The idea that a European State had a 'right' to exercise sovereignty over an indigenous non-European people and ideas about how this could be exploited apparently began with the works of the Spanish school of natural law theorists of the sixteenth century. These works were aimed at devising a 'civilised code' by which the exploitation of the New World could proceed.

According to these ideas, Natural Law, which recognised the equality of all mankind, avowed a goal to preserve the proprietary rights of native peoples' whenever they ceded their lands to a sovereign state. However, given that some people are 'more equal than others', it very soon came to be seen that 'primitive' peoples should rightly be protected by the 'civilised' States which 'discovered' them. This protection could be secured by these native primitive people granting the colonising civilised and 'superior' States an exclusive right of pre-emption over their lands.

Sound familiar folks? An even more profoundly Eurocentric view was to follow which was grounded in the so-called morally neutral positivist movement. In this vision, only sovereign (nationalised) and therefore 'civilised' States were capable or entitled to make laws. Tribally arranged communities could not, they were seen to lack that ability. Of course this was taken to mean that they could claim no title to the lands they were occupying or ranging over; this shift meant that they were now seen as legally non-existent.

So naturally any power sharing would not even be on the colonisers' radar.

                                               

I am reading Nelson Mandela's book, Long Walk To Freedom. Many of you may have already read it. It has been out for a few years now. For those who haven't, Nelson Mandela wrote an autobiography which details what it was like to grow up and live through racist South Africa and the apartheid regime, and about his part in trying to bring about change. In the book I am up to the year 1962. Nelson has just arrived at Robben Island.

While I read and think about these issues though, it brings up other memories and images about related things that happened here.

The issue of Apartheid in South Africa was a huge political issue in New Zealand. It became especially important to us here, (apart from the obvious humanitarian concerns), because of our strong rugby-playing links with South Africa. Rugby was THE game here in New Zealand, and the ongoing joke was always that rugby was in fact the NZ Religion, and of course you don't mix Religion and Politics. Neither do you mix Politics into Rugby, that was the view of many rugby supporters and the various NZ governments too. Rugby was sacrosanct, rugby was above all that.

There was no professional sport in New Zealand back then. Even the wonderful rugby was played by 'amateurs' who worked full time jobs. It was clearly necessary to have nice employers who would let the men off work for the months that the players might be away playing test matches overseas in Australia, or Britain, or South Africa. It was a big thing back then to be chosen to be an All Black and represent our country in other parts of the world.

All through the sixties, seventies and into the eighties, the South African Springboks rugby team was always made up of only South African 'whites'. When they were challenged about this I remember they defended themselves by stating that the teams were chosen on merit and the 'Black' indigenous South Africans were not good enough to make the team. These statements may have had some truth in them because, after all, if people never get the opportunity to play, how do they became good enough to make the team.

Problems arose when our mixed race All Blacks team went to South Africa. The Maori members of the team had to be made "honorary whites" so that they could use the same facilities and stay in the same hotels as the Pakeha/NZ European players rather than being made to use the sub-standard facilities provided for South Africa's indigenous African people.

I remember this issue being hotly debated in our Social Studies classroom in my third form year (1971) in high school. That year a spokeswoman from HART (Halt All Racist Tours) came to speak to the whole school about the appalling conditions in South Africa for the indigenous people, with pictures of their living conditions etc, and why we should support HART's protests against rugby tours to and from South Africa.

There was a kind of impromptu feel to the thing really; my class arriving for our double period in the science lab had been told, leave your bags and go to the hall, so we had done just that. When we returned we were faced with an agitated science teacher, (he had been standing at the back of the hall), who happened to be a 'white' South African. He said, "I am not allowed to speak politics to you but that was not the whole truth, it's not balanced, it is not just as she says". That moment has become one of those annoying little things that sticks in my mind for years, coming back to me out of the blue, such as when I am reading a book by Nelson Mandela, for example. I have often wondered what my science teacher would have said back then. Would he have tried to justify The Apartheid Regime and if so, how? How could anyone defend such an immoral and indefensible position?

By 1973, feelings about the Apartheid issue and rugby were running so high that the then Labour Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, worried about the potential violence and the divisiveness, cancelled a planned Springbok tour to this country.

The 1977 Commonwealth Gleneagles agreement which finally banned all sporting contact with South Africa intensified the divisions here, with stubborn diehards who still attempted to make a 'politics should be kept out of sport' stand, looking more and more out of touch with the reality that the rest of us lived in.

