A Spectator's Notebook
The Relief of Mafekeng
THERE are two men above all with whom I would not like to exchange jobs. The first is the man at the White City grey- hound stadium whose job it is to walk round, carrying a dust- . pan and brush, behind the dogs when they are paraded before a race. Whenever, in the parade, one of the dogs stops to relieve itself, this attend- ant stoops to remove any solids it may leave behind, lest when the race is being run a dog should trip or skid.
The other man whose job I do not want is Mr. A. W. Steward, Director of Information at South Africa House. Mr. Steward's task is almost ex- actly the same as that of the man at the White City. Whenever the South African Government is paraded before the world, his task is to walk round behind it with a dustpan and brush, sweeping up its dropping's, lest it should subsequently trip or skid on them. The only difference I can see be- tween the two men, in fact, is that the man at the White City is doing a perfectly honourable, though lowly and possibly humiliating, job, while the man at the White State is doing, no doubt with sincerity and to the best of his ability, a job which is fundamentally shameful.
This week Mr. Steward is plying his dustpan in the correspondence columns of the Spectator (page 672), and very badly he is doing it, too. Mr. Ronald Segal's article in last week's Spectator, which gave some of the background of the Mrs. Mafekeng case, is of course unanswerable. There is no defence, outside the mentality of a Himmler, for a regime that can without any recourse to law give a mother of eleven children five days to leave a home that she had lived in for thirty-two years, to say goodbye, possibly for ever, to her husband and ten of her children, and go off to a concen- tration camp; and all without any possibility of appeal or legal stay, which indeed are specifically forbidden to her. Mr. Steward cannot pretend that Mrs. Mafekeng was ordered to the Southey con- centration camp for a rest cure, nor that she was a menace to good order and government, nor that this would be appropriate punishment if she had been, nor that the riots which have been going on for sonic days now in Paarl (her home town) are the work of 'trouble-makers.' Mr. Steward has no answer to the other cases—some of them even more shocking than that of Mrs. Mafekeng—that
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