Insight on Africa

...Now, in South African Tragedy: The Life and Times of Jan Hofmeyr, he has given us a great biography that combines the same clarity of style and insight into human emotions with a masterful sense of history...

...Paton does it with the artistry of the skilled novelist...

...More particularly the tragedy is that there was so little constructive effect from his courageous efforts to destroy shibboleths and to point the thinking of South African whites to the ultimate necessity of associating the majority non-whites with the political process...

...This must be why Paton chose to devote so much time and talent to making Hofmeyr known to this generation of South Africans as well as to the vast number outside who will now meet him for the first time...

...Nielsen is President of the African American Institute, which administers the most extensive scholarship programs that bring Africans, including refugees from southern Africa, to this country...

...Both Paton and Nielsen see the need to awaken people to the human values so easily passed over in a milieu of race and color tensions...

...155 pp...

...Waldemar Nielsen in African Battle-line takes another approach to an understanding of South Africa, and tries to make Americans realize that they too have far-reaching policy choices to make in southern Africa...

...Nielsen with a sober, factual marshaling of facts...

...No other book I know takes one so fully into the complicated events, and still more complicated motivations, that form the warp and woof of the South African story...

...Yet there is a sense in which they are both in the same key...

...Reviewed by Gwendolen M. Carter TVTe have long been indebted to Alan Paton for a great novel: Cry, the Beloved Country...

...Yet it is no less true to say that in an extraordinary country Hofmeyr stands out as the major political figure within the white minority who came nearest to seeing what was necessary if South Africa were to take advantage of its rich human resources instead of stultifying so much of them...

...Harper and Row...

...3.50...

...He allowed his extraordinarily dominant mother to mold his domestic life in a way that could not help but warp his character and accentuate the apparent coldness that repelled, or even frightened, so many people...

...More than any other important public figure in South Africa, Hofmeyr struggled to free himself from typical South African attitudes to race and color...

...For that rare group of South Africans who have been aware of the possibilities of putting race relations on a stable basis, and of the failures to take advantage of those possibilities, Paton has provided not only the history of an era, but also a reliving of their own hopes and their despairs...

...It is easy and indeed true to say of Hofmeyr that the phenomenal brilliance that brought him a first class degree and a Rhodes scholarship at fifteen, a professorship at twenty-two, the presidency of Witwatersrand University at twenty-four, and the office of Administrator of the Transvaal at twenty-nine was more administrative than creative...

...Well before white Rhodesians flaunted Great Britain and world opinion, he was pointing out that a battleline exists across the waist of the African continent between the African-controlled countries and those under the dominance of relatively small white minorities that use their political and police power to discriminate against the majority Africans in their countries...

...The tragedy of his life lies partly in the fact that he was never able to do so...

...Perhaps together they can succeed...

...Perhaps Paton may influence more people politically through this book than through his courageous but curbed Liberal Party...

...The two authors and the two books could hardly be more different...

...One hopes so, for time is running out fast...

...Anyone confused about the current Rhodesian situation will do well to read this straightforward, informed account and to ponder seriously Nielsen's warning that if the United States merely follows traditional paths of diplomacy in responding to the potential dynamite in southern Africa, we may impair ourselves as well as fail to avert violence...

...he always remained in second place to Smuts in politics and thus never went quite far enough to provide liberal-minded South Africans with the leadership and direction they needed to become a factor in the South African scene, and he gave Malan's Nationalists the opportunity in 1948 to exaggerate and capitalize on his—to us— mild notion that Africans would in the long run be represented in Parliament by Africans, without ever pushing his approach to its logical conclusions...

...American policy choices in southern africa, by Waldemar A. Nielsen...