The mask of apartheid

Mail & Guardian

a day ago

The new apartheid is decentralised, encrypted in algorithms, and cloaked in the language of economic rationality and legal formalism and it's not only in South Africa. Photo: File
Despite South Africa's transition to democracy in 1994, apartheid has quietly entrenched itself within the private sphere. While the responsibility of managing the state lies in public hands, real power increasingly resides in private institutions and markets.
Today, privilege is governed by price. The market now sets the boundaries of opportunity. Financial barriers have replaced legal ones as instruments of exclusion. Something as simple as an application form is often accompanied by a fee — a form of economic regulation. These financial mechanisms now perform the same function once carried out by explicitly racist laws. Surcharges, income thresholds, qualification criteria and premium pricing have become the new tools of modern segregation.
Apartheid persists not just in memory, but in the cost of a car, a house, a job, a university placement, a medical aid scheme, an insurance policy, or a loan. Where the state once enforced exclusion through law, private actors now enforce it through economics.
Policing racial statutes was costly — politically, morally and financially. Financial exclusion, by contrast, appears neutral and carries no overt moral burden. By replacing legal barriers with economic ones, segregation has shifted from being a public burden to a private one, shielded from constitutional scrutiny and public accountability.
Unlike the centrally governed apartheid state, this new system of exclusion is maintained by a decentralised network of private actors. Although many apartheid-era laws were abolished after 1994, apartheid endures in South Africa's common law — particularly in the law of contract and property — which continue to structure economic relations and access to resources.
Law is not merely a matter of statute; it is embedded in legal practice, judicial culture and precedent. Apartheid, therefore, survives not only in what the law says, but in how the law is applied. It lives outside the statutory framework — in the everyday transactions that define who belongs, who benefits and who is left out.
This entrenchment of exclusion has also been accelerated by digital technologies. The rise of surveillance systems and racial categorisation tools — foundational pillars of the apartheid state — has been replicated through data-driven infrastructures. Unlike apartheid-era mechanisms, these technologies exist largely beyond South Africa's control. Their global proliferation coincided with the country's transition to democracy but ultimately complicated that transition.
Technological segregation now operates through algorithms — mechanisms that appear neutral but function with embedded bias. These algorithms reshape the public sphere, determine access to essential services such as credit, healthcare, education and employment, and quietly reproduce systems of exclusion by amplifying existing inequalities.
For instance, biased data sets and opaque decision-making processes can disproportionately deny marginalised groups access to loans, jobs or even housing. As the economy became increasingly digitised and financialised, power shifted further away from the democratic state toward international tech and financial corporations that control these platforms and infrastructures. These corporations operate with limited accountability, often beyond the reach of national regulatory frameworks, further entrenching inequality. In this way, apartheid has been encrypted into a new, digitised form — a system where exclusion is maintained not by explicit laws, but through coded algorithms and data-driven governance that perpetuate racial and economic divides.
Since 1994, apartheid has become fractalised. Once visible on grand, institutional scales, its logic now manifests in smaller, more diffuse forms. What was once a centralised system of segregation is now scattered across everyday life — in housing, education, employment and finance. This fractalisation makes apartheid easier to survive, but harder to see. Its invisibility renders it more difficult to confront, allowing structural inequality to persist under the guise of normalcy.
The system of apartheid and exclusion is not confined to South Africa's borders. In occupied Palestine, similar structures of racial and economic segregation are enforced through a combination of state power and private interests. Here, apartheid is maintained not only through physical barriers like walls and checkpoints but also through economic control, land confiscation, and pervasive surveillance technologies, many developed and sold by global corporations.
This entanglement of public authority and private capital in Palestine echoes South Africa's experience, highlighting how modern apartheid adapts across contexts. It reveals a transnational pattern in which racial domination is sustained through intertwined legal, economic, and technological systems, perpetuating dispossession and inequality on a global scale.
Legally, the persistence of apartheid in its modern, privatised form reflects deep continuities in South Africa's legal system. While apartheid-era statutes were formally repealed, the foundational principles embedded in common law — particularly in property, contract, and corporate law — continue to structure economic and social relations in ways that reproduce racialised inequality. These legal doctrines were developed to protect wealth, land, and capital accumulation for a privileged few and remain largely unchallenged in courts today. Moreover, judicial culture and precedent frequently uphold these doctrines under the guise of neutrality and formal equality, masking the structural biases they perpetuate.
Without a fundamental transformation of the legal order, beyond mere statutory reform, to interrogate and dismantle the inherited values and practices that sustain exclusion, the law risks becoming a silent enabler of privatised apartheid rather than an instrument of justice and redress.
Apartheid has not ended; it has evolved and multiplied its forms. No longer enforced solely through overt laws and state apparatus, it now thrives in the interstices of market mechanisms, digital technologies and legal frameworks that appear neutral but remain deeply exclusionary.
Recognising these continuities and transformations is essential if we are to confront and dismantle the systemic inequalities that persist in South Africa and beyond. Only through holistic efforts that address economic structures, technological governance, and the very foundations of our legal system can we hope to realise the democratic promise of equality and justice at home and in solidarity with those, like Palestinians.
Sõzarn Barday is a writer and attorney based in South Africa and has a particular interest in human rights within the Middle East. Opinions shared represent her individual perspective.