With calm conviction and rich narrative texture, Professor Neil Roos took his audience through a layered excavation of white complicity in apartheid South Africa, drawing from his recent book Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society: Social Histories of Accommodation. Eschewing both moral alibis and sweeping condemnations, Roos probed how white South Africans, particularly those on the social margins were enlisted, managed, and disciplined into the racial order. “This was a book about whites,” he stated, “and in particular, it was a book about ordinary whites… a heterogeneous mix of people… the working class, the destitute, and those separated from respectable society.” These were not the apartheid architects, but nor were they innocent bystanders. The book, he clarified, is “fundamentally… about complicity, [about] accommodation.”
Roos began by tracing his own intellectual journey, how a working-class upbringing and early exposure to radical campus politics in the 1980s shaped his discomfort with the standard historical narratives of white South Africans. The “flat, narrow, cardboard” historiography of whiteness in South Africa, he recalled, often obscured the tensions and dissonances of white life during apartheid. Most accounts, he argued, either glorified white liberals or demonised state actors, leaving little room to understand how millions of so-called ‘ordinary’ whites participated in, while simultaneously distancing themselves from, the apartheid system.
One of the most striking images he discussed, also featured on the book’s cover, depicts white South Africans dancing and playing guitars in a Durban working-class neighbourhood. On the surface, there is no sign of apartheid; yet, Roos insisted, it is “grotesque… these people are deeply immersed in apartheid… yet there’s no sign of it anywhere.” The point, he said, was not what was visible, but what was everywhere if one chose to look.
Much of the book is anchored in what Roos called “the banality of apartheid”, drawing inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” and from German historiographies of ordinary life under Nazism. What fascinated him was not defiant resistance, but how the apartheid system incorporated whites into its machinery through bureaucratic routinisation and psychological interiorisation. His exploration of the apartheid civil service was particularly telling: a “highly atomised and compartmentalised” system that enabled white civil servants to perform violent administrative functions without ever having to act “in specifically racist ways.” Their complicity was systemic, masked by routine and justified by procedure.
Even more revealing were Roos’s findings on the apartheid-era “work colonies,” institutional spaces where miscreant white men were sent to be reformed, rehabilitated, and in effect, reabsorbed into whiteness. These were men who had drunk too much, transgressed moral norms, or violated class expectations. “They were disappeared,” he said plainly, “sent for a lengthy spell of rehabilitation” in remote, barely documented sites. There, men underwent medical, psychological, and sociological assessments, and were subjected to “labour therapy” and moral policing. The work colonies functioned as carceral spaces designed not only to hide white failure but to discipline and recode it into respectability. Jeffrey Cronje, an influential sociologist in apartheid South Africa, loomed large in this narrative. “He [Cronje] was most obsessed with whiteness,” Roos noted, explaining how Cronje feared not only interracial mixing but also intra-white ‘deviance’ such as incest, alcoholism, and poor hygiene.
During the Q&A, Dr Anell Daries pressed Roos on this notion of “civilising the white body” and how whiteness itself had to be constantly managed. Roos responded by recounting how one of his own grandfathers, who had become an “ailment”, was targeted by the state for his failure to embody respectable Afrikaner masculinity. “Jeffrey Cronje doesn’t see himself as a jailer… he sees himself as a social worker,” Roos explained, even though his methods included surveillance, forced labour, and moral conditioning.
It was a personal history for Roos, and this intimacy added weight to his critique. “The book is profoundly personal,” Daries observed, citing his poignant reflections on his mother, Sheila. Although she “hated the Nats” and was “class conscious”, her politics “never crossed the colour line.” Her solidarity stopped at the threshold of race, a limit Roos believes marked the broader failure of white dissent under apartheid.
Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s engagement during the discussion reframed the question of complicity through a psychological lens. Reflecting on the “apartheid of the mind”, she asked whether denial was always active. Could it be that “people really, truly… don’t know?” Her challenge was that the whitening of the body also involved a whitening of consciousness, one so deep that the moral cost of complicity is buried in silence, awkwardness, and affective disavowal. Roos, in response, echoed Biko and Turner’s insistence that white people must first learn to free themselves from the “prisons of whiteness.” The challenge, he argued, is not simply historical or intellectual, but affective and moral.
Professor Albert Grundlingh offered a deeply human reflection on the intergenerational silences that Roos explores. He recalled his own frustrations about his parents’ failure to educate him politically, before recognising their likely fear and inability to explain the injustices of a world they perhaps didn’t fully. Roos affirmed this, recounting the silences of his own mother in contrast to his father, a waiter with little formal education but profound moral clarity, who supported his son’s decision to dodge conscription with a simple, knowing silence.
The final take-away from Roos’s lecture was the refusal to provide an easy moral escape hatch. The “ordinary whites” of his study, while often victims of class discipline and bureaucratic scrutiny, never rejected white supremacy. “None of them defied segregation as wrong. Not one.” Their complicity was not spectacular, but intimate, and for that reason, all the more enduring. By tracing how whiteness was inhabited rather than merely espoused, Roos has produced a history that unsettles both nostalgia and denial. His work reminds us that radical history must not only recover the past but also furnish “analytic, political and moral off-ramps” for those willing to exit the prison of whiteness. If the past is still with us, it is not because it has not been studied, but because it has not yet been felt.
