The Politics of South African Legal Scholarship

Abstract

Human Rights and the South African Legal Order, by John Dugard. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978, Pp. xix, 470. $30.00. The Republic of South Africa is a rigidly stratified pigmentocracy where whites occupy the top of the social pyramid while blacks are pinned to the bottom. What distinguishes the South African situation from racial discrimination elsewhere is that it reflects official government policy. The Republic of South Africa is the only government in the world that makes racial domination the foundation of its philosophy and racial separation the basis of its conduct. The Afrikaaner regime coined the term "apartheid" to describe its vision of social organization. It is a term so associated with calculated cruelty that in many quarters of the international community apartheid has superseded nazism as the exemplar of state-organized terrorism. As the United Nations has repeatedly declared, apartheid is "a crime against humanity.''