SOUTH AFRICA RUNS AGAINST THE TIDE

...Today the government has everything under control—except the aims and aspirations of its ten million black people held in abject bondage...

...This will sound surprising only to distant observers who cannot see below the surface of political appearances which put the mine owners firmly in the British conservative tradition and the Afrikaners just as firmly outside it...

...It is hemmed on three sides by the seas, and its neighbors on its northern border are the Portuguese colonies and Southern Rhodesia, areas which are more backward and less mature than the Union itself, and as closely controlled by rulers determined to defend white supremacy...

...Among the innumerable laws are some designed to prevent any unofficial contact between black people and white...

...H« writes for several British and South African publications...

...It has an inherent strength which has hitherto enabled it to ride out all storms...

...Interracial activity of any type, never strong at the best of times, has today ebbed lower than ever before...

...Like the mine owners, who recruit 90,000 laborers annually in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, the farmers have secured government sanction for the use of labor from neighboring British territories to eke out the labor supply from the tribal areas...

...You cannot easily find an industrialist or a big commercial entrepreneur in any South African city who would be ready to snap his fingers at the well-organized pressure group known as "the Chamber of Mines...

...He has been one of the leading lawyers for the defense throughout the marathon treason trial...

...In these circumstances you would expect to find at least one political party boldly sponsoring the claims and promoting the interests of businessmen who have both feet in the Twentieth Century...

...Partly, too, the absence of such a confident belief is a matter of sheer numbers...

...True, there is a sort of African middle class—consisting mainly of teachers, preachers, and clerks—ready to lead peasants and factory workers out of the wilderness and towards the promised land of good hope...

...It is this deepening poverty that lies behind the repeated recent demonstrations of rural discontent in Pondoland, Seku-kuniland, Zeerust, and Zululand— peasant revolts which are soon put down by a government with plenty of practice in the ruthless application of military force...

...So, few in Johannesburg were surprised by the Bar Council's choice...

...The authorities, realizing that ideas are dangerous things, do all they can to make it impossible for white liberals of any shade of opinion to meet middle-class Africans capable of acquiring a degree of political sophistication...

...By contrast, the Union of South Africa is virtually an island...

...Ideas are alive, but there is no means of translating them into political action...

...Foreigners find it hard to realize that the more South Africa changes, the more it remains the same...

...His grandfather was prime minister of the state when it was a British colony before joining the Union...

...Brought to the mines under contracts carrying penal sanctions for deserters, these migrant laborers are housed and fed in compounds during their period of work, which averages fourteen months, before they go back to their tribal homes for a rest...

...By a strange irony, the dissolution of the party was the prelude to a growth of radical thought...

...The only country in the continent which presents a true comparison is Algeria, where the Algerians form about ninety per cent of the whole population...

...It currently appears every week, and it is still widely read by Africans and Indians...

...Intellectually, from five to ten per cent of adult Africans could perhaps be described as above the literacy line in any modest political sense...

...This helps to explain why there is no revolution around the corner in South Africa...

...Applying this test to South Africa, an observer must report, first, that politically the Africans have not attained the suffrage nor is there the slightest prospect that they will in the foreseeable future...

...In a sense the attempt has come too late...

...So although the mine owners do not openly support the Nationalists, they will never oppose the present or any other government as long as it does not interfere with mining...

...The main reason is simple: African miners are forbidden to organize labor unions—unlike their immediate bosses, the white miners, one-tenth of their number, who have won high wages through their powerful union...

...It is, however, necessary to recall that even in the "good old days," long before the present repressive government came to power thirteen years ago, Africans showed themselves weak in political organization...

...Communism as a creed was outlawed more than ten years ago...

...It was merely illuminated for an hour when the Progressive Party was formed in 1959—a party which owes much of its inspiration as well as its financing to Harry Oppenheimer, the politically influential chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa, the mining and investment giant...

...Certainly it has a better balanced and more intelligently conducted economy than has any other area in the continent...

...Yet it is hard to kill ideas by law...

...So old and deeply entrenched is this anti-union tradition that it is challenged by hardly anyone...

...Returning to his own country, he built up a lucrative law practice and became a Queen's Counsel long ago...

...to think in terms of an imminent collapse of the economy is foolish...

...Citizens with long memories know that the problems under public discussion today are in essence much the same as they have been for the last thirty years...

...JULIUS LEWIN is on the faculty of the University flf Wltwatersrand in Johannesburg...

...This weakness is in part caused by the absence in South Africa to this day of the buoyant feeling that has driven Africans everywhere in British and French territories to act—and to suffer—in the belief that the future is theirs for the taking...

...The world beyond the Limpopo river, the Union's northern frontier, has changed and moved forward, but the Union and its peoples have, through a combination of unique and complex circumstances, moved backwards, away from the rights of man and the equality of races...

