RACIAL DESPOTISM IN SOUTH AFRICA

...The government now controls their right to enter and leave the country...

...Last year, therefore, the government increased the size of the Appellate Court from five to eleven, packing it with judges favorable to the Nationalist interpretation of the constitution...

...Rather the majority of the people—the non-Europeans—are in the position of colonials subject to the imperialist Europeans...

...Its character will depend largely upon the sympathy and understanding which has been developed between people in other countries and the non-Europeans in South Africa...

...In the first place, the administration is not efficient...

...Many of them have lost their employment, cannot move out of their own district, and are constantly hounded by police...

...Africans were removed from the electoral roll in 1936...

...At the same time, they increased the size of the Senate from 48 to 89 members, and altered the method of election to ensure that almost all members are Nationalist supporters...

...Eight thousand of their people voluntarily went to jail...

...These colored people have been brought together in ever increasing numbers in the towns, where they form political and industrial organizations...

...At that time they violently resented a government which interiered with what they considered to be their divine right to live as they thought fit and to treat their colored servants as animals...

...Events in other parts of the African continent, in Asia, in the Caribbean, and even in the Southern states of America, are all increasing the pace and the pressure...

...The Afrikaners, therefore, feel themselves to be a beleaguered garrison in their own country and in the whole continent...

...I learned later that his plan to adjourn Parliament that night and get away from Cape Town had been frustrated by the obstinacy of a single Senator...

...It is highly significant in the present South African scene...

...The answer must be a qualified "no...

...Some form of revolution appears inevitable, for in the present world four-fifths of a people will not submit permanently to domination by one-fifth...

...Industry is deliberately handicapped...

...They think in terms of the volkswil, the mystical, divine truth known only to their people...

...This year they have used this swollen Parliamentary majority to remove the Colored voters and to establish the supremacy of their parliamentary oligarchy over the courts...

...This mass protest was broken by the passage of the Public Safety and Criminal Law Amendment Acts giving the government powers to declare an emergency and legislate by proclamation, and imposing vicious penalties of fining, imprisonment, and flogging on any person associated with protest against the racial laws...

...The keystone to this divinely-revealed truth is the concept of baass-kap...

...For all Swart's arresting appearance, it was his companion who immediately commanded attention...

...There are just not enough Nationalists to run a police, state in such a large country...

...Then followed the Bantu Education Act, based upon the principle enunciated by a previous Committee on Native Education: "The education of a White child prepares him for life in a dominant society and the education of the Black child for a subordinate society...

...The fate of race relations throughout the world may well depend upon this single, significant issue...

...Modern South Africa, however, is not the Afrikaner pastoral Utopia of a hundred years ago...

...My letters to such people have been seized by the police, for raids on their homes and offices are frequent...

...In the world of today he considers any white man a completely different being superior to all Africans, Indians, Chinese, West Indians, South Americans, or Japanese...

...This all occurred before the Nationalists took power in 1948...

...It was the last hour of the House session...

...Out-the House cars were waiting to rush Members to the airport and away from Cape Town for the next six months...

...They would like to recreate that patriarchal society in which despotic heads of families met to decide the affairs of state under the leadership of their authoritarian president...

...The Mixed Marriages and Immorality Acts render sex relations between white and non-white a criminal offense...

...The life of its white people, in particular, depends upon the mining and export of gold and the development of secondary industries...

...The Afrikaners are fundamentalists, regarding themselves as the Chosen People, unanswerable to discussion or debate...

...Furthermore, the South African white community comprises about half of all the white people living among 200 million blacks on the African continent...

...For five years it has been attempting to remove the last non-Europeans, a handful of Cape Coloreds, from the electoral roll...

...In 1952 the leading non-European politicians took their last stand...

...They have now succeeded...

...Even Afrikaner professors and clergymen have begun to raise voices of protest against the intensification of racial oppression and the resulting collapse of public values...

...he took the Blue Train to Johannesburg at the very time that the extra sitting was being held...

...If democratic government is to avoid the risk of being used to establish despotism, it has to be based upon common principles accepted by the vast majority of the population...

...They organized a mass campaign of deliberate, but peaceful, infringement of the segregation laws...

...Most non-Europeans and a handful of brave European anti-racialists are living under the conditions of a police state...

...The entire white community of South Africa—and one must accept that the Afrikaners have converted most British South Africans to their racial philosophy—is only two and a half million strong...

...But the Afrikaner goes much deeper in attacking the roots of parliamentary democracy...

...Consequently, the whites have been able to use the full force of political, legal, and economic power, gained through democratic institutions confined to their own caste, to destroy every effort of the majority to attack white privilege...

...It is common for Europeans to carry guns...

...Europeans, particularly Britishers, have begun to feel insecure under Nationalist policy...

...Johannes Strydom is dark, square, and stern, with thin tight lips and crystal blue eyes...

...In their wanderings they found new lands free from government interference, established new states—the Orange Free State and the Transvaal—and set up new constitutions based upon the principle, "There shall be no equality in Church or State...

...They would like to wipe out mining, industry, commerce, and modern amenities of life, to close their doors to alien religions and philosophies...

...One late afternoon during 1955, I stood alone in this courtyard, outside the Prime Minister's room...

...Premier Strydom is a fanatic...

...Having forced Parliament to re-assemble the following day, the Senator proceeded to show his contempt for it by not deigning to attend...

...In 1954, 112 out of every 1,000 people were prosecuted...

...What the Afrikaners would like to do is to jump backward into the time when they first founded the Boer Republics...

