A Little More Time for Violence

IN THE May issue of the Atlantic, Clarence B. Randall wrote with great feeling about South Africa and urged that we “lower our voices . . . and adopt instead friendly argument and thoughtful persuasion, on a man-to-man basis.” He concluded his article with three short sentences I shall long remember: “At heart they [the South Africans] are our kind of folk. In the end they will do right. Let us give them a little more time.”

The ensuing question is, time for what? Time to pass more restrictive measures, such as the recent Security Act, a law as vicious as the Sabotage Act, if not more so? The law states that people can be held in solitary confinement for repeated periods of ninety days without charge or jury trial and is called by its opponents the “eternal arrest bill.” This is the law which the Bar Council in Johannesburg condemned as “the virtual end of the rule of law in South Africa.” This is the law under which a newspaper editor or reporter who withholds information can be placed in jail and never tried. This is the law which demands the death penalty for anyone who advocates abroad South Africa’s overthrow, or seeks foreign intervention. Thus, a citizen making a speech in the United Nations, under this law, could be arrested in South Africa and, if convicted, executed. One aspect of this piece of legislation offers a horrifying insight into the minds of Verwoerd and his followers. It is retroactive to 1950.

Mr. Randall visited South Africa last November, and to the best of my knowledge was a guest of the South African Foundation. This organization’s chief purpose is the bettering of business relations between that country and other nations.

During the past year I spent seven weeks in South Africa as a journalist, producing a television documentary film about that country. Mr. Randall and I saw the same inequalities, the same injustice. Hundreds of “For Europeans Only” signs, the daily arrests of nonwhites for pass-law violations, job qualifications restricting nonwhites to certain, invariably menial, fields of employment, separate houses of worship for whites and blacks (in the Dutch Reformed Church), townships for nonwhites only, and countless other indications of the brutal drive by Verwoerd and his government to separate colors — white from black, black from Coloured, and Coloured from Asian. Rarely in the civilized world have we had so blatant an example of man’s inhumanity to man.

Mr. Randall feels keenly about some of these South African legal restrictions, for he writes, “Nor can we stomach the intrusions into personal liberty: the constant carrying of identification cards; the requiring of passes for both the white man and the black man.” But what he fails to state is that if the white man does not have his identification card, he is not arrested. The black man is, and usually is fined one week’s wages.

He praises Albert Luthuli, the Nobel Prize winner and “leader of the African National Congress,”without stating that the Congress has been outlawed by the government since 1960 and that activity by anyone in its name invites immediate arrest and long imprisonment.

After listing what he finds distasteful in South Africa, Mr. Randall turns to the job at hand, that of explaining the problems besetting the nation. In this way he lays the basis for his plea that, in spite of its shortcomings, apartheid is perhaps inevitable, and that more time to develop the policy, unhampered by outside criticism, might show surprising results.

Mr. Randall begins his apologies by stating that South Africa is our staunch ally in the struggle against Communism. And yet some of the leaders of the ruling National Party during World War II were interned as Nazi sympathizers. Prime Minister Verwoerd after the war sued a newspaper for libel when it stated that his sympathies were with Nazi Germany. Verwoerd lost. All of us, obviously, realize that in the struggle against Communism we must have allies, but need we ally ourselves with a nation which denies even the basic liberties to 13 million people, some 80 percent of the population?

Mr. Randall claims that the white people landed on the Cape in 1652, at about the time the natives moved into southern Africa from the north. Since both groups sought to establish homelands at the same time, according to Mr. Randall, “It is this historic separation which apartheid seeks to perpetuate.”To back up this unusual argument, he states that “as our ancestors staked out in the open prairies, the white man is within his rights when he names the conditions upon which the black man may enter his territory.”

Mr. Randall goes on to describe some of the heartening signs of progress among natives in South Africa. It is true, as he writes, that there are 2000 university graduates, but since there are 11 million natives, or Bantu, this simply means that one out of 5500 is a college graduate. He states that among the Bantu there are 70 doctors, not adding that this works out statistically as one doctor for about 157,000 people. But even this is not exactly true, since 20 of the doctors work in one hospital near Johannesburg. A more accurate statistic would be one doctor for 220,000 people, a truly pathetic figure.

He brings our attention, too, to the 70 Bantu librarians and the 50 Bantu attorneys for 11 million people. A nonwhite might find a white attorney to handle his legal problems, but if the offense is a political one, a white attorney is hard to come by.

Mr. Randall has high hopes for the development of separate Bantu states, the first of which is the Transkei. He claims that with next year’s general election a Bantu Parliament will be chosen and a Bantu Prime Minister will be placed in power. What Mr. Randall fails to tell us is that all legislation passed by the Bantu Parliament must be approved by the President of the South African Republic. At the present time, two things have been approved for the people of the Transkei, a flag and a national anthem. What they do not have is education, employment, political freedom, and dignity.

