The deployment of racism in South Africa

Abstract

This work has been motivated by the debates concerning the questions and issues of racism in South Africa up to the end of the 1980s. The work analyses the practice of racism from an inter-disciplinary perspective, based on Michel Foucault’s texts. It develops a conceptual and historical framework which itself has been derived and elaborated from that analysis. It covers three hundred years of South African history based to a large extent on primary sources. In critical ways it differs from the standpoint of the dominant Marxist and Liberal accounts of South African historiography until the end of apartheid. It attempts to avoid some of the pitfalls into which analysts from these schools have tended to fall in their contribution to the race-class debate on colonialism, segregation and apartheid in South Africa.