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

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That could happen given a 1983 nuclear exchange-scenario in which a rump-Sweden has fell into a corrupt dictatorship to survive. A cult-like post-Swedish polity for that manner.

Actually, that can happen for South Africa, too.

It's surprising how many alternate history problems can be solved through nuclear war.
 
Well, okay, but a western(more or less) industrialized country forcibly enslaving MILLIONS of people, who previously had not been enslaved for generations, is probably gonna attract the world's attention in a way that a small, third-world country tolerating the continued existence of slavey won't.

If someone suggested a time-line where Sweden brought back literal witch-trials in the 1990s, I don't think it would enhance the credibility of the scenario to point out that witch-trials still take place in Saudi Arabia and other medivalist locales.

You mean like, oh lets say, India where 18+ million are enslaved?
 

thorr97

Banned
Okay, let's say that with considerable hand waving and butterfly flapping, the white controlled regime in South Africa institutes a system of forced labor that the rest of the world quite rightly calls out as being actual slavery. That this takes place after World War Two and devolves to this level after the Cold War has ended as well.

One thing that this will cause is the rather painful recognition that slavery still exists in this world and that the number of countries practicing it and tolerating it is revoltingly high. That will have some major effects in the international order beyond just how particularly odious the regime is in Pretoria.

As to a slavery practicing South Africa itself, it's days would be extraordinarily limited. Once the international community recognized - officially recognized - that SA was practicing slavery, then South Africa would become a pariah state like none other. Even at its worst, North Korea still enjoys considerable support from China and Russia. It's in their political interests to have North Korea on hand to agitate the West with.

The slave state of South Africa would have no such protectors, benefactors, or even those nations which had anything to gain from its continued existence. The sanctions would be well nigh absolute and the brain drain on the country would be crushing. Anyone with any marketable skills who sought a future for themselves and their families would recognize how doomed South Africa's economy would then be. And they'd leave. The more that did that the worse it'd get in SA until the country could no longer sustain itself in the face of the international embargo and the relentless military pressure coming from the black regimes which bordered it.

A likely outcome though might be a South African version of the Israeli "Samson Option." Given just how evil the apartheid regime already was, a South African regime which supported slavery would have been even worse and thus more likely to have chosen to face its end in a nuclear hellfire rather than meekly give up the reins to those it viewed as less than human.

The end result would not be a pretty thing for anyone.
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
Getting beyond an image of the Apartheid SA Goverment with the nuance of a Spitting Image skit, who exactly in that Government would want Slavery to be introduced?

I am serious and that isn't a rhetorical question. If anyone can find a single scrap of evidence that a member of the National Party in a position of relative power actually spit-balled this idea seriously, then it's something we can take seriously. But beyond that, it's a awful WI because it relies on the Apartheid Goverment being this faceless torrent of pure undiluted evil that's basically the Draka, as opposed to a bunch of greedy, racist, violent dickheads who just wanted to cling to the power they had and their parents had and their parents before them had, and did so through violence and segregation.

Honestly, given how Marius is from around these parts, I trust his judgement that a PoD for 'the Apartheid Goverment reintroduces Slavery' doesn't actually exist and would require a lot hand-waving and leaps of logic, at least within the confines of what the OP provided. Wage slavery or private individuals human trafficking, maybe, but as an official Goverment policy, it's not plausible.
 
As an official government policy? Because my understanding of this thread premise is not just that private companines or criminal enterprises force people to work, but that the government of South Africa officially announces that blacks will be enslaved, and uses the power of the state to make that a reality.

My point still stands. Whether it's de jure or de facto, millions of people are in slavery today, and no one's talking about invading.
 

shiftygiant

Gone Fishin'
My point still stands. Whether it's de jure or de facto, millions of people are in slavery today, and no one's talking about invading.
Right, but the distinction being made is an official Goverment policy, which surprisingly, is not what happening in India. It is not a Goverment Policy, and if anything the Goverment of India are actually taking steps to combat it, as noted in that article.

What the OP is asking- or at least what we have to infer because of how vague it is- is for the South African Goverment to make slavery an Official Goverment Policy, not simply have certain people in positions of power be personally lenient to private individuals engaging in human trafficking and slavery.
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
South Africa was able to last in its form for so long because they were able to point to Communists in Angola and therefore solicit international support from anti-Communists. They would not be able to survive if they started up slavery. There would be no international help, and economically, they would cripple themselves. It would fall apart in a few years at most, violently or not.
 
Right, but the distinction being made is an official Goverment policy, which surprisingly, is not what happening in India. It is not a Goverment Policy, and if anything the Goverment of India are actually taking steps to combat it, as noted in that article.

What the OP is asking- or at least what we have to infer because of how vague it is- is for the South African Goverment to make slavery an Official Goverment Policy, not simply have certain people in positions of power be personally lenient to private individuals engaging in human trafficking and slavery.

Yes, I get that. i got it from the start. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter one little bit whether it's official, you still aren't going to get a situation where "(t)hey'll be taken out by the UN".
 
There is a difference between "I don't want you to go to places near my race" and "I want you to work for me forever and never have to be paid, and basically turn you into an animal in the eyes of the law." Both are awful, but not even the most racist South African would want to re-institute slavery. It is like how if Alabama seceded, at this point not even the most racist redneck would want to re-institute slavery.
 
Getting beyond an image of the Apartheid SA Goverment with the nuance of a Spitting Image skit, who exactly in that Government would want Slavery to be introduced?

