31 JANUARY 1947, Page 14

SOUTH AFRICA AND U.N.O.

SIR,—In your issue of January 24th there is a letter from J. Haarhoff justifying the colour bar in South Africa because of the "primitive savagery " of the natives. He illustrates this savagery with three incidents: one in which a native kills a little girl of seven and two in which houseboys killed their white employers. In our own newspapers of the past few days there has appeared a story of a young girl of ten murdered and left lying outside her own back-door. Also a woman tied her own child naked to a stair banister. A fiancé was shot through a window by his rival. A short while before that, we were reading about a woman beating her perverted husband, dressed in women's clothes and tied to a boiler at his own request. A little earlier than this the columns of our Press were vibrant - with the thrills of the Heath case.

If the natives of South Africa were trained to be literate and to read the British Press they would doubtlessly be writing self-righteous letters to their weekly reviews condemning the primitive savagery of the English, who are influenced by Christianity, and suggesting that England should be put under the rule of the South African natives in order to "give them all facilities for advancement:" If British policy is based on U.N.O. as Mr. Attlee has stated, is it not time that our Governrognt and our Press roundly condemned General Smuts' insulting attitude to U.N.O., reminiscent of Hitler's attitude to the League, and demanded an end to that racial discrimination which is also an essential

ingredient cf Hitlerism?—Yours, &c., PAT SLOAN. Crockham Hill Vicarage Flat, Edenbridge, Kent.