THE AFRICAN NATIVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 784, 30 July 1954, Page 17

THE AFRICAN NATIVE

W ZEALANDERS, who are prepared to make a talking point of a Europeans Only notice in the most insignificant pub, would keep the correspondence columns going for a long time if they saw one on a Christian church or a Y.M.C.A. building, which is something Frank Newman _ reports from South Africa in two.talks on the South African Native, to be broadcast from 3YA at 4.0 p.m. this Sunday (August 1) and next Sunday. Though Mr. Newman, who recently became producer to the Canterbury Repertory

Society, doesn’t claim to be an authority on the South African native-he wasn’t there long enough for that-he did go to Africa as a visitor and so was able to see. things more dispassionately than if he had livéd there all his life; and he stayed long enough to acquire something more than a tourist’s superficial knowledge. One of the most interesting stories in his first talk, about the native at home, describes a visit to the kraal of a Zulu family, where, feeling rather foolish in his European clothes, he sat surrounded by naked black bodies and beaming faces, held two piccaninnies, and watched the women dance, Left alone to amuse themselves and live in their own way, Mr. Newman says, the natives get a lot of fun out. of life, even if they’re working for the white man. The second talk is about the racial problem which Mr. Newman sees. like a menacing question mark over the country. The Afrikander, he says, seems to believe, in a settled way, that the native is quite different from and lower than the white man; and he has made his country probably unique in thisthat the reward it offers to one of its black sons who goes abroad and becomes honoured and’ renowned is eternal banishment.