Divide-and-rule ethnoracial fragmentation long predated formal apartheid

Evidence

Any discernible non-whiteness, by contrast, suffered segregating differentiation, attempting formally to compel the threat of resisting coherence into the disarticulating artifice of competing ethnoracial groupings nationally conceived. Ethnoracial divide and rule long preceded formalized apartheid, disarticulating blackness into fragmented parts as whiteness in contrast covered over the Anglo-boer split. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1481

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on the general divide-and-rule argument from the law-merchant and social-capital material, and connects to later post-apartheid ‘rainbow’ fragmentation debates. — connects to: The apartheid state engineered categories for groups that had no prior bounded identity. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 557; Apartheid intensified preexisting state-created categories rather than inventing new ones — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 566; Colonial ethnography supplied the classificatory categories apartheid segregation built upon. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 567 (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: how the state disarticulates the colonized into competing sub-groupings while consolidating the colonizer’s internal split—a pattern generalizable beyond South Africa.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1481