AFRICA'S SOUTHWEST HELL

...At the end of World War II, the League of Nations mandate system was transferred to the United Nations, and the procedure of U.N...

...This resolution was adopted by a vote of eighty-three in favor, none against, with seven abstentions—the colonial powers and the United States...

...Since these developments, the Union administration has been ruthlessly isolating and deporting the new leaders they have been able to find...

...Because of an involvement with Communists in England during the depression of the Thirties, Scott has been an "unwelcome" representative of Chief Hosea Kutako, and the United States has restricted him to only parts of the island of Manhattan —ironically symbolic of how the Africans of South West are restricted to reserves and locations...

...Chief Hosea Kutako is still praying —and waiting...

...Africa beats a strong rhythm of independence in the 1960's, but the vibrations have largely been limited to tropical Africa...

...In recent months more than twenty Africans have escaped from South West, among them Markus Kooper, who spoke with humility and passion of his experiences to the United Nations in November, 1960...

...Zelma Watson George, of the United States delegation to the United Nations, who stood and applauded with the Asian and African delegations after the resolution had passed...

...Nestled among Portuguese Angola, Bechuanaland, and the Union, South West Africa is the Achilles' heel of the Union of South Africa...

...I hope," said Morse, "that this is the last session of the General Assembly with the United States on the wrong side of the vote...

...We are so insignificant...

...Ernest Gross, Assistant Secretary of State and a United States delegate to the United Nations under President Truman, has taken the job of legal representative for Liberia and Ethiopia at the International Court of Justice...

...The first called for the prosecution and punishment of those responsible for the death of Africans on the night of December 10, 1959, in the Windhoek "Native" Location...

...This power of the United Nations has never been used...

...Yet few know of him in America...

...White expansion has followed a cycle of land seizure, pushing the Africans further back into the famous Kalahari desert, onto marginal land, letting them spend years developing it, and then pushing them off again onto more waste land...

...In January, 1959, Reverend Markus Kooper, the leader of the local African Methodist Episcopalian Church, was forcibly removed by twenty-eight policemen, following the machine-gunning of his weaponless people who had surrounded his house to protect him...

...And for those men you prayed because they did not understand what they were doing, and that you came only for what is right...

...Most of the best land has been taken by the Europeans...

...In 1948 it was virtually incorporated as a fifth province of the Union, a maneuver based on the Nationalist Party's desire for the few thousand white votes in South West...

...the other 36,000 hectares were given to three white farmers from the Union...

...Of the ninety-nine delegations at the United Nations, only seven (including the Union of South Africa) were absent...

...Its ultimate meaning is that the United Nations is legally entitled to resort to police action if the decisions of the International Court are flouted...

...On all these resolutions on South West Africa an abstention is tantamount to a negative vote...

...the prisoners are then "let out" to the highest bidders as "laborers...

...we [the United States] must free ourselves from the colonial powers of the world and recognize that the only wealth we have is human wealth, the only values, human...

...In line with a shift in policy on South West Africa in the past year, the United States voted for these three resolutions...

...Now that the majority of African states are free, they will not rest until all of Africa is free...

...On November 4, Ethiopia and Liberia, acting in accordance with a decision made at a conference on Independent African States held in Addis Ababa in June, placed the issue of South West Africa before the International Court of Justice at the Hague, where hearings will begin April 15...

...In 1956 Kerina and Scott faced the same frustrations, with a United Nations unable or unwilling to act, boldly, to declare and guarantee the conditions of the League mandate or a trusteeship, which the Union has refused to accept...

...He remained alone and silent, because he feared deportation from the United States...

...In 1959 he escaped by foot from South West...

...Give us the courage to struggle in that way for what is right...

...A true African leader, in his own right, was maturing...

...A contract labor system guarantees cheap labor for the Europeans and is the major source of employment for the Africans...

...To Morse, abstaining meant voting against what was practically his own proposal, because in the Fourth Committee he had raised certain questions concerning a preliminary draft resolution, and the African nations had complied with his criticisms in the rewriting of this last resolution...

...In 1957, all that was done by the United Nations was to recommend a "Good Offices Commission" that returned the following year suggesting the partition of South West, a proposal rejected by both the Union government and by the people of South West through their petitioners, Kerina and Scott...

...The conditions of life for Africans are difficult for a Westerner to comprehend: overwhelming poverty, substandard housing, disease, almost no education...

...A third resolution recognized that the dispute with the Union of South Africa relating to the interpretation and application of the League of Nations mandate of December, 1920, had not been and could not be settled by negotiation...

...The Union government has consistently claimed that South West is an internal affair and that the conditions of the people in South West are not a matter for consideration by the United Nations...

