Understated understatement.

So, I was reading about apartheid on Wikipedia this morning, and came across this picture, meant to illustrate the brutality and injustice of that time. The Wikipedia article was written by a student at Stanford, who apparently really does not want his/her post to be flagged for questions about neutrality.

The sign itself would be funny (don't freak out, stay with me here) if it wasn't real and racially hateful. Talk about your hyperbole. Savage dogs will devour the corpse? Now that's commitment to killing someone until they're dead in an almost Shakespearean manner (though if it were true Shakespeare it'd probably be savage curs rather than dogs or a couple of whoreson dogs at the very least).

The juxtaposition of the sign replete with grinning skull and the "were often treated quite poorly" caption is pretty great.

In case you were curious, I was reading about apartheid because I just finished J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood and was looking for a little more context on the story. The book is a slightly fictionalized account of his boyhood in S. Africa in the 1950s. It's also an incredible account of apartheid (not to mention all the class, religious, and geographic prejudices in play during that time as well) as seen by a child. The story's wicked short, has a beautiful and poignant economy of language, and Coetzee's a Nobel Prize winner. Read it. You can borrow my copy.