South African Attitudes

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31119, 23 July 1966, Page 4

South African Attitudes

Against the World. By Douglas Brown. Collins 215 pp. Index. The republic of South Africa is more isolated diplomatically than any country has been since the new Soviet Republic of 1918. Yet within the “laager” a rich and growing society is bringing an improved way of life to all its races. However the moral decisions on which South Africa rests have been made in accord with a special view of human relations. The result is what appears, at least to white South Africans, as a most noble persistence in what the rest of the world regards as wrong-doing. Douglas Brown, an English journalist with considerable experience of South Africa, is no apologist for apartheid. He is ruthless in his examination of the absurdities and inconsistencies of South African society and segregation laws. But he is equally sceptical of the simple solutions and slogans offered by outsiders, without first-hand knowledge.

“Against the World” is a determined effort to understand white South African attitudes, themselves deeply divided. There is no immobility in these attitudes. The Afrikaner, as he acquires more economic power, has become politically sophisticated. The English-speakers, conscious of the fate of other English settlers in Africa, have moved closer to the Nationalist position. And while he is ready enough to present the historical origins of apartheid, Mr Brown points out that it is only the white man who can appreciate it in this way; the other races can only suffer apartheid, and the black man is a stranger in his own land.

Mr Brown is concerned with two themes—that white South Africans are remarkably similar to other peoples Of European stock, and at the same time they live, by their own choice, in a world “on the other side of the moon.” He offers no solutions, no conclusions, but he has captured the flavour of this tragic environmept “There is a nightmarish quality about the South African Parliament, a hint of Kafka. The Honourable Members are not noticeably sinister. They are the more or less decent representatives of the more or less decent white South Africans. But they are playing two games at once. They are maintaining the forms of Parliamentary democracy, and dealing with a concept of the State that was better expressed by Hitler’s Reichstag. ... In Parliament two principles meet and clash in interminable warfare. One is that of free elections and free speech: the other is that of the embattled, eternal Afrikaner volk.”

The new Pan Piper science series (published by Pan Books) includes in paperback form some of the notable publications in the science field originally published in hardcovers, and some original works. Two Pan originals to hand are ‘The Living World” by Dr. C. L. Duddington and “Nuclear Weapons” by Otto Berzins. Two books that have been transferred to handy, inexpensive paperback form are Susan Michelmore’s “Sex,” first published in 1964 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, and “You and Your Brain,” by Judith Groch, first published in 1964 by Cassell.