Blacks And Whites

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30959, 15 January 1966, Page 4

Blacks And Whites

The Story of Sarah. By Sylvia Whitehead. Macdonald. 192 pp.

There is an air of complete authenticity in this straightforward account of an English family’s lengthy sojourn in South Africa just after the war, though some of the grim drama which it reveals has almost a suggestion of unreality. Eric Whitehead, driven nearly mad by postwar restrictions on his business in England, sailed in 1947 with his wife and two small daughters for South Africa with the intention of settling in the Cape Province for life. Sylvia Whitehead graphically describes the circumstances which governed their existence for the next five years, with special emphasis on their relations with their African servants, of whom Sarah is the chief study. The girl had run away from her tribal home at the age of 12. Sylvia Whitehead found her on the doorstep one day—a tall, slim, dignified young thing of 18, who wanted a job. Sarah was, as it turned out, pregnant to a handsome cabaret pianist, who surprisingly enough was induced to marry her after the birth of a baby girl. Despite the good-natured taunts of her Afrikaaner acquaintances Sylvia kept Sarah in her service and, by doing so, came to love both her and her child, and to learn the immutable laws surrounding Bantu marriages;

for Sarah was compelled to be absolutely subservient to her mother-in-law and, at intervals, to go and work for her husband’s parents. The child, as it was the first one, became the unconditional property of its father’s family, and Sarah had to accept this unpalatable fact, too. To ease the awful boredom of life in Port Elizabeth Sylvia Whitehead ran first, a kindergarten, and then an occupational-therapy class in a hospital for orthopaedics. The book is not just an ordinary account of an English family’s life in a strange land, nor yet a thesis on race relations. What emerges from a sometimes heart-breaking story is the negative results of the mutual hatred obtaining between whites and blacks. On the one hand the author learnt a good deal about the violent savagery and superstition which were inherent in age-old tribal tradition; on the other the calculated and callous repression which the Government evolved to keep these potential dangers in check. For the trigger-happy police Mrs Whitehead has nothing but dislike and contempt, while a riot in a native settlement, during which murderous Africans savagely slaughtered a white woman doctor who had been their best friend, roused in her similar feelings of helpless anger. Eventually Sarah was framed for a theft which she had patently not committed, while temporarily serving an Afrikaaner couple in order to be near her husband, and went to goal for six weeks. This proved to be her death-sentence, for an untended attack of pneumonia, which she contracted there, led to tuberculosis, which swiftly killed her. There is no propaganda motive behind this grim tale, which was told first through the medium of a broadcast on the 8.8. C., and has since been translated into French, Swedish and Danish. The intractable savagery of the African when his enmity is aroused is allowed no mitigating licence. White people's brutality is not played down either. The author’s observation bn page 113 “The Africans hate the whites; the Europeans fear the Africans; the Afrikaaners hate the British; and nobody wants the In dians” sums up the sag-3 of intolerance in which everyone involved is to be blamed. Perhaps Sylvia Whitehead’s final comment as a civilised human being, enshrines a great truth; “We must go back to England. This is no place to bring up children.”