APARTHEID

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 895, 28 September 1956, Page 5

APARTHEID

Sir,--Mrs. Sarah G. Millin, whose husband was a brilliant Judge of the Supreme Court, is a South African writer internationally known. Among her numerous works are Rhodes-a Book Society choice and filmed; General Smuts, a biography authorised and approved by him while he was still alive; and The People of South Africa. About an hour after I had listened to Mr. de Villier’s broadcast expounding the South African. Government’s apartheid policy, I was reading Mrs, Millin’s autobiography, The Measure of My Days, and came across this: The essential Afrikanders had not moved since they had called Smuts "The Apostle of a Kaffir State.’ On their native policy the Boers had never, in three hundred years, moved. Apartheid began the day the Dutch set foot in South Africa. It continued as the Boers trekked East, and the Blacks West. Upon a Black Manifesto the Boers had gone north a hundred and twenty years ago. Upon Apartheid they had built their_ republics. Upon eve quarrel with the British and upon the Boer War itself there had been a Black Manifesto, The inequality of the natives was one of the things the Boers had insisted on wh Joseph Chamberlain came to negotiate wi them after the war. . . In 1948 Dr. Malan came out with the Black Manifesto of Black Manifestoes-in short, the, basic policy of Rhodes and Smuts, of the Rhodesians, of ail British settlers in Africa, of the British South African territories that, for their part, admitted no white men-Apar-theid, Separation. . . Only Smuts could have said: "The war of the freedom of South Africa has been fought, not only for the Boers, but for the entire people of South Africa. . ." When only seven years later he devised the union of the two old Boer Republics and the two British colonies, few besides Smuts could have honestly felt that here was "a union not of top-dog and under-dog, but of brothers . . . under the majesty of the British Flag." Smuts did not foresee-nor Balfour, when he spoke of "this most wonderful issue out of all the horrors of war and difficulties of peace’-that the British colonies were thus delivered, under democracy and the rule of numbers, into the | hands of the old Boer Republics." In my judgment apartheid is basically wrong, because it is founded on fear; fear of reprisals by Africans for treatment they have received at the hands of white men, This fear springs from the guil consciences of the white people. A policy of sops to keep the Africans quiet while perpetuating the domination of Africans by a white minority is not the right solution. There should be announced a policy of educational and social development for the Africans which envisages a time when a government of cultured Africans could be trusted to rule and administer’ the Union as efficiently, and with even more justice, than any white Government has done.

J. MALTON

MURRAY

(Oamaru).