BLACK Y. WHITE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 252, 14 January 1928, Page 5

BLACK Y. WHITE

SOUTH AFRICA’S TROUBLES POTENTIAL BATTLE GROUND One of the last articles written by the late Robert Keable was a political review of South Africa’s troubles, a country with which he was well acquainted. Ho wrote: “South Africa is usually known to the average American as the scene of the 300-year-old quarrel between Britain and Boer that produced the Great Trek, a couple of wars, the reconciliation that made the Union of South Africa, and bids fair to flame again in the present flag controversy. “But it has a still greater interest for us as being the potential battleground between black and white that meet there as they do not meet elsewhere in the world. “This also has been a century-long affair. The South African has had to struggle with that problem, both under British and Boer regime, and neither side has been able to settle ". Two books have just appeared that deal most timely with the question, one by Professor Macmillan, ‘The Cape Colour Question.’ and the other by one of the most interesting personalities in Africa south of the Equator, the Rev. Arthur S. Cripps, ‘An Africa for Africans.’ “Mr. Cripps is an Englishman with an inordinate love of the English countryside in his blood. The fields

and lanes of Kent and Surrey awake in him something of the intense love and devotion that a Frenchman feels for France, and to which we more phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons rarely give expression. Thus, while taking brilliant honours at Oxford University, he' won several university prizes for poems expressing his love of England.

“It is therefore all the more interesting that he should have surrendered the whole of his adult life to Africa. He has lived and worked since his ordination among the Mashona of Southern Rhodesia, retaining his scholarship and his lov e of poetry, and brimming over now and again in passionate little books in which the two loves of his life are intermingled. On the parched stony African veld he ever remembers the depths of the English woods, and possibly because he is so passionate an Englishman. he has identified himself so Tsfblly with the cause of his Mashona.

“The situation in Southern Rhodesia is to-day the situation that has been disastrously lost in the Union of South Africa. One has there some 32,000 whites and rather more than SOO.OOO blacks, and while the blacks have so far remained living freely on their own territory and constituting a labour-reserve for the whites, the tendency of the whites is to encroach more and more upon their territory. "This was exactly the situation round the Cape of Good Hope a century ago.

“In that Cape Colony a century ago. only the wisest heads foresaw the inevitable result. At first all went swimmingly, but inevitably causes of trouble showed themselves and developed. The black man increasingly acquired education and acquisitiveness; the white man increasingly encroached on native territory: and there grew up an an increasingly large gray population, which was despised by white and black alike and had neither pot nor lot with either.”