...And the presence of 500,000 Indians and 1,500,000 "colored" people—those of mixed descent—is a further complication...

...But the two factions share a common interest in pressing on successive governments one vital demand—the maintenance of the supply of cheap black labor...

...Bram" himself was a Rhodes scholar who acquired his left-wing outlook at Oxford in the 1930's...

...Their best friends among the white people—those in the small Liberal and Progressive parties—have been arguing with one another for years the question of how and by what stages to reach the ultimate goal of universal adult suffrage...

...By restricting civil rights severely, the government has created a legal wilderness, but no one can call it racial peace...

...No textbook of political science describes how revolution or even radical reform can come to a country in South Africa's peculiar position...

...When this is pointed out, Africans who resent any criticism will in reply indignantly enumerate the harsh laws which reduce political activity, when it is permitted at all, to a formality...

...In any case, Africans as a whole are not much given to reading—they prefer talking—and when New Age is finally suppressed after the new, more drastic Censorship Bill is passed during this current (1961) session of parliament, there will be little in the way of radical literature for them to read...

...Yet the persistence of controversy does not by any means add up to a prospect of fundamental change, such as foreign visitors are inclined to believe "inevitable...

...He receives briefs both from big mining corporations and from small left-wing attorneys...

...But national finances are directed by able and shrewd minds not under any illusions...

...From its inception gold mining has depended on the recruitment of an army of unskilled African laborers, numbering nearly 400,000...

...The fact to be recognized is that the new republic, to be inaugurated on May 31, 1961, is the oldest and strongest state in Africa...

...Other white members, however, were free to join, or indirectly to try to influence, other organizations such as the small left-wing Congress of Democrats which was born during the campaign of passive resistance in 1952 and which is still alive...

...Whether the control measures adopted will restore the position, no one can yet tell...

...After the great "emergency" last year, it was significant that the president of the Chamber of Mines was able to assure assembled shareholders that the actual operations of the mines—as distinct from the falling value of shares on the stock exchange—had not been disturbed for a day by the great upheaval...

...and now many of its adherents would say that New Age serves their purpose well enough...

...It is, of course, in the cities that one would most expect to see the signs of resistance to policies that deprive the people of all hope...

...Gold mining is the big key industry which British capital has long organized on efficient and highly profitable lines...

...Some of the former party members, like Fischer, were, however, forced to retire from active politics because they were personally prohibited by law from attending meetings of any kind, even private committee meetings...

...They have long felt the heavy weight of white settlement and white culture imposed on them, and, indeed, accepted by them for nearly a hundred years...

...At this point in any assessment of the situation, those who predict the overthrow of the government raise the question of international pressure...

...Entry into and exit from the Union is fairly effectively closed...

...Both these bodies were outlawed last year...

...When Africans do escape to freedom abroad, they never return because they have committed a crime in leaving the country without a passport...

...But Abram Fischer, the chairman of the Bar Council, was officially listed as a Communist years ago, and he will tell you, with his charming smile, that he has no reason to hide the fact...

...To account for its absence, one would again have to trace the pervasive influence of the mine owners...

...This is just one example of the many paradoxes that appear in the public life of a country deeply divided among races and creeds...

...Although the party had been small and sectarian, it had exercised a certain influence, mainly through its weekly paper New Age (formerly The Guardian), which was published without interruption until the law suspended it during the five-months' national emergency last year...

...Yet grounds for criticism are not wanting...

...and they are heartened by outspoken support from white liberals at home and echoes of their demands from abroad...

...But this development has never occurred...

...Today there is no effective African organization to resist the government or even to express African opinion on the events of the day...

...Although Americans may rub their eyes on reading this fact, it was not considered sufficiently newsworthy to be reported in any daily newspaper in the Union of South Africa...

...To do so ] ays handsomely...

...In its ranks, however, there are all too few with the kind of competence required to organize a political movement in the face of formidable obstacles...

...Neither party has yet won a single seat in any elected council, not even municipal or provincial...

...each pulls in a different direction, but whatever happens, the blanket does not collapse...

...The internal supply has fallen because the great growth of modern industry competes with the old feudal system of farming and mining...

...In the last three years some peasant leaders have been banished to isolated places and others have been imprisoned...

...Industry today contributes to the national income more than the other two activities combined...

...What did affect the economic situation was the world's reaction to the shooting at Sharpeville in March, 1960, the affair which triggered off the emergency...

...For one thing, it extends into the editorial offices of every English-language daily newspaper and, as a result, no murmur of criticism of this enormous industry ever appears in print...

...Moreover, it must be remembered that in their struggle for self-government the Algerians have received arms and other forms of aid from neighboring states which speak the same language and which have already gained their own freedom from foreign rule...

...whole areas have been sealed off by the police to prevent any contact with urban "agitators" of any race or creed...

