[throwaway210222]

Hi techrdan - can you lighten up on the insults. I'm really trying to discuss a topic with a teeny, tiny Overton window and I don't deserve you continued efforts to caricature me as a racist.

> Then how could the system have persisted for decades?

- surely I have explained at least one mechanism - in your words - "in distracting long detail";

- another one was to make sure no white kid ever learnt a black language. Most kids in the areas I spoke about above learnt French as a third language - not Zulu or even Hindi. This was deliberate;

- they went to enormous lengths to destroy any common knowledge of Sofiatown and it was a rejection of that the races could never live together. To show you what it meant: they renamed it "Triuph";

- they high-jacked the dominant protestant religion (ask Reverend Beyers Naude)

- in the mid 1980s the imposed a state of emergency that controlled all TV and news.

- any yes, like many places in the early mid 20th century - there were indeed a lot of racists.

But I suspect form the tone of your comments you aren't really asking in some good faith pursuit of knowledge of a complex place. I suspect you are rather employing a common rhetorical device to actually assert there "there other is no possible explanation - other than simple pure evil bigotry - for how it could continue for so long. And anyone who I feel doesn't agree with this is a bigot".

Its not cool and its not consistent with the site guidelines.

So let's discuss briefly the other Apartheid state - Northern Rhodesia. Here the whites-only voting was first-past-the-post as per the UK mother ship.

In all of the elections about 40% of the white population regularly voted against Ian Smith in just about all the districts. They won exactly ZERO seats in parliament.

40% is not "a few" people.

Voting structures matter and they get high-jacked. Look after yours.