S.A. University Staff Warn Of Catastrophe

Press, Volume C, Issue 29513, 15 May 1961, Page 11

S.A. University Staff Warn Of Catastrophe

(N ZP.A -Reuter—Copyright)

CAPE TOWN, May 13. South Africa faced a catastrophe unless she found a new racial policy, according to a declaration signed and issued by 247 members of the staff of the University of Cape Town yesterday. They called for a meeting of leading South Africans of al' races to work out agreed principles as a preliminary to holding a national convention. The declaration said: “We citizens of South Africa and members of the staff of the University of Cape Town record our distress at the present state of our country "Because of insistence on white supremacy, nearly al) nations of the world have turned against us We have lost our place in the Commonwealth and internal con-

flicts have grown more bitter. "Unless • new policy is found we face catastrophe—not in the vague future, but soon—a catastrophe in which all of us. English and Afrikaans speaking, farmer and townsman, white and nonwhite, will suffer . . .” In Johannesburg, a lender of South Africa's non-white majority last night made a nation-wide call for strikes and demonstrations by whites as well as African* against the Union'* coming republican status, the Associated Press reported From a secret hiding place, the secretary of the All-Afri-can People’* Conference, Mr Nelson Mandela, made his appeal in letter* to newspaper*. A bill is before Parliament to outlaw demands for strikes and demonstrations.