I am serious and that isn't a rhetorical question. If anyone can find a single scrap of evidence that a member of the National Party in a position of relative power actually spit-balled this idea seriously, then it's something we can take seriously. But beyond that, it's a awful WI because it relies on the Apartheid Goverment being this faceless torrent of pure undiluted evil that's basically the Draka, as opposed to a bunch of greedy, racist, violent dickheads who just wanted to cling to the power they had and their parents had and their parents before them had, and did so through violence and segregation.

Honestly, given how Marius is from around these parts, I trust his judgement that a PoD for 'the Apartheid Goverment reintroduces Slavery' doesn't actually exist and would require a lot hand-waving and leaps of logic, at least within the confines of what the OP provided. Wage slavery or private individuals human trafficking, maybe, but as an official Goverment policy, it's not plausible.

Exactly. Apartheid imagined the subordination of blacks, their exclusion from the white-run polity and their subordination to whites, but it did not imagine enslaving them. Apartheid's planners were not that bad.
 
North Korea has slavery, they just don't call it that. Have the South Africans introduce multigenerational work camps and there you go. Of course, that in itself might well be unachievable by any plausible means.
 
"Something something higher GDP... Something something white flight = genocide .... something something brain drain.... something something Mandela was a terrorist... something something 'if only Ian Smith ran RSA'.... something something cranial shapes" *buries head in sand*

In all seriousness, there are quite a lot of people that think like that. The next suburb over from mine is full of South Africans that emigrated, and they're about 50/50 pro and anti-apartheid.

While the apartheid regime was bad and the ANC were the good guys, we should remember that the reason that Mandela was imprisoned by the South African state wasn't because he was the a "South African Gandhi" but because he was the head of an armed paramilitary unit in a group that was part of a "united front" that included communists.

Maybe armed black resistance was justified, maybe it wasn't, but the notion that calling Mandela a "terrorist" (even wrongly) makes you a white supremacist is just flat out wrong. With that logic John Brown was a heroic freedom fighter who was fully justified in raising arms against the Federal Govt.
 
A Jim Crow-based way to create bad situations akin to slavery is to do the following:

1. Harsh vagrancy laws, with jail time for not having a job and if you get fired or "let go," your employer must report it to the district and you have a week to find a new job if you're Black.

2. 1-sided employment laws where employment is at will for the employer and minimum 3 year contract for the employee. They could borrow a page from Civil Law countries and make specific performance of the work contract a civil penalty for the employee only. This combined with number 1 keeps Blacks afraid to defy their bosses no matter how much work they are given and gives bosses the leave to be paternalistic or harsh, as they see fit.

3. The aforementioned community service requirement as the penalty for vagrancy, especially if you can't go home to your family at while serving.

4. A head tax is imposed, with the value set above what most Black families can pay but that most White families and persons can. If you can't pay the tax, you and your family have to do x days of "community service."
 
Right, but the distinction being made is an official Goverment policy, which surprisingly, is not what happening in India. It is not a Goverment Policy, and if anything the Goverment of India are actually taking steps to combat it, as noted in that article.

What the OP is asking- or at least what we have to infer because of how vague it is- is for the South African Goverment to make slavery an Official Goverment Policy, not simply have certain people in positions of power be personally lenient to private individuals engaging in human trafficking and slavery.

I posed the question to @missouribob about what the actual POD would be, and which individuals would be behind the reintroduction of slavery but he (perhaps unsurprisingly) declined to respond.

The apartheid government was bad, very bad, but they weren't literal Nazis.

As I have said, this thread should be in ASBs.
 
While the apartheid regime was bad and the ANC were the good guys, we should remember that the reason that Mandela was imprisoned by the South African state wasn't because he was the a "South African Gandhi" but because he was the head of an armed paramilitary unit in a group that was part of a "united front" that included communists.

Maybe armed black resistance was justified, maybe it wasn't, but the notion that calling Mandela a "terrorist" (even wrongly) makes you a white supremacist is just flat out wrong. With that logic John Brown was a heroic freedom fighter who was fully justified in raising arms against the Federal Govt.

By any definition Mandela was a terrorist. But there's nothing wrong with that. The French Resistance were terrorists for example. If you know dialogue is impossible through peaceful means, sometimes (not often, but sometimes) violence and terror are the only way to make your voice heard.

I still remember as a kid in the 1980s, my father telling someone that if he was a black man in South Africa he would be a terrorist. And my father voted National Party.
 
Yes, I get that. i got it from the start. What I'm saying is it doesn't matter one little bit whether it's official, you still aren't going to get a situation where "(t)hey'll be taken out by the UN".

International pressure on SA was huge, and become something of a cause celebre for many organisations.

Human rights abuses in other countries were often worse than in South Africa, but they did not receive the same level of ostracism etc as South Africa. If slavery is reintroduced in South Africa there will be massive pressure from African countries, the NAM etc. and within many Western countries and governments to do something, with the use of force being an option.
 

Czar Kaizer

Banned
This is beyond ASB.
Why would they reintroduce slavery? That would mean whites would have to feed, house and clothe their black slaves, a lot more expensive than just paying them shitty wages, segregating them from the cities and such.
Can't you see that Apartheid is far more economically beneficial than slavery?
 
Seriously, this needs to go to the ASB section.

This is beyond ASB.
Why would they reintroduce slavery? That would mean whites would have to feed, house and clothe their black slaves, a lot more expensive than just paying them shitty wages, segregating them from the cities and such.
Can't you see that Apartheid is far more economically beneficial than slavery?

No.

This can be possible given a nuclear exchange between NATO and the Comintern, thus allowing South Africa to regress beyond belief. A post-atomic dictatorship instituting a form of slavery or serfdom can be implemented under the guise of survival.
 
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