...In the pleas of these petitioners is echoed the prayer that Chief Hosea Kutako uttered when Michael Scott left South West Africa in 1946 to come to the United Nations: "You are the great God of all the earth and heaven...

...The extension of apartheid into South West has intensified the policies of cruel exploitation and suppression that already existed...

...The Africans have long been relegated to locations and reserves, but the Union's encroachment on these lands has been steady and consistent...

...The Africans are divided among the three main tribes of Hereros, Namas in the South, and Ovambos in the SHERIDAN GRISWOLD is the pseudonym for an American observer who has watched the struggle of South West Africa before the United Nations at close range...

...If South West can be wedged free of the Union it will be a giant step forward not only for the people living in this hell of suppression and exploitation, but for the people of the Union of South Africa itself...

...What was the nature of the two resolutions on South West to cause the United States to abstain...

...Michael Scott's solitary voice, appealing to the conscience of the world for ten years, has been joined by Mburumba Kerina, Jariretundu Kozonguizi, Jakob Kuhangua, Sam Nujoma, Markus Kooper, and others...

...South West is the hope of the beginning of the end of apartheid...

...Reverend Michael Scott is the "white African" hero who is revered throughout Africa for his fifteen years of dedicated efforts, in the face of overwhelming difficulties, and without any thought of self, to carry to the world the cause of the oppressed peoples of South West Africa, who have been refused the right to express their grievances by the Union of South Africa...

...Why does South West Africa today have this historic potential...

...Today, the young leaders of South West Africa, most of them still in their twenties, have gained maturity and world stature...

...The United States action is related to its abstention December 15 on the resolution for colonial freedom, which at the time was dramatically disavowed by Senator Wayne Morse and Mrs...

...Give us back a dwelling place...

...What were the new acts on the part of the Union government that finally gave birth to political organizations dedicated to independence...

...Twelve Africans were killed, including Mburumba Kerina's brother, and thirty-two were injured...

...They still ask, as they have for the past fifteen years, that the world community assume its responsibility for South West Africa, and assure that the territory is placed under United Nations trusteeship...

...The first political organizations on the part of Africans in South West have been formed: the South West Africa People's Organization, and the South West African National Union...

...Colonialism is a dying policy...

...Even the Union of South Africa seems "liberal" in comparison...

...Since having to abstain on this vote Senator Morse has indicated his personal rejection of the United States position...

...They emphasize that if the decision of the International Court is favorable to South West Africa, political action will be necessary to enforce it...

...It is hoped that this long-contemplated recourse to compulsory jurisdiction will force the Union to relax its policy of enforcing apartheid in South West and turn the country over to the United Nations for administration...

...Help us who have been placed in Africa and have no dwelling place of our own...

...On Human Rights Day, December 10, 1959, a crowd gathered non-violently in Windhoek to protest the move to the new location...

...By 1955 Kerina felt that the time had come to stand up and speak for his people...

...The gallery laughed when he cast a lone vote for his resolution...

...The wealth of the country lies in diamonds, minerals (large American investments), and Persian lamb...

...This, they believe, is the necessary first step toward independence...

...The situation in South West may seem hopeless, but the people o? South West have not given up hope...

...to "deprecate" the application of apartheid in South West...

...In terms of the future of South West Africa, the last resolution is one of the most important to come out of the United Nations in fifteen years...

...Ireland is not expected to be asked by the other members of the Committee to send a representative because Ireland abstained in the vote on this last resolution...

...In human terms, South West is a brutal story...

...Windhoek is the small, sprawling capital, a mile above sea level, with a population of 40,000, half European, half African...

...He added that in the next session of Congress he was going to see what he could do to help "change the course of American policy in this whole field of human rights...

...South West is larger than Texas, but holds only a little more than a half-million people, including 70,000 "Europeans" (of German origin and recently immigrated Afrikaners), 20,000 "coloreds," and 540,000 "natives...

...An underground railroad has been established with Tanganyika as the northern haven...

...The result of a roll-call vote was seventy-eight for, none against, with fifteen abstentions, including the United States...

...North...

...trusteeships was established...

...For coming down to earth you were despised and mocked, and brutally treated because of those same defects in men of those days...

...Mburumba Kerina had escaped from South West by representing himself as a "Cape colored," and in early 1953 had come to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania...

...These orders came directly from President Eisenhower following a call to the President from Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan...

...The 1961 members of the Committee on South West Africa are Brazil, Denmark, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Ireland, Philippines, United Arab Republic, and Uruguay...

...Amen...

...Now the Europeans want the rest of the reserve...

