South Africa

on the World Today

THIS year South Africa has been celebrating her tricentenary. The nation ignored for a time her chronic political quarrels and, concentrating on her biggest show, the van Riebeeck Festival, expressed her exuberant mood in the slogan “We Build a Nation.”Pride in the achievements of her industrial revolution and high hopes for her future outweighed, temporarily at least, her fears of racial difficulties. The Festival was designed to convey South Africa’s message to herself and to the world, to display her prodigious material development and determine the spiritual value of her “own outlook on life.”

The only cloud in the sky was unrest among her millions of non-Europeans who were boycotting the Festival. On March 20 the country’s highest court handed down a unanimous decision that the Malan Government’s act placing Colored voters on a separate electoral roll was unconstitutional. Within a few hours the Prime Minister flung down the Nationalists’ challenge. Describing the situation as “intolerable,”he promised legislation to remove from the courts the right to test legislative acts of Parliament.

The “outlook on life" which the tricentenary dramatized in pageant, song, and story boomeranged. Various evaluations of the spiritual value of this outlook, most of them damning, have filled countless columns of newspaper space all over the world. And in South Africa the Government’s determination to circumvent the Court’s decision set off an emotional reaction which slill is explosive. On June 3 Prime Minister Malan’s bill setting up a parliamentary court to rule on Supreme Court decisions was signed into law by Governor General Ernest G. Jansen. It has passed both houses of Parliament by comfortable margins.

Tens of thousands of South Africans are looking ahead to the consequences. If a party caucus is to be the highest court of appeal on constitutional issues, they say, anything might happen. The way is open to dispose of English language rights as easily as of the Colored franchise. The status of English has no more protection. The very form of government could be changed. The republic to which the Nationalist Party is pledged could be created by a simple majority in House and Senate.

What people are saying reflects the current fear. “My brother got out in time,” a bank clerk muttered unhappily. “He’s in Southern Rhodesia and I wish I were with him. The next thing they’ll do is stop our leaving. They won’t want technicians to go. It will be the Iron Curtain for us.”

“I’m not leaving, you may be sure.” A shop manager tossed her head. “I was born in this country, and my father and mother before me. It’s our country as much as theirs. But what can we do?”

In Northern Rhodesia, where half the recent immigrants come from the Union, the same story was told. “They’re getting out. Both Afrikaans and English-speaking South Africans. The ones who have no time for what’s going on down there.”

These are not isolated cases, and no matter how vehemently the Prime Minister may protest that the Nationalists would not tamper with language rights, people are listening to his heir apparent, the Minister of Lands, J. G. Strydom. He is likely to be the next Nationalist Prime Minister, and for years he has been the St. George of the one language, one flag crusade. So who puts any faith in promises? Mistrust is the tragic fruit of the High Court Bill; mistrust and such division as the country has not known since the Boer War.

The barrier of language

An American wears a small American flag inside the lapel of his coat so that he can show it when an Afrikaner refuses to speak to him and do business with him. An American is forgiven for ignorance of Afrikaans, but never an English-speaking South African. Afrikaans-speaking South Africans refuse to wait on English-speaking customers, and sales so lost are thought lost in a noble cause. Such incidents occur time and again.

Government departments operate for one month in English, for the next in Afrikaans. The efficiency of the older people, who are not bilingual, drops. Answering letters in the less familiar language is postponed. Trained men lacking facility in both languages are not hired, whether or not they ever may meet the public on their jobs. Children are segregated in Afrikaans and English schools. No longer are they growing up to know and play with one another, and the movement is spreading from the Transvaal to other provinces.

In refusing to bother to learn even a few phrases of Afrikaans, the English-speaking South African has been both lazy and stupid, but a bilingual generation was growing up, and before long the change might have been completed. Yet Nationalists net like men with no time to lose. Afrikaans is being rammed down the throats of educators, businessmen, civil servants alike, and bad feeling be damned.

The Boer War goes on

The Nationalists continually justify their acts by claiming that they have a “mandate from the people.” They conduct themselves like men with a sacred mission to perform. Most of them believe they have.

The simple fact is that the Boer War is not over. The British won the war and signed a peace outstanding for its generosity, but the backveld Boer, in particular, grimly gathered his strength to win the peace sometime, somehow. If not today, then tomorrow. The Malan Government represents and is speaking for these bitter-enders when it refers to its “mandate from the people-”

The “mandate" really comes from a segment of a part of the people. To be Afrikaans-speaking does not mean that one is the ware Afrikaner for whom the Nationalists speak. About half the members of the Opposition are Afrikaans-speaking, and over 100,000 more people voted for the United Party than for the Nationalists, although, as with electoral college votes in the United States, it was possible for the Nationalists to win the majority of seats.