...He was one of a capable group of middle-class professional men—lawyers, doctors, architects, lecturers, and others—who led the party with much more skill, patriotism, and detachment from Moscow than other English-speaking Communist parties showed...

...of one million people accepts he values and opinions ap-provec by the mining industry...

...At their second conference late in 1960, they approved a long list of basic human rights, but the right to form labor unions was missing from the list...

...The answer is "not much," measured in terms of possible deep changes in racial policy...

...Moreover, they are getting poorer with every passing year because their desperately small incomes are diminishing in relation to rising prices in the shops and the declining fertility of their overcrowded lands...

...All the white people, including the Afrikaner semi-skilled workmen, have shared in this prosperity and so, to a lesser extent, have urban (but not rural) Africans...

...The domestic accum ilation of capital has risen by leaps ; nd bounds in the last twenty years, during which South Africa's rate of economic growth has been among the highest in the world...

...The whole English-speaking com-munit...

...Picture four firemen holding a blanket taut...

...Mounting opposition to the Afrikaners' vicious racial policy within the United Nations is not likely to elicit a response from South Africa other than a further withdrawal to a still more isolated and lonely position...

...Fischer was an active member of the Communist Party of South Africa from 1937 until it was dissolved in 1950...

...Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's recent decision to withdraw from the British Commonwealth of Nations rather than temper his government's severe racial policies was met with dismay by many South Africans, but the decision was never for a moment susceptible to serious challenge...

...His father was a judge of the Supreme Court in the Orange Free State, the least free of all the states of the Union of South Africa...

...There are already too many educated Africans and Indians who know, however vaguely in many instances, what is going on at the United Nations and in the rest of Africa...

...In the forty-eight years of its existence, from 1912 until 1960, the African National Congress never seriously attempted to produce a journal of its own...

...Here again, however, the secret political police (known as "the special branch") regard eternal vigilance as the price to be paid for the suppression of all civil liberty...

...Accordingly, a ferment of controversy does continue in the press, even if it is kept to rather abstract terms...

...It was an American radical, Walter Weyl, who pointed out long ago that "a class, to be effective either for revolt or reform, has to be economically above the poverty line, intellectually above the literacy line, and politically above the suffrage line...

...Nor have the boycotts organized in Britain yet made any perceptible impact on this prosperity, except possibly on limited interests such as fruit exports...

...It is, indeed, a serious libel to call any man a Communist because it would imply that he should be put under the heavy legal disabilities which the law can impose on Communists...

...Standing squarely behind the Nationalist Party, the rich white land owners complain, like the mine owners, of a chronic shortage of labor...

...Similarly, South Africa is sustained by an uneasy balance of forces...

...Their low wages, averaging sixty cents a day, do not keep pace with the cost of living or even with minimum family needs...

...Capital from overseas, which had already been slowing down, not only ceased to flow into the country but began to retreat in dismay...

...Interracial tensions are painfully obvious, but tensions alone do not transform a country or produce social change...

...They know that even a cautious plan to extend the franchise to allow Africans to become, say, even five per cent of the total electorate is enough to wreck the chances of any white Liberal or Progressive candidate seeking election to parliament...

...When the Progressives debated their program at their inaugural congress, they were careful to exclude unskilled Africans from those entitled to form free labor unions...

...When Africans did learn,, in the 1950's, to take an alert interest in politics, they turned to the old-established African National Congress and, after 1958, to a rival body, the new Pan-Africanist Congress...

...It is their financial houses which have provided a substantial part of the capital available for other enterprises...

...The influence of the mine owners reaches far beyond mining...

...In their rather silent and faceless, but wide-awake, fashion, the mine owners can indeed be regarded as partners of the ruling Afrikaner Nationalists...

...In one way or another these men keep on demanding human rights and the redress of human wrongs...

...Furthermore, South Africa has chosen to isolate itself politically as well as geographically...

...Originally a poor agricultural community, South Africa began to develop seventy-five years ago when its rich resources of diamonds and gold were first opened up...

...It is, of course, evident that every year international pressure on South Africa is becoming heavier, but what actual effect can it have on the balance of forces inside the country...

...Even in its heyday, the Communist Party never attracted many African members...

...No country in the world has such a network of restrictive laws, as evidenced by the recent publication of a book containing merely the text of these urban laws which runs to a thousand pages embodying a million words...

...Fischer comes from an old and respected Afrikaner family...

...Of the fifteen million people in South Africa, Africans constitute only two-thirds, a proportion considerably smaller than in any other African country...

...They have, for instance, never published a weekly, or even a monthly, newspaper...

...Economically, the Africans on the white farms and those in the tribal reservations—together numbering two-thirds of the total population—are wretchedly poor...

...The nation's foreign reserve funds sank by fifty per cent to a dangerously low level...