BLACK AND WHITE [To the Editor of the Sencravon.]
Sin,--Your reviewer adds fresh distortions to his remarks on my book.
He repeats his complaint (on the title) " Lord Olivier would have us believe that the merry, cheerful Kaffir is a creature sunk in misery, and ignores that his kraal life h happy." Untrue. I said that the Kaffies good humour, easy temper, and sense of the ludicrous 'save South Africa. The point your reviewer burkes is that more than half the natives have been squeezed out of their tribal life and that General. Hertzog's Land Bill aims at expelling from their homes some hundreds of thousands more who can have nowhere to go but the towns.
My title is a cribbed translation. The misfire of South Africa is of the European as well as the black. Is the " poor white " a cheerful product ? Are the natives " seething with discontent " (Smuts) about nothing ?
Admitting " brutal manners " your reviewer admonishes me not to " argue from the particular to this general " or to " bring an indictment against a nation " on the strength of them. This, in the face of page after page on which I make it clear that I deal with their manners merely as symptoms of the deeper disease. I analyse and repeatedly refer to the many South Africans who condemn them and to the kindly disposition of Boer masters. Mr. Rhodes and his companions did not maltreat unoffending servants in order to " intimidate " them, but because they were bullies, and because the slave- State standards of their environment did not restrain them. As to your reviewer's penultimate paragraph, nowhere do I approach recommending that Europeans and Karim should interbreed, or suggest, as he pretends I do, that this would produce " a superior human being."—I am, Sir, &e., Old Hall, Ramsden, Charlbury. (hay! En.
[This correspondence is now closed.---ED. Spectator.]
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