Tennis balls, my liege
Sir: As one who has lived in South Africa a good deal longer than Mr Douglas Brown, I found his 'Tennis balls, my liege' (4 April) not only well below the standard of his writings in that country, but a depressing variation of that old defence of evil: if you can't punish all criminals, you shouldn't punish any. Further, Mr Brown destroys his own arguments.
He loudly criticises British prelates for protesting against South African racialism in sport—but then claims that sanctions, the alternative, must inevitably 'turn southern Africa into a graveyard' (so any kind of protest against racism is anathema).
He thinks it frivolous—'even blasphemous' —publicly to associate anti-racist principles 'almost exclusively with sporting fixtures', but ignores the historical fact that in 1936, those who publicly protested against the racist Nazi Olympics similarly stood accused, but at least helped to draw world attention to the less sporting aspects of racial insanity. And he misleads your readers by claiming that the only kind of legal protest open to white South Africans is 'purely verbal'—the alternative being 'attempting to pull down the state edifice by force'. (This is exactly the argument put forward by defenders of Ger- man Nazism, be it noted.) In fact, in South Africa there is also the protest of the ballot box. There is, too, the silent but useful protest of the tiny Black Sash movement—in actively helping the vic- tims of apartheid pick their way through the legal trickeries of its Nuremberg Laws.
But there is another protest. I made R- and so can any sincere white South African sportsman. As chairman of a whites-only welfare group with high-sounding multiracial 'principles', I resigned, making clear my reasons, when I found their hypocrisy im- pregnable. Today, they help non-whites. And I also resigned (to no avail) as a Foundation Member of the South African Sappers Association when it became clear that their discrimination against their non- white wartime comrades was to continue, and indeed increase.
If you will not stand up at all for your principles, it is, I think, rather obvious that you have none. For even partial protest is .abetter than nothing.
L. Clarke Clients Mail Dept, Bank of NSW, 9 Sackville Street, London wl
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