baasskap means dominion, control, or supremacy, especially of white South Africans over nonwhite peoples. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 88 out of 100.
Why “baasskap” is a great word
BAASSKAP — [Noun] A state of absolute dominion and control, specifically the systematic racial supremacy exercised by white South Africans over nonwhite peoples during apartheid. Borrowed from Afrikaans baasskap, from baas ("boss, master") + -skap ("-hood, -ship", forming a state or condition). Unlike "hegemony," which implies a diffused leadership secured through cultural consent, or "paternalism," which masks control with a pretense of benevolent care, baasskap is the raw assertion of racialized ownership, a creed of supremacy stripped to its brutal, administrative core. It is the architecture of a passbook, the geometry of a segregated bench, the unalterable distance in a form of address—the totalizing condition where one man's identity is merely another's instrument of rule, a terrible ordinary.
noun
- Dominion, control, or supremacy, especially of white South Africans over nonwhite peoples.“African teachers were not permitted to criticize the government or any school authority. It was intellectual baasskap, a way of institutionalising inferiority.”