WI: South Africa reintroduces slavery and becomes a pariah state like North Korea

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What about serfdom? Would it be less ASB if this was instituted in the early 1900s?

What is the POD?

In the early 1900s a number of blacks in the Cape could vote, dependent on property qualifications. What is the POD that sees some black people being allowed to vote, to a situation where people are turned into serfs?

There was also a fairly strong liberal movement in the Cape which was supportive of at least a qualified franchise, and would have strongly opposed any move to turn people into serfs.
 
What about forced labour? Offenders, indigents and the like are to work on public things to fight against vagrancy.

Just so happens a lot of those "public projects" are on private land.

Salary without the name. Plus the system of forced labour was relatively common in colonies
 
Let's say that apartheid South Africa rather then abolishing apartheid instead hunkers down, even in the face of sanctions. They don't re-institute slavery, but they do engage in increasingly horrific human rights abuses in a desperate attempt to contain the rebellion. The UN escalates sanctions, but the South African possession of nuclear weapons inhibits further action. And so the black African rebellion grows increasingly radicalized, and the apartheid South African regime is able to hold on to power for a considerable while longer due to their technical and organizational advantage. As their economic position grows starker they rely more and more heavily on black African labour, and said labour increasingly loses even the pretense of being voluntary, even if they never officially label it as slavery.

But eventually the disintegration of the economy erodes their technical advantage, and so the regime is overcome by the black revolution.

The big problem with this scenario is getting a large enough fraction of the white leadership and white public to choose mass conscription and the destruction of their standard of living rather then reconciling with the black South Africans. Is there any possibilty of the ANC being led by someone much more radical and "scary" then Nelson Mandela? That might be enough.
 
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Why would they re-introduce slavery? Jim Crow taught racists that you could get all of the "benefits" of having a permanent, servile underclass with none of the downsides of ownership (you know, like actually having to provide *some* food and shelter instead of providing a pitiful wage and "well, he's just going to have to make it work"), all the things that made slavery so terribly expensive. Other than as a perverse "prestige" thing, I can't see this getting traction among anyone, even the crazy Apartheidites.

Although this is insanely unlikely one of the downsides of slavery is not you having to provide food and shelter, you have to do that indirectly if you pay them a wage as well. You can't pay a free worker so little that he starves to death or dies of exposure or you are out of a worker. Even during the worst of the Jim Crow era Black workers did not starve to death or were homeless. It was very bad for Blacks but they didn't starve to death.
 

Yuelang

Banned
Soviet invasion to liberate the Socialist Africans from Fascism. And USA quietly lurks in the background while trying their best to court the Black leaders...
 
Soviet invasion to liberate the Socialist Africans from Fascism. And USA quietly lurks in the background while trying their best to court the Black leaders...

No, the Soviets didn't have the sea-lift capabilities to send tens if not hundreds of thousands of men all the way to South Africa and support them. If it were going to be out and out invaded it would most likely be US+UK+ France. Nations that had decent sea-lift capability.
 
If South Africa becomes a pariah state, wouldn''t that defeat the purpose of reintroducing slavery in the first place? Because no one in the outraged international community is gonna wanna buy all the gold, diamonds, and other precious minerals the slaves are digging up.
 
If South Africa becomes a pariah state, wouldn''t that defeat the purpose of reintroducing slavery in the first place? Because no one in the outraged international community is gonna wanna buy all the gold, diamonds, and other precious minerals the slaves are digging up.

South Africa was pretty much a pariah state from the 1960s to the 1990s, and sanctions were only part of the reason apartheid ended.

In this extremely ASB world, whoever is in charge of South Africa may be very happy to look inward and not trade with other countries, negating any problems with trade that might occur.
 
South Africa was pretty much a pariah state from the 1960s to the 1990s, and sanctions were only part of the reason apartheid ended.

Well, I remember drinking(unintentionally) South African wine in Canada in the mid-80s. And I remember people around the same time talking about how they were choosing to boycott South African stuff, which would further indicate that SA was exporting things.

In any case, are you arguing that, had NO ONE in the global community been buying South African wine, diamonds, gold etc. that South African industry could have just sold all those things internally to maintain the white minority at a decent standard of living? Or is it that they just never develop that SOL to begin with, as a result of earlier pariah-hood, and therefore don't feel the burn of international isolation?
 
Well, I remember drinking(unintentionally) South African wine in Canada in the mid-80s. And I remember people around the same time talking about how they were choosing to boycott South African stuff, which would further indicate that SA was exporting things.

In any case, are you arguing that, had NO ONE in the global community been buying South African wine, diamonds, gold etc. that South African industry could have just sold all those things internally to maintain the white minority at a decent standard of living? Or is it that they just never develop that SOL to begin with, as a result of earlier pariah-hood, and therefore don't feel the burn of international isolation?

Market certainly wasn't big enough to sell all that kind of stuff internally and keep whites in the style to which they'd become accustomed.

In the ASB vein of this thread, I'm saying any government that would reintroduce slavery in South Africa would probably be happy to sacrifice high living standards for whites so as to not deal with outsiders.
 
According to the wiki article on the Sullivan Principles, in 1977 General Motors was the largest employer of blacks in South Africa. I assume they mean "the largest single employer", but in any case, that does make it sound as if foreign-investment in South Africa at the time was not negligible.

CROSS-POSTED. YOUR LAST POST CLARIFIES YOUR STATEMENT.
 
What if the while minority was pressed into slavery (unlikely for various reasons) as retribution for the years of apartheid.

Even Mugabe hasn't managed anything quite like that, and if there is anyone who would try, it would be him.

So, can't see Mandela, or even the somewhat off-the-wall Mbeki or demagogic Zuma, going for retributive slavery.

But yeah, if it happened, well, I guess South Africa would take a bit of a tumble in the world's estimation.
 
Even Mugabe hasn't managed anything quite like that, and if there is anyone who would try, it would be him.

So, can't see Mandela, or even the somewhat off-the-wall Mbeki or demagogic Zuma, going for retributive slavery.

But yeah, if it happened, well, I guess South Africa would take a bit of a tumble in the world's estimation.

If this happened it would probably be in the 1960s or '70s, so unlikely that people like Mbeki or Zuma would be leading this bizarro-ANC.
 

Andre27

Banned
In the Netherlands one of the punishments is community service. While not slavery i could see a black government push for mandatory community service as retribution. There are more than enough issues to be fixed in South Africa.
 
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