South Africa's Part

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 131, 26 December 1941, Page 5

South Africa's Part

OW perhaps I may be permitted to tell you a word or two about my own home country, South Africa. New Zealand has a homogeneous population and it is fair to say that it is 100 per cent. behind the war effort and war policy of the present Government, and 100 per cent. in the present struggle with the rest of the Allies. South Africa has not a homogeneous population. Its European population is divided between the Afrikaans and Englishspeaking sections. You may take it that the Englishspeaking section is almost, if not entirely, unanimously on the side of the Allies in the present struggle. But at least one-half of the Afrikaans people are opposed to South Africa’s present participation in the war. Our decision to take part in that

war was by a free vote in a free Parliament, and has been reaffirmed on several occasions since it first was taken on September 4, 1939. But that decision has not been accepted by the Opposition parties in the South African Parliament. In considering South Africa’s war effort, therefore, regard should always be had to this very important fact. But even so, I think we have every right to be proud of our contribution to the Allied cause in the two years and more which have elapsed since the war began. We have taken a leading part in destroying the Italian African Empire in Somaliland, Abyssinia and Eritrea. To-day we are taking a big part in the struggle to throw the combined forces of Nazism and’ Fascism entirely out of the Continent of Africa. From a white population of just over 2,000,000, we have recruited an army of 120,000, and of that army at least half bear Afrikaans names.-(" South Africa Speaks to New Zealand,’ Leslie Blackwell, K.C., M.C., M.P., Official Envoy from South Africa to the Government of New Zealand, 2YA, December 7,) 4