Apartheid, the SADF and white masculinities framed in Foucault’s Power Theory

Abstract

To recognise how the mechanisms of white masculinities in apartheid and partly in a democratic South Africa function, following notions such as racism and violence, a theory which examines how technologies of power entwined and established in tangible contexts, ought to be dichotomized. Refining from Foucault's opus of power logics, this article displays how the processes whereby white apartheid masculinities discipline or govern others are recurrently meticulously associated to procedures of racism, brutality and discrimination. Through techniques of controlled and indoctrinating sermons, violent assaults, verbal abuse, involuntary admittance to psychiatric wards, austere conduct, forced Afrikaner faith, everyday reality, apartheid political lucidities, in the form of combined totalisation technologies whereby military conscripts are punished, the film Moffie is employed in the article as a mimetic device to demonstrate the Foucauldian power structures explored through the conduct of the South African Defense Force (SADF) and the white masculine government. White masculinities’ purpose and theoretical intention are argued to be confined to racism via the interposition of peripheral threats which activated the Border War, and thereafter it is claimed that the white masculine born free generation of South African students’ reversion to apartheid racism are augmented and comprehensive to incorporate the rise of revolution.