5 SEPTEMBER 1958, Page 6

A Spectator's Notebook

MERE ARE all sorts of apartheid. 'Baasskap' is at one end of the scale —crude, ugly, unapologetic. Then, in the lumpish middle, come a thousand excuses and equivocations reflecting all conceivable colour-bar attitudes. And, at the other end, comes Hendrik Verwoerd. Or that, I gather, is where he would like to be, one of the intellectual apartheiders who sincerely believe that there is a practical and moral solution to the problem in the physical separation of the races, and in their 'separate but parallel' development. But under the hard pressures of practical politics Dr. Verwoerd has had to temper his idealism. He and his house- hold—he is a father of seven—once dispensed with African servants just to show how it was done; but politically he has to give ground before labour-hungry industry and agriculture, whose demands just cannot be reconciled with complete apartheid schemes.

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