South Africa

on the World Today

FOR eight unhappy years, South Africa has troubled the conscience of the Western world. In 1948 Jan Christiaan Smuts, more at home as international statesman than as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, lost the general election in his country to Afrikaner Nationalists who had mushroomed domestically during his preoccupation with foreign affairs. Ever since, this nation washed by both the Indian and the Atlantic Ocean at Africa’s southern tip has pursued a policy of racial intolerance.

The Nationalist government, which won a bare half of the people’s votes in 1948, has now gained complete control of the three branches of government— legislative, administrative, and judicial. Government men fill most key administrative posts. By the simple expedient of packing parliament with a two-thirds majority of new government appointees, and by ignoring the constitutional judgments of a High Court which they have already swamped with government appointees anyway, the Nationalists appear to have reached the peak of power.

Yet there are signs that may change the story. There are the Alan Patons and the Trevor Huddlestones in brave opposition. There are a few rebellious whisperings in the Dutch Reformed Church, to which the government owes its strength. There is the tenacity of the African, and the Christian conscience of thousands of humane South Africans whose skin is white.

The racial mixture

Almost the easiest thing to perceive about South Africa’s racial problem is its complexity. There is no 1 to 10 ratio here as between Negroes and whites in the United States. In South Africa nonwhites outnumber whites by nearly 5 to 1. An additional complicating factor is that the non whites are themselves split — 9,306,000 Africans, 421,000 Indians originally imported as cheap labor for the sugarcane plantations, and 1,281,000 coloreds, or persons of mixed descent who arc the product of white and nonwhite interbreeding.

Furthermore the white population of nearly 3 million is itself divided. About 60 per cent are Afrikaners, mainly of Dutch descent, whose forebears initiated white settlement in 1652 when they operated a supply station at the Cape of Good Hope for the Dutch East India Company. Most of these Afrikaners support the present government, but a moderate minority join with the remaining 40 per cent of British-descended South Africans who bitterly oppose the government.

Whites are the top dogs, politically, economically, and socially. Nonwhites are still weathering the impact of civilization concentrated into the relatively few years since industrialization overtook South Africa and the current big boom whisked them off the veldt for their vital labor. Nonwhites want what they do not have — which is almost everything, including a political voice. Whites know that racial equality for Africans, many of whom are still quite primitive, would mean the end of white influence.

The government has retained power by its “apartheid ” policy. Translated from the Afrikaans, apartheid means segregation, but in practice it all too often becomes separation without equality, or simply white domination.

The battle for survival

In most of its acts, it is easy to see that the government is impelled by fear. And this is in some measure explainable by the history of the Afrikaner people. It is a lonely history in which Afrikaners have been constantly struggling for survival. Many of their ancestors fled to South Africa from religious persecution in Europe. Subsequent to that, Afrikaners threw their belongings into ox wagons and trekked into the African hinterland from British rule at the Cape. On the journey they faced extreme privation and danger, especially from hostile natives.

Always they were hunted. Always it was a battle to survive. And today the Nationalist leaders of South Africa are obsessed by the determination to entrench their lonely nation of fewer than 2 million Afrikaners — politically this time. Consequently the government is opposed to almost all nonAfrikaners in South Africa.

It bitterly resents South Africa’s British link as a member of the Commonwealth and talks of severing it and substituting republican for Commonwealth status. It fears British South Africans because it thinks they may overthrow it. The government has therefore consolidated its political power in almost every conceivable way.

It is stifling British traditions and methods in the defense forces and public services; it has launched a massive campaign for the expansion of Afrikaans, the Dutch-derived second official language which is spoken nowhere outside South Africa; and it is intent on developing a broad “South African-ism" which more closely resembles a narrow “Afrikaner-ism.”

Even more does the government fear the nonwhite, who it thinks will swamp the white Afrikaner politically and economically. This is why nonwhites are restricted to an ineffective seven white representatives in a parliament of nearly 250 members.

The government would like to solve the Indian problem by repatriating these people to India, hut their number renders this impossible. And coloreds, or half-castes, who live mainly in the Cape province and have there enjoyed voting on the common roll with white men for a century, have been deprived of their vote and given communal representation by four white members in parliament. Always there is this fear of the Afrikaner being submerged. Always the white man’s superiority must be maintained by legislation.

The color bar

The rigid color bar extends everywhere. Though a man may be capable of performing a skilled job, the color of his skin debars him from it and he must take unskilled, or in some instances semi-skilled, work. This is more curious in view of the fact that the grave shortage of skilled men and technicians in South Africa is a major source of concern to the government.

But rather than allow one of the 300,000 nonwhites employed in the gold mines to do a skilled miner’s work, of which many of them are eminently capable, the authorities will let a mine operate only eight hours a day instead of a possible twenty-four, through shortage of skilled personnel.

