Damn post submitted itself. Try again.
You have to be a bit cautious applying these statements to South Africa. The situation wasn’t quite that black and white. The country was being colonised/invaded simultaneously by Blacks from the North and Whites from the south. The original Brown inhabitants, the San and various related groups, were displaced by both groups but primarily by the Black. And that is an extremely potted summary. If you’re fortunate Mr. Dibble may be along soon to fill in the details.
But the main point is that the Whites in South Africa were displacing recent invaders, or to put it more bluntly they were taking land from Blacks that Blacks had taken from Browns. That may not make it right but in the eyes of many (myself included) it makes it a lot less wrong. If your culture says that it is acceptable to claim land by right of conquest then you will have a hard time claiming injustice when someone conquers you and claims your land.
Even more important is that, at least in places, Blacks moved into land after it had been claimed by whites. IOW the Blacks weren’t being disposessed from land they owned, they were occupying land already owned by Whites.
Nor were there the serious and mutual territorial wars in Africa that were seen in Africa. Whites and Blacks in Africa fought for territory and the Blacks lost. Whites arrived on Indian land as visitors and displaced them largely by stealth, massacre and subterfuge. That is not to downplay the (relatively few) massacres of Black civilians, but it was a very different type of encounter.
In many ways the clash between Black and White in Africa was more like the clash between Russian and England in Asia than the situation in America. Both sides were colonising/conquering peoples hungry for land, both were new arrivals and both fielded armies and had little respect for the indigenous inhabitants.
That’s in stark contrast to the situation in the Americas where the Indians were the indigenous inhabitants and the Indians had no armies and little concept of territorial conquest.
None of this of course justifies the Apartheid system, but it does make any direct comparison to the history of Indians in America difficult.
In some ways the American scenario is worse because the destruction of the Indians was so complete: culturally, linguistically and numerically and is impossible to reverse. In contrast the Blacks in Africa largely retained their cultural identity and actually increased in number after coming into contact with the Whites. Black culture has altered a lot in the 20th century, but then White culture would hardly be recognisable to a Victorian Boer or Englishman.
In some ways the American situation is better.
It was largely accidental, a result of disease and cultural contamination which more thoroughly destroyed the Indians than any malicious or deliberate action ever did.
The American system was never formalised and legalised to the degree that Apartheid was. To the degree that it was ever official it was a peicemeal system made up to suit the times and circumstances and personalities/cultures involved. At no stage did the US as a whole declare Indians to be subhuman and with inherently less worth and dignity than Europeans, though doubtless that was the majority sentiment for most of history. The Indian experience was largely driven by greed and self-importance, the Indians weren’t using the damn land. It was more akin to the machinations of Rhodes in claiming Rhodesia than to the later formalised Apartheid systems.
In addition the American system wasn’t aimed at keeping Indians down. Quiet the opposite seems to have been true: from what I’ve read most people would have been pleased to see the Indians to “rise” to a European Christian standard in every regard including wealth.
In contrast the Apartheid system was deliberately and carefully designed to keep Blacks in a subservient position and let them know it. The effects in terms of poverty and ignorance were precisely the effects desired. As such the maladies that brought such as crime, disease and despair were not the result of ignorance and that much worse for that reason alone. To me a sin made from ignorance is not as severe as a sin made in full knowledge that of what you are doing.
At the end of the day you are comparing apples and oranges. The cultures involved, the intents of all parties, the means used and the end result are all so radically different that any judgment of what was worse is meaningless.