Biological anthropology at the southern tip of Africa: Carrying European baggage in an African context

摘要

One of the biggest surprises in the rise of apartheid in South Africa in the 1940s was that, unlike in prewar Germany, it was not rooted in the physical anthropology of the previous decades. The engineers of apartheid were, for the most part, Afrikaans-speaking ethnologists operating out of the Afrikaans-medium universities, where little or no physical anthropology was taught. The University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town, both English-medium schools based on the traditions of British academia, were the centers of biological anthropology. Although none of the early practitioners from these schools were directly involved in the implementation of the apartheid policy, their strict typological approach to human variation provided a solid growth medium in which the government policies could develop without credible scientific opposition.