Two Types of African Ambiguity

...Some of the colored people, he says, reject white supremacy because it is an immoral creed, "but many of them resent it because they are not included in it...

...Again, Miss Jabavu painfully reveals how the feeling of African one-ness contrasts with reality...

...Noni Jabavu is a modernminded humanist who frankly revels equally in her African-ness and in her membership in a Europeanized society...

...She reveals herself at times a little priggish: She felt she had to put the "native" children out of bounds for her teenage, Englisheducated daughter when they talked too bluntly of their less genteel social customs...

...He tells them: "Nobody, in a normal context, would oppose the prevention of erosion...

...This conflict is Miss Jabavu's real theme...

...Inevitably, many of his comrades in the movement have thrown this idea overboard, and sought the violent way out...

...Your solution is to take our cattle away today because you took our land yesterday...

...At the receiving end of tyranny in South Africa there is no single, predictable set of reactions...

...Misunderstanding and poor communications is also the sub-theme of Luthuli's book...

...These two accounts by very different South Africans of their predicament and attitudes have only one major similarity in temperamental reaction: Both refuse to be bitter...

...One of her villagers suddenly shouts in Xhosa and laughs: "My, who would be a European...

...He considers that "the real struggle in South Africa is not Black versus White, but Herrenvolk versus the rest...

...The saddest parts of Luthuli's book are the repeated instances of the failure to unite on the part of the oppressed...

...But in practice here is the factor which you ignore: the overcrowding of African areas by man and beast is the direct result of the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts...

...Miss Jabavu beguilingly imparts enthusiasm for the "African" qualities and attitudes...

...But what a subtle and dismal confusion of attitudes both betray...

...Apartheid in her book, as in her life, is but a dark back-cloth...

...Actually to meet a black South African, either in the flesh or through his book, is to realize that all these reactions can be present in one and the same person...

...Folks, these people rise up angry at everything even from their sleep...

...His conclusion, optimistic yet somewhat tired-sounding-as though he already knows in his heart of hearts that it will not work -is that salvation lies in understanding...

...The problem of racial identity, of what constitutes "Africanness,' the puzzle of isolating the respect, if any, in which Europeans are supposed to be superior, or at any rate more civilized-these bedevil and confuse all Africa, black as well as white...

...Our hope is that white people will look into our grievances, take us seriously...

...But her writing has the quality of a fully alive person in a poignant racial situation: that of a black South African married to an Englishman trying to help her unfortunate sister married to a Uganda man...

...With skill and sensitivity she introduces us to her Bantu homeland, letting us savor its intimacy, vitality and warmth...

...Reviewed by WALTER SCHWARZ Editor, "West Africa" A confusion of values on the subject of race is not peculiar to South Africa, though political circumstances there give it an extreme form...

...First thing in the morning angry always angry, they were conceived on a twisted mat, those...

...Chief Albert Luthuli, the Nobel Prizewinning political leader who has become identified with non-violent revolt, makes a dignified protest, lucidly and simply stated, informed with hope and faith...

...Perhaps the ultimate moral of her experiences is that people are usually so determined to misunderstand each other that they will succeed in doing so even at times when the racial excuse is altogether absent...

...He even explains that when angry mobs burn down churches in riots, they can be excused for associating the white man's religion with his oppression...

...He sees the Christian churches in his country as at best indifferent, at worst actively upholding the doctrines of the oppressors...

...So uncivilized did she find the people that she persuaded her sister to get a divorce...

...A chapter or two later she reveals the same villagers equating lightness of skin with superiorityan attitude she deplores herself but unconsciously shares ("although he too was very, very dark in complexion he was strikingly handsome...

...Again and again he points to ignorance and fallacy as rivals to greed and inhumanity in the South African regime...

...In the end, in spite of reason and in spite of Luthuli, it probably will be Blacks versus Whites...

...But he himself does not waver...

...Some are resigned, some disinterested, some resort to a nebulous optimism, others to despair, still others to violent revolt...

...Worse, she began to look down on the Ugandans as "natives,' much as if she were a European...

...Her sister had married a man from Uganda-a society of fellow Bantu which the South Africans consider advanced and privileged because its traditional organizations were allowed to flourish even under British rule, and because Africans there were allowed to own large areas of land...

...Luthuli, the African protesting against the most ruthless system of exploitation of our time, is a Christian...

...With admirable frankness, she says: "Such conflict between common sense, emotion, human values inculcated during one's childhood-would it not tear a person to pieces...

...Just as the whites cannot understand why rioting blacks burn down churches, so they ask Luthuli to explain why his African National Congress supporters rejected schemes for the prevention of soil erosion by cutting down the number of cattle...

...But when she visited her sister in Uganda, she was cruelly disappointed...