SOUTH AFRICA JANUS

By G. H. CALPIN Durban,

IT was interesting for some of us in South Africa to see the reactions of the British Press to the news that Dr. Malan accepted the invitation to the Commonwealth Conference, particularly so after the comments of various papers on his victory at the General Election.

For many years people in Britain have looked at South Africa in the face of General Smuts (at home he will never be known as Field-Marshal) and have found it a pleasing sight. But South Africa, Janus-like, has two faces, and in 1948, as a result of the General Election, they were called on to look at us in the face of Dr. Malan. By all accounts the prospect was one of unrelieved gloom. There were forebodings of disaster, of legislating out of the Commonwealth, and of near-Nazi oppression of Native majorities and of Asiatic minorities. It was reported here that on the dismissal of General Smuts Mr. Churchill wept ; and that on the advent of Dr. Malan a few Englishmen, proposing flight hither from the disciples of Socialism, cancelled their passages. All the more then were a few of us agreeably impressed by the recent change in news- paper headlines.

It is a very desirable change. The possibilities of misunder- standing are limitless, and one of the gravest errors some British newspapers have committed is to represent Dr. Malan, his Cabinet and his policy as contradictions of all things British and democratic. It is an excusable error, for many English-speaking South Africans, especially in the predominantly-British province, Natal, were equally dismayed, convinced that the Nationalist party would rapidly turn the country into a republic on the Hitler model. Some of them also have changed their opinions. They have decided that the Nationalists are not so bad in office as they threatened to be out of office. The older ones among them recall that Dr. Malan was Minister of Education from 1924 to 1933, a period fruitful in legislative measures designed to establish Afrikaners and British on terms of strict equality. Those whose memories are long recall that Dr. Malan was the first editor of Die Burger, the Afrikaans daily founded by General Hertzog, and today the most influential newspaper on the Nationalist side.

Dr. Malan's colleagues now are younger men without his Minis- terial experience, but among them he counts Mr. Eric Louw, already known in Europe as High Commissioner at Paris and, more recently, notable for his spirited defence of South Africa before the United Nations. Then there is Dr. T. E. Donges, Minister of Interior, who possesses gifts of speech commensurate with gifts of statesmanship, and one or two others like Mr. Havenga and Dr. Jansen, who are held in high esteem. These men will be found to be personally likable And, for the business of the conference, behind their Prime Minister in his tasks.

This is not said to defend Nationalist policy. What is important to all concerned is that the people of Britain should be better informed of the character and the philosophy of Nationalist leaders in South Africa. They have had a bad Press overseas, a fact which is deplored by thoughtful English-speaking South Africans, and there is a danger that the distortions of the Press will crystallise in the British mind as polite hostility, and that, at this end, much unnecessary harm will be done as a result.

The Nationalists have been accused of a certain touchiness at the point of criticism, and there is no doubt that some of the younger men react quickly to rebuke ; one wonders, however, whether Afrikaners are any quicker on the trigger than anyone else when they are misrepresented abroad. It is with misrepresentation that the Nationalists have to deal overseas, and it is not surprising that, since they follow so powerful a figure as General Smuts, their anxiety for their own reputation abroad is a little clumsy.

It was an Afrikaner statesman who, before the war, remarked that

South African problems do not lend themselves to the solutions of Europe. This is a hard saying which has too often been interpreted overseas as South Africa's excuse for witholding from subject races the gifts of freedom. There is no doubt that too many of us do

explain away conduct which does not meet with the approval of observers by insisting that South Africa is different. But when all proper weight is given to these considerations which, by the way, are quoted by the British as relevant to problems in colonial Africa, the remark contains a substratum of truth recognised even by those few liberals in South Africa who marched under the banner of the gallant Mr. J. H. Hofmeyr.

It is seldom instructive to judge a whole philosophy by the slogan which describes it for popular consumption. Slogans obviate the

necessity for thought and study. The Nationalists' slogan apart- heid is a case in point. During the war the Malanites became the Malanazis ; after the war apartheid became aparthate, carrying sinister intent for all and sundry inside the country and destroying confidence abroad. Apartheid has been represented not as a policy but as a threat, not as a philosophy but as a plot. The responsibility for this misrepresentation cannot be apportioned. The point is that as a result of many things, including the wai record of, the Nationalists but not excluding the propaganda of their opponents, people abroad have gained a distorted view of Nationalist intentions.

In effect the philosophy of apartheid is not far removed from the philosophy of General Smuts. It is the concept of separation and race-identity which in his domestic policy General Smuts has advanced for the territorial design of the country, and which finds many an echo in the non-European mind. No one who sat through the sittings of the judicial commission of inquiry into the recent race riots in Durban, and heard the evidence of Zulu chiefs and spokes- men, could fail to appreciate the profound desire for a review of their status and condition. The central theme of their evidence was the need for a just and faithful policy of separation in territory where, to the extent that modern industrialisation permits, they can serve and be served by their own people. This was the theme emphasised also by the Natal Post-War Works and Reconstruction Commission, a body appointed during the war at the express wish of General Smuts. This Commission visualised the racial zoning of the province, each with a measure of local autonomy and each to a large extent self-serving, if not self-sufficient.

Such, all too briefly, is the meaning of apartheid in the territorial scene. There are many other aspects of it, and one in particular where the two political parties diverge. One of them, no doubt the cause of some misgiving overseas, is the nature of political representation. On this subject it is more difficult to convince members of a homogeneous society like Britain of the peculiar complexities of the South African problem, and space does not permit a detailed analysis of the policy of the Nationalists. That policy is based on the preservation of white civilisation, as distinct from western civilisation, which is the issue exercising the British mind. In this respect Dr. Malan does not differ from General Smuts. The conflict arises on the methods to be adopted in the pursuit of this aim.

At the moment political representation of non-Europeans is selec- tive. The coloured community, largely congregated in the Cape Province, enjoy the parliamentary franchise on the common roll with Europeans. The Natives 'are represented in the House of Assembly by three Europeans. The Indians have no representation at all. In the absence of war, parliamentary majorities in South Africa are invariably small, and it is conceivable that, were Indians also represented by three Europeans, as was proposed in the 1946 Asiatic Act, a bloc of six members, privileged in the sense that they would not be responsible to the electorate at general elections, could reverse the decision of the country. The experience is that the representatives of the Natives vote with the United Party. It is to avoid this, and to postpone the day when non-Europeans will have direct representation in Parliament, that the Nationalists hope to abolish the present system.

To quote this example is nqt necessarily to approve of Rather is it to suggest that the political idiom of the Nationalists in South Africa deserves more study than it is receiving, and that nothing is to be gained but much lost, in our Commonwealth

relations, by uninformed and casual dismissal of Dr. Malan and his associates as disciples of Hitler. Democracy takes many shapes and forms, as witness its practice in America and Britain, and there is nothing to forbid a contribution to democratic life in South Africa through the principles which imbue Dr. Malan's philosophy. Indeed, it may well be that this small country, with its manifold problems, having already given so much to the common weal in the services of the great Afrikaners, such as Botha and Smuts, may, in this more dangerous age, have something to offer of which we can be genuinely proud.