...Instead, the Union systematically began a process of colo-nialization and exploitation directed toward helping the whites and subjecting the Africans...

...The complaint charges the Union of South Africa with having violated the terms of the mandate under which it has been "supervising" the territory...

...But the League gave supervision of South West over to the Union of South Africa, whose racial policies Mohandas Gandhi had helped make known to the world twenty years earlier...

...South of the Congo, in the Portuguese colonies, in the Union of South Africa and in Union-controlled South West, where Africans are denied even the most basic human rights, there is considerable ferment, but it is difficult to predict the outcome...

...In the terms of the mandate the Union was to "promote to the utmost the material and moral well-being and the social progress of the inhabitants of the territory...

...South West, along with Tanganyika, the Cameroons, and Togoland, was a German colony that at the end of World War I became an international territory, a mandate of the League of Nations...

...He is a convincing representative of his proud people...

...The Union government has denied South West Africans passports, while permitting Europeans to travel...

...In Windhoek, the capital, officials are attempting to remove 20,000 African residents to a new area, Ka-tatura, miles away, so the city land will be available for new homes for whites...

...Before World War II it was fenced down to 14,000 hectares for the Nama people living there...

...But the Union government has steadfastly pursued its policy of annexing South West and has tried to throw doubt on the international status of the territory...

...To make his annual pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and the Cloisters—both in Manhattan—he has to request special permission from the U.S...

...They have accepted isolation and exile from their homeland in order to bear witness to the struggle for freedom that their people are embarking on, a freedom that we all too easily take for granted...

...Escaping has consisted mainly of walking at night across borders: Angola, Bechuanaland, Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and even the Congo before the independence turmoil broke out there...

...Wages vary from a few dollars to twenty dollars a month in the city...

...The rest of the people of the reserve followed...

...Though the Africans constitute more than eighty per cent of the population, seventy-nine per cent of government expenditures for education are for Europeans...

...The whites have set out to seize still more African land on the dwindling reservations and to take the land and homes of the Africans in the cities, moving the Africans to new locations (where they are also divided along tribal lines...

...And in South West, what truly is the "official" government...

...The Pan-African movement is most sensitive to white domination wherever it is perpetuated in Africa...

...On the next two resolutions the United States joined the colonial powers in abstaining...

...The South West Africa problem is symbolic of great foreign policy problems...

...Gross has indicated that there is a clause in the United Nations Charter that gives the Security Council the power to take whatever means it deems necessary to enforce a decision of the International Court...

...Only one in three Africans ever gets to sit in a schoolroom...

...Kerina produced numerous photographs smuggled out of the territory to support his description of the subhuman conditions under which his people were forced to live...

...A list of abuses is detailed, documenting the grim history of forty years of oppression...

...South West is a veritable colony of the Union, held in a darkness hiding the struggle of the South West Africans to throw off their oppressors and strike out for independence...

...Since no South West African could leave the country—and none ever had—the Hereros asked Scott to bear to the United Nations for them their petition against annexation...

...It was an accident of history that moved Michael Scott to be the spokesman for the voiceless people of South West...

...Coupled with the case at the International Court it makes 1961 a year to watch South West Africa...

...He tried to join Scott but ran into the impersonal bureaucracy of the United Nations, encountering difficulties in procedures and credentials...

...For forty years South West Africa has been lost to the world, forgotten...

...Some of these resolutions confirm the progress made at the United Nations on South West Africa after fifteen long years and also give evidence of the difficulties that lie ahead...

...Blocked at speaking formally, Kerina submitted a tape recording (an approach that United Nations protocol was not prepared for) which the members of the Committee on South West Africa listened to in an informal, closed session...

...In 1946 the Union staged a rigged "referendum" among the tribes of South West...

...After extended discussion and debate, several draft resolutions were presented to the General Assembly and were considered on December 18, 1960...

...A considerable part of South West is dry, arid, undeveloped land, where droughts are frequent and severe...

...They have yet to resort to violence, although daily they are violated in every conceivable way...

...O God all power is yours in heaven and earth...

...Still, it will be the first time the Committee has been allowed inside South West to observe conditions...

...In contrast, the Europeans of South West enjoy the second or third highest living standards anywhere on earth...

...Kerina was most eloquent in his appeal, which was the first opportunity for United Nations delegates to hear directly from someone who had lived under the Union's regime in South West...

...to "deplore and disapprove" these policies...

...The abstentions have consistently come from the old colonial powers—Netherlands, Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal, joined at times by a few of the commonwealth countries, mainly Australia...

...Scott happened to be staying in Bechuanaland at the time and there he met Chief Hosea Kutako of the Herero people of South West...

