articulation of Black Consciousness, was left to suffer a slow, strangulating death in 1977 lying undressed and unattended in the back of a police van on a long cross-country drive after a particularly brutal set of beatings under interrogation in prison. The height of apartheid sought to foreclose any dream of social mixing or black self-determination other than at the command of white benefit. Racial mixing – socially as much as sexually, politically as much as personally – became the counter, the resistant, the underground. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1546

Categorization

• SHARE: The detail of Steve Biko dying undressed in the back of a police van on a long drive is a precise, harrowing fact worth sharing with anyone interested in South African history.
• XREF: connects to: Apartheid demolished a thriving mixed-race neighborhood precisely because it embodied racial mixing — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1547