1977 was also the year Steve Biko died in a Pretoria prison cell. He had been detained and interrogated four times between August of 1975 and September of 1977 under the Apartheid era anti-terrorism legislation. On the 7th of September, "Biko sustained a head injury during interrogation, after which he acted strangely and was uncooperative. The doctors who examined him (naked, lying on a mat, and manacled to a metal grille) initially disregarded overt signs of neurological injury." But by the 11th of September Biko had slipped into a continual semi-conscious state and the police physician recommended that he be transferred to hospital. Instead Biko was transported 1,200km to Pretoria, a 12 hour journey which he made while lying naked in the back of a Land Rover. A few hours later, on the 12th of September, alone and still naked, and lying on the floor of his cell in the Pretoria Central Prison, Biko died from brain damage. The brutality of the circumstances surrounding Biko's death caused a worldwide outcry. Biko became a Martyr and Symbol of Black Resistance to the Oppressive Apartheid Regime. Anybody who hadn't noticed the dysfunction by now was truly an Ostrich.

We seemed to have a lot of Ostriches in New Zealand back then.

Despite all of that, the New Zealand Rugby Football Union, (NZRFU, a flock of Ostriches if ever you saw them), under the apparent benevolent gaze of the Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, (yet another Ostrich), and his right-wing National government, went right ahead with planning a Springbok Rugby Tour for 1981. Jock Phillips later wrote that Rob Muldoon was apparently of the 'old guard' who thought that New Zealand should stand staunchly side by side with [white] South Africa because both countries had fought side by side as allies in the 2nd World War.

Which is an interesting thought when you remember that those who were running the Apartheid regime had actually voted against fighting with the Allies in the 2nd World War. In fact they thought that Hitler and his fascist Nazi party's Aryan views were completely the right idea.

In July of 1981 Diana married Charles, Prince of Wales. I watched that wedding on a Christchurch Women's Hospital telly with my one day old daughter in my arms.

But from May until September, (the winter months of 1981), the New Zealand nightly news and our newspapers were filled with images of police and protesters fighting on the streets, images of our police dressed in riot gear and carrying long batons, images of battered and bleeding protesters. Despite the fact that the Springboks had actually brought along a 'token' Black this time, (too little too late), the first game to be played in Gisborne in May had to be cancelled when protesters (some had bought tickets, others stormed the fences), mobbed onto the field and the pilot of a light plane circling overhead threatened to fly it into the main stadium killing the spectators. (The twin tower thing in New York wasn't an original idea, just bigger).

This surely wasn't New Zealand, not the way we knew it.

All of this was televised live in New Zealand and in South Africa. To this day I have no idea what the South Africans made of it.

Of course the law had to be upheld, insisted the government. It was the youngest, fittest policemen, some hardly out of basic training who were put onto the frontline. Large numbers of police were flown from city to city wherever the latest game was being held. In the end the government upholding the rights of rugby supporters to watch rugby whatever the cost and therefore supplying our policeman as security and enforcers cost us tax payers more than fifteen million NZ dollars.

My father was a policeman. Because he was a middle aged man he wasn't out there on the streets in front of protesters. Instead the older policemen worked long hours into the night filling in the gaps of the policing that the younger cops would normally have been doing. We hardly saw my dad that winter. When the Springboks played down here in Christchurch my father was right there at Lancaster Park but he didn't see the game. A long blue line of police encircled the field but their eyes were not on the game. The whole time they watched the spectators, they were watching for signs of trouble, in case protesters had bought tickets and tried to rush onto the field. My father said the tension there was so heavy you could have cut the air with a knife.

My soul was with the protesters. If it wasn't for my tiny child I would have been out there on the streets too. I still have a residual guilt about not being there.

This tour should never have been allowed to happen, my father said.

As many as nine million women may have been destroyed as witches during the European witch-hunting craze of the so-called "Enlightenment Period", (from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries). These people of whom about ninety percent were women, were accused, tortured, and executed.

The witch-hunting craze which reached it's peaks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was centered upon revivals of exaggerated cultural and biblical associations of women and evil.

Political Junkie, (Poli), asked me quite a few weeks ago why I use the witch as part of my id; at the time I was about to blog The Story of Hannah and James I think, so I said I would write about the witch thing later. Now its weeks later even.

Mostly when I answer this question I am inclined to flippantly reply that I have the right hair for the job and in a way that is a reason too, but mainly I carry this witch id with me in memory of all those women who were killed back then in what is sometimes described as the Women's Holocaust.