...Both Kerina and Kozonguizi have in the last two years joined the ranks of other African leaders at the various Pan-African conferences...

...Out of the grass roots new leaders have emerged, ready to meet the challenge...

...This growing repression has brought united resistance from the Africans...

...O Lord, help us who roam about...

...Scott is a devout Anglican clergyman...

...He and his family were taken 150 miles into the Itsawisis Desert, where they were dumped...

...By 1956 Kerina was able to establish his credentials (hundreds of Hereros, Namas, and Ovambos signed petitions to the United Nations requesting that Kerina be permitted to speak for them), and he joined Scott as the first African petitioner from South West (and the first South West African ever to go beyond the Union, the first to get a bachelor of arts degree...

...Malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases under control in most of the rest of the world are rife among Africans in South West...

...and to ask the Union and the Secretary General to aid in facilitating an early report...

...In 1956, after a decade of seemingly futile efforts on behalf of the people of South West—years during which the Union consolidated its position and continued a program of "white man's wealth, black man's burden"— Scott was dramatically joined by a young Herero petitioner...

...In the last year the Union has been intensifying its encroachment on the rights of Africans in South West...

...A resolution calling on the Union of South Africa to seek the assistance of the United Nations specialized agencies was passed unanimously...

...On following days the United Nations heard from the South West petitioners...

...It is expected that the Union government will grant visas to the representatives of the Committee on South West Africa when they seek admission to the territory...

...we must not postpone its death pangs...

...This was a serious setback for the United States in its relations with the new African nations...

...In 1957 Jariretundu Kozonguizi, the only other African from South West to have a college degree, was offered a scholarship for graduate study in England, but was refused a passport...

...The Assembly commended the initiative of Ethiopia and Liberia in instituting contentious proceedings against the Union of South Africa in the International Court of Justice...

...On the basis of the results the Union's Prime Minister, Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, came to the United Nations to seek annexation of South West...

...The problem of South West is now seen as an African problem, and the Pan-Africanists will not rest until South West is free...

...In us there are many defects...

...AFRICA'S SOUTHWEST HELL by SHERIDAN GRISWOLD Go into the bush anywhere in Africa, into the simplest village, the most isolated hinterland, and you will find there is one white man who is universally known and trusted by Africans...

...Another resolution urged the government of the Union of South Africa to cease the arbitrary imprisonment and deportation of Africans, including the leaders and members of the South West African Peoples Organization, and to ensure the free exercise of political rights and the freedom of expression by all sectors of the population...

...The Union of South Africa tried to discredit him through behind-the-scenes lobbying...

...UNICEF, UNESCO, WHO, FAO are encouraged to "undertake urgent programs to assist the indigenous population of South West Africa in economic, educational, social, and health fields...

...You know all about us...

...But the power is yours to make and do what we cannot do...

...The Union of South Africa's Minister for External Affairs, Eric H. Louw, tried to get the Committee to postpone consideration of South West Africa on the grounds that any discussion would tend to prejudice the International Court...

...Since the case may drag on before the International Court for a number of years, the petitioners from South West Africa are quick to point out that legal action and political action are not mutually exclusive...

...Two examples show the form of oppression...

...The coldblooded extermination of a majority of the Herero people by the Germans before World War I appears a small calamity in the light of the savage oppression under Union "supervision...

...The last resolution asked the Assembly to "regret" South Africa's failure to revise its repressive policies in South West...

...to invite the Committee on South West Africa to go to South West and investigate the situation...

...Any representatives that go to South West will probably be harassed in a number of ways—shown only certain areas, denied access to certain persons, and the like...

...government...

...On November 14, the Fourth Committee of the United Nations began its hearings on South West Africa...

...Kozonguizi has testified four times before the United Nations...

...For ten years Scott, since denied access to South West, continued to be almost the sole means by which the Herero people laid their case before the conscience of the world...

...But Africans have no rights under the system...

...The Hoachanas Reserve was originally 50,000 hectares...

...The people of South West, living in abject poverty, would welcome the assistance of UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO, and the other United Nations agencies, but the United Nations is powerless to move unless invited by the official government...

...He abstained only on orders from the State Department...

...Scott's task was a difficult and lonely one...

...The police fired into the crowd at random...

...Whenever the supply of labor is less than the demand, there is a rise in arbitrary arrests of Africans for minor violations—such as not having the right pass...

...This resolution was endorsed by eighty-six to none, with six abstentions...

...The Assembly adopted this resolution by a vote of eighty-four to none, with seven abstentions...

...A "concentration camp" has been created near Sandfontein, at the border of Bechuanaland, as part of a government drive to crush the new people's organizations...