...This attitude of contempt for parliamentary democracy is not related simply as an isolated incident...

...The machinery of a caste oligarchy had been built for them...

...The Suppres— of OvUunuMMtt Art givoc t h P Minister of Justice power to ban from public life any individual opposing the government and to restrict his movements...

...The Prime Minister told me that he was leaving Cape Town the following morning for his farm at Nylstroom to forget all about politics until the next session, six months hence...

...The mining companies have always used their black labor on a temporary basis, housing laborers in strictly controlled compounds...

...I have had to visit African, Indian, and European political leaders in secret, after making intricate arrangements to meet in an obscure rendezvous and with elaborate precautions to ensure that I was not followed...

...According to one story, when the Johannesburg police were ordered to seize banned copies of Time, they returned with issues of the London Times Educational Supplement...

...The Boers, or Afrikaners as they are now called, have been running away from genuine government ever since they fled from the British in the Cape in the Great Treks of the 1830s...

...Each time the government has been frustrated by the courts, which have declared its actions unconstitutional...

...For more than a hundred years they have sought the opportunity to impose this principle as the established, unquestioned foundation of South African life...

...On one side, the pillars and arches are filled in by French windows leading to the lobby of the House of Assembly...

...The sensation expressed by this word is much more profound than any English translation such as "white domination...

...Yet it cannot come soon because all the sanctions of force are in the hands of a small minority...

...It was to be seen in Strydom's steely blue eyes, in what he said to me, and in what he had just done...

...The total population of the Union is more than 13 million...

...The second reason is the gradual division being created in white ranks...

...He is known as "the Lion of Waterberg," a thunderous denouncer of all who would dilute JOHN HATCH, the author of "The Dilemma of South Africa," has traveled throughout Africa several times...

...Yet there are two reasons for believing that South Africa will never become a complete police state...

...At a recent Nationalist meeting, a professor of the Free State University declared that the Prime Minister receives his authority from God and uses Parliament merely to endorse his legislation...

...There is no immediate or clear hope for the South African people...

...The land of the Union of South Africa was divided so that the African population was allocated only 13 per cent of the whole area...

...Nevertheless, when the ruling oligarchy begins to crack, as it seems to be doing in South Africa, the power of the majority becomes more real...

...Sabbatarianism is strong among them...

...The organization of any strong opposition to racialism in South Africa has become virtually impossible...

...Acts were passed to exclude as many Africans as possible from the towns...

...The Population Registration Act classifies the entire population in racial groups, and the Group Areas Act allocates each group to its separate district...

...It is not only that Parliament has become a rubber stamp for Nationalist aims...

...It is roofless, open to the sky...

...The industrial revolution which has changed the face of the country during the present century has inevitably brought white and buck ana mown together on a scale never envisaged when the Boers established their republics...

...It was plain as he spoke to his Minister of Justice that Strydom was in a flaming temper...

...One of them made a striking appearance: over six feet six inches tall, thin, smallheaded and gangling...

...This has never been so in South Africa...

...He had just forced the Senate bill through the House, thus gaining power almost to double the size of the Senate and to pack it with his own supporters...

...Roman Catholics, Freemasons, liberals, and Jews are all hotly denounced...

...Since then every action of the Nationalist Government has been designed to achieve this one single end...

...For two hundred years the Afrikaner has conceived of himself as innately superior to the colored man according to the divine ordination of the universe...

...On all four sides rise pillars, topped by rounded arches, surmounted by a balcony, and palm trees grow in tubs in each corner...

...How then does the White South African minority manage to retain its domination over the non-white majority...

...Color prejudice is pathologically deep and fanatically defended...

...the absolute truth of Boer philosophy and the Dutch Reformed Religion...

...He is a character from the Old Testament and has revealed his whole outlook in the sentence, "If the European loses his color sense he cannot remain a white man...

...That has indeed brought parliamentary government in South Africa into disrepute...

...When the revolution comes it could take a racialist, a communist, or a democratic form...

...Suddenly a door opened and two figures approached me...

...What is more, mining and industry depend upon labor which can be supplied only from the non-white communities, the Africans and Cape Coloreds (half-castes) and Indians...

...Is South Africa a complete police state...

...The ruthlessness of the present government oligarchy is best seen in the methods it has used to overcome constitutional barriers...

...They have done their best to go back to the days of their Old Testament society...

...Regulations increasingly interfere with their private life...

...The Nationalist-dominated, exclusively white political despotism is now supreme...

...Every concept which hints at universality is dangerous to the Afrikaner belief in baasskap...

...Malan's electoral victory of 1948...

...Crime is rapidly mushrooming...

...Their industrial organization is obstructed by Nationalist racialism and the enforced industrial color bar...

...Since then, the attack upon every form of non-European organization not controlled by the government has been systematic...

...The extent to which this innate belief in the superiority of a white over a colored skin is due to religious philosophy or sheer terror can hardly be assessed...

...He was "Blackie" Swart, the Minister of Justice who hires convicts out to farmers and once proudly brandished a cat-o'-nine tails in the House as a warning of what the government intended to do to non-white offenders...

...The opportunity finally arrived with Dr...

...This year the passing of the Industrial Conciliation Act prevents the formation of mixed racial trade unions, encourages such existing unions to split racially, and gives the Minister power to determine what employment each race may engage in...

...Many of the police are semi-literate, and, although they are quite capable of knocking people about, they do not approach the rigid efficiency required for such a system...