One of the things that a visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg gets across very effectively is that a policy of monstrous repression was built on details—the details of paperwork and procedures and regulations, a parody of rational administration built around deranged and evil goals. Early on, a wall carries a list of the laws that made up the apartheid system: 148 different measures spanning 22 years, a constant process of repression and escalation.
A little further on, there’s a series of personal passbooks on display, turned to various pages. The particular one that brought me up short was opened to the spaces where the passbook holder was required to get their employer’s signature every month. There was the same notation, over and over—routine daily existence made contingent and subject to endless re-approval.
Under apartheid, lives were tightly managed, and the purpose of that management was to make it impossible to live. In one gallery is a display of photos and enlarged pages from the Pretoria-born photographer Ernest Cole’s 1967 book House of Bondage, which was banned in South Africa when it was published. From the crowded streets of the capital to the desolate territory where politically inconvenient figures were extrajudicially banished, Cole recorded the particulars of what it meant for people to exist under constant subjugation.
One spread in Cole’s book showed and described the rituals of the passbook checks, with their constant mass harassment and presumption of guilt:
A student who said he was going to fetch his textbook is pulled in. To prove he was still in school he showed his fountain pen and ink-stained fingers. But that was not enough; in long pants he looked older than sixteen.
Another photo from a chapter about the artificially low wages of black workers showed a woman holding an infant in a state of advanced starvation. “Like one in every four African children, he died before his first birthday,” Cole wrote in the caption. “His father has worked nineteen years for railways.”
Nineteen years of labor—useful labor, for the country’s benefit—and the worker couldn’t keep his own family alive. The only social contract was the promise of malice.
Six months ago, in Africa and beyond, doctors and other healthcare workers found their supplies of medicine and funding cut off overnight by the Trump administration. Patients in the middle of receiving lifesaving care were turned away to go home and sicken and die.
I flew home from South Africa to read the news that United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had reportedly ransacked a pair of Pennsylvania restaurants while seizing 16 workers there; and the news that the Internal Revenue Service was trying to fight off a demand from Department of Homeland Security for confidential taxpayer information, under which addresses and personal information from tax filings would be used to track down suspected undocumented immigrants; and the news that security guards at the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases brought in ICE to arrest “an existing patient” who had allegedly presented a driver’s license without RealID on her way in to get treatment. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services—named Andrew Nixon, in case anyone is keeping a list—told the Washington Post that “[l]ike any taxpayer-funded service, NIH clinical trials are for people here legally” and that the department was “grateful to our law enforcement partners for acting swiftly to protect patients and staff.”
The federal government is busy establishing classes of people who are excluded from participation in, and protection by, the larger society—people who aren’t allowed to work, or to pay taxes, or to comply with immigration proceedings, Also last week, the Air Force of the world’s most lavishly funded military declared that it was denying retirement benefits to trans service members the Trump administration is driving out of the armed forces.
There’s plenty of precedent for, and fodder for predictions about, tyranny and subjection within the borders of the United States. This country was built on mass murder and enslavement, and when the system of enslavement was overthrown and barred by the constitution, the political system reconstituted it as a new system of racial segregation and political subjugation—one that helped show South Africa’s white minority how its own project of domination might be accomplished.
But what the Apartheid Museum demonstrates is how quickly and completely it could all happen, within a more modern political setting. Using minority rule, South African whites built up the whole savage contrivance within a few years and kept it grinding up the country for decades. When my parents were born, apartheid didn’t exist; when I was born, apartheid was the entrenched reality for 23 million people. It was senseless and indefensible and it was the law.
Once this happens, it won’t just go away. The museum doesn’t end with the unwinding of apartheid: there are big screens showing the bloodshed afterward, and a case full of guns, and further galleries of the long and dissatisfying process of a profoundly broken society trying to figure out how to become something else. The more damage that builds up today, the more damaged the future will be.