Poor women, vulnerable women, women who were "alone" ie "without a man", women who were old, grumpy or had warts or moles, mouthy women, women who had rejected sexual advances, or conversely women who were too sexual, and women who were healers and/or midwives, all these and more were served up to the Inquisitors to be tested as witches.

Once a woman was standing in front of an Inquisitor she was cast into a no-win situation. The water test is a good example of the no-win, most people will have heard about this I am sure. A woman is weighted with a sack of stones or suchlike, if she sinks and drowns she is innocent, if she somehow manages to stay afloat she is clearly using magic and is therefore a witch who needs burning at the stake to cleanse and purify her from her sins.

The Inquisitors would torture the hapless victim until she confessed and the only way to make the torture stop was to "confess". Naturally an important part of the "confession" was to name other witches in the supposed coven and torture continued until some people had been named, then they too were tortured in turn.

It's not hard to see how many people were named as witches in ever-increasing circles and why so many were killed. It is said that at one point a whole village of people were annihilated in this manner.

It wasn't just about misogyny though. There were Religious and Socio-Political underpinnings.

A widening physical gap was growing between the wealthy and the poor members of the European societies, and while both groups "believed in" magic and the spirit world and occult things, (belief is a powerful thing), it was the poor who were by far more likely to be accused of having and using these evil powers. The dominating elites seeking ways to consolidate their political and economic power were motivated to "stamp out" superstition within the great unwashed masses.

By cooperating with zealous church reformers of the Catholic and the Protestant churches, the dominating elite groups found a way to deal with dissenters, women and the poor.

(Eradication is always a foolproof way of dealing with dissension. Hitler later found eradication a useful tool too as did Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and other megalomaniacs).

The powerful elite also had a drive to "control" medicine for this was also the age of growing elite male interest in medicine and women healers presented an actual threat to male credibility in this field. Basically women's herbal lore was more successful for healing at the time.

Sometimes it was also about land grabs. When a person or family was found guilty of witchcraft and summarily executed their land was of course revoked, often back to the person with the most power within that community.

Religious reformation required a stamping out of the last vestiges of paganism, (women's beliefs, earth bound religions and medical lore), and "witchcraft" was therefore associated with heresy, (serving the devil), which was seen as great a crime then as serving Osama Bin Laden is seen in western countries today.

The religious reformation is also seen to have provoked widespread guilt. Evangelical-style preachers were bombarding people with "fiery" sermons centered on their congregations' sinfulness. The devil was seen as unflagging and tireless in his attempts to capture souls. Eternal damnation awaited for those people indulging in pleasures of the flesh or yielding to carnal temptations. Hence projection onto the less powerful was a method of assuaging guilt.

If you could blame a witch for the thoughts in your head it became her sin not yours.

In the religious view of the zealot, women were supposed to be "more sensitive" to the supernatural and women's closer ties to the earth, their "materiality", was supposed to make women more susceptible to devils and demons. The intellectually inferior women naturally lacked fundamental moral sense, (unlike the 'superior male), which made them receptive to evil just as their bodies propelled them into licentious and sensual behaviours.

In the best of theodical traditions, when a witch was tortured the rationalisation was that God would intervene for the innocent. The "just" God would only visit intolerable pain on those who deserved it, (so HIS non-intervention is proof of guilt). A further rationalisation was that as God condemns sinners to eternal suffering, then righteous men were justified in inflicting pain to destroy evil and save souls. Some Inquisitors and witch prosecutors really did care about the salvation of the souls of their victims.

The earliest printed books were handbooks to investigate heretics and witches of which the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 which was authored by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, is one of the most well known today. It was considered to be an encyclopedia of witch beliefs and was constantly cited in support of those beliefs by both Catholics and Protestants through to the eighteenth century.

"All witchcraft comes from carnal lust", states the Malleus Maleficarum, "which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of filling their lusts they consort even with devils. More such reasons are brought forward, but to the understanding it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft."

According to the Malleus Maleficarum, witches who were midwives were also seen to devour and eat infant children or offer them to devils. Witches raised "hailstorms and hurtful tempests and lightnings", they caused sterility in men and animals, "made horses go mad under their riders", witches could transport themselves from place to place through the air, either in body or imagination, see absent things as if they were present, cause great horror in the minds of those about to arrest them, bewitch men with a mere look etc etc. I have had enough of typing this rubbish.

It sounds silly, too silly for people to believe, but is it any sillier than the belief that aliens may descend from spaceships to abduct Americans so that they can examine human genitalia? Repeatedly? People apparently believe things like that even now.

And I think it was only last week that I saw an article trying to convince it's readers that terrorists were stealing babies in order to eat them.