Black death
From Dr J. L. Insley Sir: One wearies of Mr Clarke's (November 20) increasingly violent attacks on child care in South Africa and me, but I should appreciate one last opportunity to reply to him.
He cites an infant mortality of 18.7 per cent in the Grahamstown area. Having no medical acquaintance there I cannot comment on this. But I know that when I worked in Zambia the government anti-malnutrition literature acknowledged a 40 per cent mortality, and I saw no reason to quarrel with this. Since then I have worked in a clinic in South West Africa where the African mortality was not significantly different from the European, and my more recent
experience in NW Rhodesia (no apartheid, but tarred with the South African brush) gives an infant mortality of 6.0 per cent. I think it fair to conclude that the basal pre-colonial rate would be higher than any of these, probably in the 50-60 per cent range to account for the pre-colonial absence of a central African population explosion.
Many interpretations can be placed on these figures, but a legitimate though incomplete one could be that (excepting Mr Clarke's anomalous figure) the longer black Africans are exposed to white influences the better it is for their children.
These 'results can be and are being improved, but what I do not see is the relevance to it of militant liberalism. This appears to function by digging up other people's cricket pitches and contributing to the finances of terrorist organisations with jaw-breaking acronymic titles. Its adherents avoid any serious physical danger, being content to drum up vicarious violence by and for others in a curiously Kremlinesque way. They also show little sign of getting themselves appropriately trained to come and help solve the problems they so much deplore. A recent editorial in the Guardian (surely their daily literary diet) referred in another context to "Britain being on the wrong side in the coming 'racial conflict in South Africa," thus begging two questions in one sentence. I see no reason for conflict, unless it be stirred up by such militants from outside, but should it be so stirred I see a disaster for black Africans of unparalleled dimensions, which for their sake I would hope to avoid. These noisy demagogues will improve nothing in Africa. They are an intolerable illiberal bogus irrelevance; away with them. J. L. Insley PO Box 61587, Marshalltown, Transvaal
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