Mr. Randall says, “I had the privilege of an interview with the high commissioner to the Transkei, who has the matter in charge, and I was impressed with his grasp of the problem, his humility in the face of a difficult task, and his manifest sincerity.”The man in question is J. H. Abrahim, a close friend of Prime Minister Verwoerd’s.

Indeed, Mr. Abrahim does have the “matter in charge.” Natives in the Transkei who criticize the government may lose their jobs — if they are fortunate enough to be employed. If considered by Mr. Abrahim to be dangerous, they can be transported to oblivion, deep in wasteland areas, hundreds of miles from any large community. Escape is virtually impossible. Hundreds of Africans have been put away in this fashion and denied the use of the mails, the right to have an attorney, or even the right to be tried in a court of law. Are we to hope that the Honorable J. H. Abrahim, commissioner-general of the Transkei, will “do right” in the end?

When I talked to him, Mr. Abrahim had complete faith in the newly formed native government in the Transkei. I asked him how many years it would take for the Transkei to be independent. He said he would not venture to predict a date in the future because “political matters all over the world are moving too fast.” He assured me, however, that self-government would not happen suddenly. Mr. Abrahim reminded me that we had far greater problems in the South than he had in the Transkei. I suggested that in the United States segregation, though still in practice, was illegal, whereas in South Africa segregation has been legalized. He looked at me and asked, “Well, then, isn’t our way better?”

NOTWITHSTANDLNG Mr. Randall’s plea for the Republic of South Africa, there are several ugly truths which must be recognized. The simple idea of freedom has not yet come to this last bastion of white supremacy in Africa. The government’s credo is “separate and survive.” This beautiful, bountifully endowed land has determined that 3 million whites shall prevail, no matter what the cost to the 13 million nonwhites. Apartheid, or separate development, is a fancy word for segregation — total, enforced segregation, a national policy applied at every level, down to and including the home.

What was once a policy directed only at the nonwhites has developed into a brutal campaign against everyone, white or black, speaking up for liberty. Verwoerd and his colleagues find it difficult to distinguish between a traitor and a critic. Speaking out against the suppressive policies of the National Party invites being called an enemy of the state. Criticism becomes sabotage, and protest is called treason. The government has a spectacular talent for devising unusual and cunning forms of punishment, and for justifying them.

True, last year the more than 365,000 nonwhites arrested for pass-law violations did tax the capacity of South Africa’s jails. Matters failed to improve even when “our kind of folk” (Mr. Randall’s phrase) saw to it that 17,000 prisoners received 81,000 strokes with a heavy cane.

This year Minister of Justice Balthazar J. Vorster introduced the novelty of house arrest. Under this scheme a person arrested by order of the Minister of Justice is confined to his home, even if the home is but a single room. He is strictly forbidden to communicate with anyone outside his immediate family. He may be released briefly to report to the police station. That is all, his only breath of air. The effect of this extreme punishment is “banishment from life.” Among those currently banished in this fashion are several women, one of them Mrs. Helen Joseph, whose crime was that she denounced these cruel and inhuman practices, as well as the government’s barbarous treatment of the natives.

A few people placed under house arrest have been smuggled to the dubious safety of Basutoland, a British protectorate in the middle of hostile territory.

Liberal white South Africans say that their country is on a collision course. The natives, whose every daily activity is covered by legislation, have jettisoned Chief Luthuli’s policy of nonviolence. The government, filled with fear, has enormously increased the defense budget. It is training home-defense brigades and has purchased more guns, tanks, fighter planes. Fear begets violence, and violence has already come to South Africa. Riots have occurred in Pondoland and in the Transkei. In October, November, and up until December 15 of last year, there were forty-six reported acts of violence and sabotage, including bombing, dynamiting, arson, and cable damage. The government arrested thousands of natives. Most of them are still in prison and held incommunicado. Three underground groups, the Spear of the Nation, the National Committee for Liberation, and Poqo, working separately, continue to worry and harass the whites.

Mr. Randall says that he had “the extraordinary privilege of seeing at firsthand every part of the Republic of South Africa under experienced guidance.” The two words “experienced guidance” worry me. My memories of South African guidance include being followed for two hundred miles by C.I.D. cars. Did Mr. Randall speak privately to Africans who might be eluding the ever-searching police, or did he speak to Africans at meetings arranged by the government guides?

Violence will not solve the problem in South Africa. But violence will come if the Verwoerd government, which has taken a vow to fight to the death and which says, “If we die, it will be our fate and not our fault,” is unwilling to make humane concessions.

It is little wonder that Rebecca West, describing the Republic of South Africa, said, “I’ve never seen a country as low as this one. It’s like a country being governed by mad babies.”

Clarence Randall comments on this article in Atlantic Repartee, page 24.