Investigating Bad Science
The challenge here is to investigate a number of issues associated with the ‘bad’ or ‘pseudo- science’ used to justify the Apartheid system and the race discrimination at its core. You can divide up the research or tackle it as a single project. In the end it is up to you how you report your findings – as a talk or a piece of writing. You could gather your research under a single title: What were the origins of the prejudice against Sandra Laing?
There are a number of roots you will need to explore.
Some go back a long way, the foundations being laid when white Europeans first began to explore Africa, the Far East and America. It was clearly a bit awkward as a Christian to find oneself engaged in enslaving or otherwise mistreating fellow human beings. One solution was to convince oneself that such people were so vastly inferior to you, hardly above the status of animals, that their exploitation was entirely justified.
You are going to have to investigate and question the work of early biologists such as Carl von Linne who followed up his efforts classifying plants by dividing up humanity into different races – to each of which he attributed different characteristics. Somewhat predictably, it was the white European he judged the most ‘lively and inventive’.
Another misfiring race theorist to look into is Johann-Fredrich Blumenbach another 18th Century scientist who, in ignorance of all we know now about the emergence of human life out of Africa, argued that white people were the first race and that all other races were a decline from that superior starting point.
Africa and Africans always fared badly when it came to creating racial hierarchies. You can read more about this under the topic ‘academic variants’ in the Wikipedia entry on ‘racism’. It might make shocking but fascinating reading if your research also extends to ‘human zoos’ in which people from certain races were used as exhibits alongside apes suggesting their people’s closeness to animals – reinforcing the supposedly scientific basis of racist attitudes.
In the 19th Century the work of Charles Darwin was twisted to form the notion of Social Darwinism. A central feature of this pseudo science was that the laws of natural selection could be seen in the supremacy that white nations and peoples enjoyed in the world. They were on the top of the pile because it was ‘natural’ for them to be there. Social Darwinism was the perfect tool with which to justify racism and discrimination. If whites managed to dominate a society and oppress the majority, then this was the result of inevitable forces not injustice and brutality.
Another equally dangerous set of beliefs also grew up in the 19th Century called eugenics. It owed its origins to a cousin of Darwin’s called Francis Galton who published her beliefs about racial purity and selective breeding in 1883. The eugenicists dream was a perfect human race, a goal based upon the idea of white supremacy and the discouragement of racial mixing. Such thinking was fundamental to the philosophical basis of Apartheid – especially its ‘love laws’ that made relationships between whites and people of different races illegal. (You can find out more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics)
‘In South Africa’, writes Judith Stone, ‘such notions were popularized in the 1920s by the husband-and-wife team of Harold B Fantham, a zoologist, and Annie Porter, a parasitologist. They believed that coloured people, as a ‘hybrid race’, were naturally unstable and less intelligent than whites, and claimed their research proved that racial mixture led to physical abnormalities ranging from weak lungs, and other malformed organs, and character flaws such as vanity, sexual promiscuity, deviousness, violent outbursts of temper and criminality.’
Another significant factor in the spread of belief in eugenics in South Africa was the popular novelist of the 1920s called Sarah Gertrude Millin whose epic stories were often highly preoccupied with ideas of racial purity. In God’s Stepchildren, a series of disasters befalls a family explicitly because they are the descendents of a shameful liaison between a white missionary and a Khoisan woman. They are cursed by this taint.
It is also important to recognize that a number of important Afrikaner ‘thinkers’ who came to prominence after 1948 had been educated in Germany during the Nazi era and had been highly influenced by the racial theories that would underpin the Final Solution. Among these was Geoffrey Cronje – a professor at Pretoria University – whose book Home For Posterity (1945) offered ‘proof’ that racial mixing was destructive.
To learn more about the abuse of science under the Nazis, visit the Washington Holocaust Museum site http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/deadlymedicine/. A search of the photograph archive for artefacts associated with racist science produces images of assessment tests that are identical to those used in Apartheid South Africa.
Science of race: http://www.ushmm.org/uia-cgi/uia_doc/query/11?uf=uia_srnyMd