Were the Government truly concerned about its “mandate" it would have gone to the country on the constitutional issue. On its failure to do so all the arguments about “the peoples mandate” break down, except from one point of view — that of the ware Afrikaner dedicated to carrying out traditional Afrikaner policies, race policies in particular. At last the bitter-ender has his own Government and he must make the most of his opportunity.

Speaking May 21, on his seventyeighth birthday, Prime Minister Malan explained the connection between race policy and the constitutional crisis. The whole race segregation policy in South Africa, he said, would stand or fall on the outcome of the constitutional crisis; and therefore, he explained, it was impossible for the Government to accept the Court’s decision. “If we do,”he said, “we will be untrue to the future of the white race in South Africa.”

A few months ago the appeal of this plea would have been great. Since the crisis, however, the thinking of many South Africans outside the ware Afrikaner group has moved beyond segregation. They are thinking now of freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and freedom of association; of keeping in their hands the power to determine their future. Shrewdly, the nonEuropeans are standing by and making no provocative moves as the bitter struggle divides the Europeans.

White against white

The Prime Minister refuses to commit himself when asked by the Leader of the Opposition, almost daily, whether or not be will abide by the Supreme Court decision when the High Court Bill is challenged in the courts. So while the couniry seethes, Government and Opposition struggle for position, each waiting for the other to make a false move.

For a lime it looked as though the Government’s moment had come. The United Party, the Labor Party, and Torch Commando, a militant group 150,000 strong, drawn from both white groups, formed a United Front, and the Leader of the Opposition told a Cape Town mass meeting that if the Government did not act constitutionally, the United Front would “meet force with force.” Almost at the same time, the Torch Commando threatened to call a day of protest to bring the country to a standstill if the Government went ahead with its legislation. The country’s shudder was almost visible, in the midst of thousands of watching Africans, Indians, and Colored, white group was threatening white group with the very tactics condemned out of hand when proposed by non-Europeans. The Government made the most of the blunder and it took considerable explaining before the Opposition backed out of that culde-sac.

The Government’s weapon

Nothing could be worse for the United Front cause than to give the Government an opportunity to use the Suppression of Communism Act against the Torch Commando. The Government makes no secret of the fact that it is watching for the opportunity; and since its one statement too many, the Torch Commando has been comparatively quiet.

In the Suppression of Communism Act the Government has a weapon covering almost any degree of disagreement with its policies. Under the act, for example, a person may be “named” a Communist who advocates any of the objectives of Communism, depending on the discretion of the Minister of Justice. Any of the objectives of Communism might mean equality of opportunity, or socialism, or nondiscrimination on racial grounds.

After the passage of the High Court Bill, the Government turned its attention to investigating Communism. Various non-European leaders were “named" without causing much of a ripple in the European community. And then the big guns were turned on Sam Kahn, a member of Parliament, and Fred Carneson, a member of the Cape Provincial Council, both of whom represent non-European constituencies. Both men were members of the South African Communist Party before it dissolved itself.

Efforts to postpone the debate were defeated, and the Government was accused of using the Communist bogey to distract attention from the High Court Bill. Jaunty Mr. Kahn left the House saying he would be back, and even a Nationalist M.P. is reported to have said to him, “This is an revoir, not good-bye.” If anything, the Government’s procedure made many friends for Mr. Kahn, who already was one of the most popular members of the House, however men differed with his policies.

With its flair for focusing world attention on South Africa’s ills, the Government then attacked “Solly” Sachs, General Secretary of the 20,000-strong Transvaal Garment Workers Union, who has devoted his life to building up the union, fighting for better wages and working conditions. “Solly" Sachs was thrown out of the South African Communist Party in 1931, and trade unionists are convinced the attack is directed against the trade union movement as well. There is evidence to support this claim in a recent report of the Industrial Legislation Commission and in the capture of the Mineworkers Union.

“Solly" Sachs defied the order, announced that he would fight it in the courts, spoke at three meetings, and then walked out. on the platform on Johannesburg City Hall steps to address about 10,000 garment workers, their sympathizers, and onlookers. On the stroke of 11 A.M., police surrounded Mr. Sachs to arrest him. Their action precipitated a bloody riot, in which sixty-six people were injured.

Calls for help went from the Garment Workers to other South African trade unions and to practically every trade union movement in the Western world, from Great Britain to New Zealand. The trade union movement in South Africa, long divided on race policy and the political activities of some leaders, is now moving toward a unity it has not known for years.

Pan-African race policy?

“We Build a Nation” has had a hollow ring ever since the Court’s decision was challenged and the country was split. Yet Dr. Malan may still prove to be right when he says that South Africa grows from crises. Her crisis is Africa’s, only in an aggravated form produced by a large European population and rapid industrialization.

Prime Minister Malan himself has suggested a conference of Powers to determine a pan-African race policy, and the challenge will have to be met sooner or later. A pooling of experience is needed, and then it might be possible not only to build a nation but to build a world. It is not in Africa alone that people are trying to discover how men of different color and varying degrees of development may live together in harmony.