Whites and nonwhites form separate lines at post offices, railroad stations, and all other government offices — by law. A nonwhite may not use the same bus, the same beach, the same park seats as whites. The crux of the criticism which has virtually isolated South Africa in world opinion is not only that facilities are separate, not only that services for nonwhites are almost always inferior, but that in many cases they are simply nonexistent.

When a nonwhite gold miner finishes his shift underground, there are no hotels he may frequent, few movie houses and sports stadiums at which he may spend his money. In addition, the nonwhite is subject to almost, constant legal control. He must carry a variety of passes, without which he will be fined or jailed. The area in which he may live is zoned; the area in which he may work and the job which he may do are restricted. His right to move in and out of towns is limited, and rarely may he own land.

Thousands of Africans live in tin hovels made out of packing cases and old gasoline cans beaten flat. Around Johannesburg, the “City of Gold” which brings wealth almost exclusively to whites, acres of these shanties, some unserved by roads, water, and sanitation, form a ring of depressing slums.

Not all of these appalling conditions can be blamed on the present government. Previous governments have conveniently overlooked some of them too. Many white South Africans have become so wedded to the concept of African “primitiveness” that they ignore the fact that thousands of intelligent Africans, despite the odds against them, have Christianized themselves, educated themselves, civilized themselves.

Separate but not equal

The African is all too often rated as inferior. There is a different scale of human rights for black and white. An example: a white farmer who beat one of his African laborers with a hose pipe was recently lined $210 in court. The African, by the way, died. Yet an African who rapes a white woman or kills a white man is certain to be jailed for life or hanged.

This is where apartheid falls down. It means separate treatment for whites and non whites, but rarely equal treatment. And the main charge is that there is no reward, no opportunity, for the emergent Africans who have struggled to better themselves. An African who sweats to achieve a good education, and possibly becomes one of the few with a university degree, finds that he is forever barred from real social, economic, or political advancement because he is not white. Small wonder that some become extremist agitators demanding the impossible.

So restless is the African population that the government has given itself wide powers to restrain subversion. Anybody, for example, can be declared a Communist or a subversive and can be banned from gatherings and restricted in movement without appeal to the courts. There is a vast amount of legislation on the Statute Book dealing with the maintenance of public order and the power to quell disturbances. A highly active Special Branch, the political division of the police detective force, is in evidence taking notes at political meetings, checking nonwhite and liberal leaders.

The government attempts to justify these activities by saying that t hey are necessary in a racial situation which is explosive. Also the government claims that its powers are rarely used to the full. That is not much of an answer to those who charge that the police-state principle is a bad one whether the nation practicing it is benevolent or harsh.

The cost of segregation

The government has always been able to justify apartheid in its own eyes by claiming that it was working toward total territorial segregation under which nonwhiles would get a greater measure of autonomy in their own areas but would nevertheless fail to get a. say in running the federal government.

Now, however, total territorial segregation is being unmasked as a pipe dream. A commission which for five years has been investigating prospects of developing nonwhite areas to the point where they could support the whole nonwhite population, including the 5 million workers currently in while areas, has just completed its 17-volume report.

Even with the fantastic cost involved in chopping the country up into black and white non-mixing population “boxes,” the commission finds that by the turn of the century the government could segregate only 70 per cent of nonwhites into Separate areas; and at the current rate of population expansion there would still be 7 million nonwhites in white areas — 2 million more, in fact, than at present! Whether South Africa’s whites could ever be persuaded 1o do without non white labor seems, to say the least, highly debatable.

In fact, dependence on nonwhite labor is likely to become greater in this booming, industrializing nation which has hit the jackpot with diamonds, with gold, and now with uranium. Thus, as (he impracticability of total segregation becomes evident, so too are exploded the last vestiges of moral justification with which the government has attempted to cloak it.

The core of opposition

This is already a disturbing factor among the government’s intellectual wing and the pro-government Dutch Reformed Church, both of which have stubbornly maintained that segregation is only just when total. Indeed, Professor Barend Bartholomeus Keet, head of the Stellenbosch Theological Seminary which trains seven eighths of the Dutch Reformed Church priests in South Africa, has just dropped a bombshell into the political arena with a book which says that there can be no Biblical justification for apartheid in any form whatsoever.

All this has greatly spurred that small but nonetheless courageous band of liberals in South Africa which includes the international author Alan Baton, parliamentary champion of African rights Margaret Ballinger, and the world-famous Anglican priest, Father Trevor Huddlestone.

Perhaps it is demanding much of a highly conservative South African public, settled in its old tradition of master-and-servant relationships, to engulf itself suddenly in a wave of liberalism which might sweep out the government. But the government of South Africa has the weight of world opinion against it. And perhaps more potent is the militant opposition of a surging, emerging African continent of black men.