Dr. Malan's Mission By CYRIL RAY I T was in all
innocence, and with the best of intentions, that the Dutch Reformed Church, at its Bloemfontein conference in April, called Dr. Malan's bluff. The Nationalist Party scraped into office in 1948 on its policy of apartheid, and it has passed enough measures since to push racial segregation about as far as segregation can go. Europeans and non-Europeans may not marry (priests who marry them can be jailed and have been fined) ; a new law forbids them extra-marital relations. Every South African's racial descent is to be recorded on his identity card. The Group Areas Act gives the Minister of the Interior power to divide the country into racial zones. Excellent, said the party's spiritual advisers. Excellent ; keep it up. Only total apartheid will do, if white civilisation is to be saved. India was partitioned into India and Pakistan ; now for White South Africa and Bantustan.
Nothing could have been more embarrassing. South Africa's whole economy and social structure—its homes and farms and mines and factories—depend on native labour. An uncomfortable Dr. Malan, invited by General Smuts in the House of Assembly to relate his policy of apartheid to the Dutch Reformed Church's advocacy of total separation, replied that " it is an ideal, but it is not the policy of the Nationalist Party," and was greeted by Opposi- tion cries of " He's coming round at last " and " Come and sit over here, Doctor! "
It was not so absurd an invitation, at that. Outside the Union it is convenient to assume that while Dr. Malan and his Nationalists --the Afrikaners generally—stand for reaction, republicanism and racial repression, the largely English-speaking United Party is the repository of sweetness, light and liberalism. It is an assumption that a visit to the Union makes it impossible to maintain. The Nationalists are an agrarian party, looking back wistfully to the days before the mines and the towns lured the cheap native labour away from their farms. The United Party—and the division follows closely that between Boer and Briton—are business-men and indus- trialists. They do not like the African in the towns, but they need him there.
The Nationalists are illiberal in their native policy ; the United Party only potentially liberal. The Afrikaner farmer has most to gain by driving the African out of the town and back into the reserves ; the English-speaking townsman has most to lose— physically and economically—if repression harasses the African into violence or into the withdrawal of his labour. Neither Boer nor Briton, neither the Nationalists nor the United Party, has the slightest intention or inclination to give the African equal social, political or economic rights, and to this extent both parties and both peoples are in complete accord with the Dutch Reformed Church: "No equality between black and white in Church or State." - It needs a group-psychologist, not a reporter, to assess and explain the complex of fear, pride, prejudice and hatred (in both white men and black) that bedevils race relationships in South Africa. All the reporter can do is to note how far all these factors exceed what he had previously read and. heard about. To note, above all, the irrationality. A Johannesburg woman returned un- expectedly early to her Hollywood-hybrid suburban house to find that the Basuto house-boy who should have been Hoover- ing the sitting-room carpet was asleep in a sitting-room chair. How, she wailed to her neighbour, how could she ever sit in that chair again ? Yet the same house-boy, or his sister or his cousin, prepares her food, makes her bed, nurses her children. There were angry and bewildered questions in the House when European and non-European . Girl Guides (or were they Brownies ?) appeared. together in Press photographs of the rally that greeted Lady Baden- Powell. Is it for this that we educate Kaffir children ?
At the Baragwanath Non-European Hospital there are a dozen European nursing sisters on the teaching staff and some eighty-odd African nurses under training. The African girls (and it was a concession that had to be battled for) were allowed the use of the swimming-bath—built when it was a British Army hospital—for a year ; the Europeans had it for the following year. I knew better than to ask, in South Africa, why they couldn't all use it together, but I did ask why they couldn't use it on alternate days, thus respecting the local prejudices. What made me think, was the reply, that a question as stupid as that showed any knowledge of local prejudices ?
This is the country where Jews speak of Africans as Hitler used to speak of the Jews. " How would you like a Kaffir doctor to examine your wife ? " a Johannesburg Jew asked me, and in the tone of one who had produced the final, incontrovertible, knock- you-down answer to all my nonsense about educating the African. Yet it is only fair to say that there is probably a higher proportion of liberals—in the racial sense—among South Africa's Jews than in any other Eurottan group ; and to add that to most white South Africans " liberal " is a term of abuse, usually linked with " Communist," and that many Afrikaners do not consider Jews as being white themselves. When you enter South Africa you fill in a form which asks whether you are European, Asiatic or Hebrew. This has been so since General Hertzog's day, and many Jews fear that when Dr. Malan proclaims his Republic they will find them- selves discriminated against as second-class citizens.
The effects of racial discrimination are as startling as its mani- festations. Two-and-a-half million whites deliberately deny them- selves the co-operation of their ten million black and coloured countrymen, and try to run on their own a country the size of Western Europe. There is not enough ability to go round, and South Africa is administered with an inefficiency that it would be hard to match outside the Balkans or the Near East—where in- efficiency is, at any rate, tempered by the good manners of an old civilisation. The Government has few of the statistics that are readily available in any European country, or it has lost them, or it hasn't got round to tabulating them. Appointments aren't kept ; letters are lost ; you find officials in a cable office in Johannesburg who don't know where Paris is, and the girl at the Cape Town General Post Office not only doesn't know the airmail postage to England, but doesn't care.
A ruling minority that denies democratic rights to its fellows becomes indifferent to the loss of its own. Overseas Press messages are interfered with, and the Government proposes an official control of the Press at home ; the South African Broadcasting Corporation trims its news bulletins to the wishes of the Government of the day ; the Minister of the Interior decides which South African may travel abroad and which may not ;' and the advice of the Public Service Commission has been flouted ten times in a year in the interests of the same political jobbery that got rid of such public servants as the Chief of the General Staff and the general manager of the State railways.
It is easy to understand the South African's impatience with the windy and woolly-minded Western .,liberalism that would solve all racial problems by giving every man a vote. Very few Africans are fit to vote. But suggest that those few that are ready for it should be given it, so that the others may hope ; suggest that even those Africans that aren't ready for a vote are more than ready for decent housing, elementary education and a measure of human dignity, and you are asked, " How would you like your daughter to marry a black man ? "
Every form of racial discrimination, from the provision of separate counters for black and white in the post offices to threaten- ing nearly half a million Indians with repatriation, is in the sacred cause of saving white civilisation. There is more to civilisation than the minor arts of life—more even than the creative arts—but the visitor cannot help noticing that this country that calls so often on white civilisation is far less civilised than, say, Brazil, which has mixed its blood and yet produced a rich Latin culture of its own. That when lively contemporary South African paintings were chosen for the Venice Biennale they were condemned in every Afrikaans newspaper as " unfit to represent South African art " because they reflected " an unmistakable likeness to Bushman art and the primi- tive paintings of the Bantu " ; that this is the country—to turn to the art of living—which grows fine fruit and good wine, but lives on beefsteaks, bottled sauces and bad brandy ; and where not even the biggest town, with a European population of a third of a million, has a permanent professional theatre.
That town—Johannesburg, the golden city—has one of the loveliest climates in the world, and is dead after dark because the white man will not sit in cafes or stroll the streets for fear of the African denizens of the shanty towns that surround it—slums so vile that the city's own Chamber of Commerce estimates that it would cost twenty-two million pounds to make them habitable. Johannesburg is the centre, summit and glory of the white civilisa- tion that South Africa struggles so cruelly to save: it can boast the physical profile and spiritual achievements of a small Middle- Western boom town, the amenities and amusements of Leeds on -a wet Sunday night, and is haunted, like everywhere else in the Union, by the fears and hatreds and shames that once stalked Hitler's Germany.
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