South African Apartheid Analysis

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Chapter І: The South African Subject: from Victimization to Resistance
І.1. The Victimization of the African Society
When approaching the history of South Africa, a developing country situated at the Southern tip of Africa, one cannot but refer to the conflicts that characterize nearly all the vital spheres of the country. This was essentially due to the presence of numerous ethnic groups encompassing a wide variety of cultures, religions, languages, and traditions coexisting under unequal privileges. The black and white races were the two dominant groups in South Africa. Their relationship was far from being smooth and coherent. Their situation was aggravated by their existence under one of the most terrorizing political systems the world has ever known, namely the ‘Apartheid’. As for the etymology of the word, ‘Apartheid’ is an African word meaning “a state of being apart” …show more content…

He/she depicts a father, whose son immigrated illegally to Johannesburg to find a job where he got severely sick and then died of Pneumia. The father was harshly denied the burial of his son simply because he was dispossessed of his passbook. This dead son, could be saved if his brother working there on the service of whites, was not that reluctant in consulting any doctor or informing his masters to get help and because his dead brother did not have a passbook as well. Hence, using the words of Gulab Singh and Diviga Kumari in “Discrimination Even in Death: Blacks in Nadine Gordimer’s Six Feet of the Country”, blacks under the Apartheid system “find it difficult to live decently as well as to die graciously” (221). Such facts reinforce Gordimer’s opposition to the political institution blaming it for propagating the victimization of the blacks and arguing that once the Apartheid regime is abolished, the path for coexistence and mutual harmony could find a

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