Centrepiece
Bogus and real guilt
Colin Welch
With all my heart I wish the English rugger players an enjoyable and suc- cessful tour of South Africa. 1 hope their form and fun will not be spoilt by the heavy burden of bogus guilt which humbugs have tried to load upon them. It is sad that the tour should be preceded by such torrents of hypocrisy and that it may have conse- quences far-reaching, ludicrous and vex- atious. But the blame for these conse- quences will lie, not with the rugger players, but exclusively with windbags and agitators who advocate and organise such an out- come. Perhaps from all the fuss and furore sense will eventually emerge. Why should the rugger men not go? Is it because South Africa is a specially or uni- quely horrible society and that to play rug- ger with it is in some way to endorse and Condone it? South Africa is doubtless a flawed and cruelly distorted society, but it is not specially or uniquely so in degree, even if it is in kind. Blacks and coloured people are denied many rights and privileges we h. ere think they should have, but no more in fact rather less — than are denied to all subjects of communist tyrannies with which we happily play games. Indeed, unless memory errs, the fatuous former Sports minister Howell had to hurry home from a football match in Russia, probably against one of the Dynamo (i.e. secret Police) teams, hypocritically to condemn
me Previous attempt to play tiddlywinks m the Transvaal.
Nor is South Africa especially horrible compared to most of the rest of Africa, with which it would always be fairer to ,c.°InPare it. Almost everywhere to the north one-party tyrannies, muzzled and lawless, without genuine newspapers or Judges in which essential services are breaking down, in which mad dictators, Mass deportations, starvation, bloody ups brutal oppression, wars and Massacres are commonplace. Yes, real Massacres amounting to near genocide, in which thousands are butchered for every one African shot at Sharpeville by an inex- P.erienced police officer who, suddenly el,,eni.ed tear gas by a moral gesture of the who had previously supplied it, lost his head, fired on a retreating mob and was _severely censured. And real famines: it is tYpical that the egregious 'Sunny' Ram- Phal,. one of South Africa's most voluble enemies, should come from Guyana, where right to eat is among all the other rights there extinguished. Self-government, they say, is better than 8.13.9.d government. The choice for most Africans is not between these two, but bet- ween tyrants black or white, the latter arguably less cruel and incompetent than many of the former. South Africa crams its blacks into sterile homelands. The saintly idealist Nyerere brutally uproots his peasan- try and drives it by force into collective ujamaa villages, with misery and want the result. Which is worse? From the hell of South Africa we would expect an exodus of blacks to kinder climes. The reverse is the case. Blacks pour into South Africa, legally and illegally, seeking what they lack elsewhere, bread and work. They vote for South Africa with their feet.
What disgusts most people about South Africa is that a vast black majority is denied all political rights by a white minority. How can this be right? Right it may not be; understandable it should be; and the actual presence, survival and relative prosperity of this majority is surely one of South Africa's redeeming glories, though it is not often seen as such. Look at some of those who try to make South Africa bear the sins of the world, America, Australia and Tasmania for in- stance. What has happened to the Red In- dians and aboriginals there? So far from forming a majority in Tasmania, the original inhabitants were exterminated, a denial of rights more savage than any in South Africa. From the top of what piles of bones and degradation do white humbugs elsewhere lecture the South Africans, who, by omitting to massacre the blacks, by in- creasing their numbers by food and medical care, and by attracting more in from out- side, have nurtured that majority and made themselves thereby outcasts! Look at ourselves too. Coloured people constitute a mere four per cent of our population, and see what a clamour about ethnic problems and racial discrimination, 'rivers of blood' and 'swamping' they have set off, what fears and hatreds! In South Africa the blacks outnumber the whites by more than five to one. Would we be so liberal there?
But surely South Africa belongs to the blacks? Well, historically it belonged perhaps to the few indigenous bushmen, who were overwhelmed (yes, perhaps to a great extent massacred) by simultaneous waves of Bantu from the north and whites from the south. But as elsewhere the rights of the vanished vanished with them. To which invaders then does South Africa belong? The blacks might assert rights of ownership over a South Africa as they found it and as it might well have remained had the whites not arrived too — a South Africa of marauding nomads and hunters, of scratchers and destroyers of the soil. But South Africa as it exists, with its mines and industries, its rich farms, its roads and railways, its great cities, its public works and services, order and administration, its vast wealth, is surely the property of those who created it and their heirs.
Not only do they own it: they are also responsible for it, answerable in a very real and precise sense for the discharge of their trust. They may govern South Africa well or ill; their rule may well be more rough and harsh than it need be. But outnumbered as they are, and oppressed in consequence by fear, they find themselves in a hideous dilemma. Some advocate reform, some fur- ther repression: both courses present terri- ble dangers. Relaxation of existing controls may encourage, as tightening may provoke, the explosion which could mean the end of white society in South Africa. Increasing black prosperity, together with the increas- ing breakdown of apartheid, only increase expectations and thus dangers.
No wonder many white South Africans are paralysed by doubts, while others hesitantly walk a tightrope, with trifling reforms on the one hand balancing con- tinued repression on the other. They know in their hearts that a major mistake would be fatal. Even where it is denied, democracy exists always everywhere in posse if not in esse. It stands ready in South Africa, knife in hand, terribly to punish those who make unwise concessions to it or govern with in- tolerable harshness or both. To it white South Africans are already answerable, whether they like it or not.
From a safe distance the whole liberal world offers them high-minded advice. Most of this would only make sense if liberals could guarantee, after the major upheaval in the South African power struc- ture which they advocate, that the new state of affairs would be better for all than the old. How can they guarantee this, with the rest of Africa to mock them? Their advice would only be responsible if they too were ultimately affected by its unforeseeable con- sequences.
If the critics are in earnest they should go with the rugger team to South Africa, but stay there, live there, put their necks where their mouths are, and undergo personally whatever catastrophes they think appro- priate for others.
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