Essays in Contempt

By KENNETH

tin treatment of the non-whites and what %.../ we have done for them so far give irrefut- able proof that our Christian faith runs counter to oppression,' said the Minister of DefenCe, Mr. Fouche, recently.

That made me think of Mrs. Beatrice Manjati. On April I she was leaving Nyanga township in a friend's car to take her. sick baby to hospital when they were stopped by a naval detachment guarding the gate. Afte- a minor misunderstand- ing a shot was fired—'an uncalled-for shot,' according to the inquest magistrate last week— and the baby was killed. It was Mrs. Manjati's third child. The first two died in infancy. This one was called Mosuli, which means in Xhosa, 'He who wipes away the tears.'

This sort of thing can happen anywhere. But what disturbs me is that since April 1 Mrs. Manjati has had no apology, no offer of com- pensation, no communication of any sort from the Navy, from Mr. Fouche's Defence Depart- ment or from anyone in authority. If this is not oppression, it certainly betrays an un-Christian contempt. And if Mrs. Manjati and Mosuli had paler skins, the contempt would have been less.

Then there is the case of Mr. Michael Mpheluza, an African National Congress mem- ber from Paarl, who was detained without charge at the beginning of the emergency. He died in Worcester Prison two weeks ago from tuber- culosis. Perhaps that was not the Government's fault, but since his death the Government has, firstly. refused to transport his body from Wor- cester to Paarl (his impoverished family had to Pay for that), and, seconcitsk. it has refused to make any public statement about his death. In fact, the Government has never acknowledged officially that it has Mr Mpheluza in detention. This makes it an offence under the Emergency Regulations for any newspaper to publish the fact of his death or anything about him, and no newspaper has.

There is something chilling and terrifying in an unpublicised death in gaol, but I do not think the Government was trying to strike terror into anyone's heart. The truth is that the Government officials do not regard it as a matter of import- ance or even of interest: Mr. Mpheluza is black, and they do not care whether he is alive or dead. The liberal magazine Contact has revealed that teenage Africans have been simply disappearing from'the streets of Cape Town. It seems that the police, alleging that they are idlers, or rsorsis, or gangsters, have been rounding them up and transporting them to work camps in various parts of the country. Once again, the distressing thing is that the mothers of these youths are told absolutely nothing about their fate, They have been going from gaol to gaol in the Cape Peninsula asking: 'Have you got my son?' It is arguable that it is right and Christian for some action to be taken against idle and dissolute youths, but only a totally callous government would cause their mothers this sort of suffering.

As a last example of the contempt in which the Government holds those it governs, I would like to mention the appointment of Mr. Hans Abraham to be Commissioner-General of the Transkei.

eFebruary, 1940, found me a proba- tionary temporary second-lieutenant in ar asbestos chalet, on the English Channel; never again, 1 resolved. . . . In 1942 1 was in a Nissen but on a Scottish moor; never again. In those days the politicians had a lot to say about Freedom. . . . All I asked in that horrible .camp was freedom to travel. That, 1 should like to claim, is what I fought for, but I did far too little actual fighting to make that boast effective.

Recalling his twenty-year-old resolution,

EVELYN WAUGH last year decided to escape the English February, by spending it in Africa. He travelled overland to Genoa, where he met again the legendary Mrs. Stitch; then by liner to Dar-es-Salaam, via Suez. Aden, Mombasa and Zanzibar. He stayed for a while in Tanganyika, visiting the interior, meeting the Chagga and the Masai, before flying on to Rhodesia. From Salisbury he made expedi- tions to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the Serima Mission, and the Matopos, before going on south to Cape Town to board. the Pendennis Castle. From his diaries of this visit .he has compiled a book, to he published later this year by Chapman and Hall.

TOURIST IN. AFRICA

will he serialised in the Spectator, beginning July 15. Five of these Commissioners-General were recently appointed at £3,500 a year, to 'take the place of the Native Representatives which had been abolished from Parliament and to serve as a link between the Bantu areas and the Govern- ment.' The other four have all had some con- nection with African affairs and their appoint- ments could be defended. But Mr. Abraham is simply a party hack whose appointment has come as a shock even to many Nationalists. He was, until now, Member of Parliament for Grob- lersdal, and a leading light of that group of Nationalist back-benchers who are known to political commentators as 'The Kitchen' and who produce a frightening volley of hisses, boos and primitive interjections whenever any liberal views are expressed A 'few extracts from Hansard will serve to show the calibre of Mr. Abraham: So much is being said about the rise of Bantu nationalism in Africa today. I want to deny that there has been such a sudden flare-up of nation- alism. It is inspired by Communist agitation on the one side and by British-American agitation on the other. On the one side it is the power- drunkenness of the Communists which is in- fluencing the people. On the other side it is a desire for the unbridled power which wealth and land could bring a nation.'

(To a Jewish member who interrupted him) 'That hon. Member ought to fight in the Sinai desert: he is in the wrong place here. He ought to herd sheep there for Israel. He must not try and tell other people here what they should say.'

'There are certain types of clergymen . . . who form clubs in which traditional lines of separation are broken down and a type of Native is developed who is not a boon to his own race and who is definitely a curse to the white people and to humanity as a whole. . . They do not want the Native to develop in South Africa along the slow process of evolu- tion. but they first want to cause an intellectual revolution by turning the Native into something which he cannot become in the course of only a few years.

(On the notorious 'church clause') is the hon. Member prepared to see the Groote Kerk full of Natives on a Sunday? I cannot put such a question to the hon. Member for Kimberley City because 1, do not know what his religious affiliations are . . . someone spoke here about a synagogue. . . . The.hon. Member for Benoni [who is Jewish] said last night, "Are you in favour of the brotherhood of man?" As far as I know the member does not belong to a Christian church, and the idea of a brotherhood of man is a Christian concept. Where does the hon. Member get the impertinence to lay down the law to a house consisting mainly of Christ- ians about what is Christian and what is un- Christian?'

All this is delivered :n a high, slightly hysterical voice,' and is more restrained than some of his interjections which Hansard fails to record. It must sound drearily familiar to anyone who knew the Germany of the 1930s.

And this is the man who is being wished upon the Xhosas and the rioting Pondos. (As reporters are not being allowed into Pondoland we do not know what the riots are all about. The only in- formation comes from our lying Ministry of Justice. But the basic cause seems to be the naivety of the primitive Africans: they thought all the Government promises about their being given self-government in their own areas meant they were to be given self-government in their own areas.) That appointment is an act of most tm- Christian cynicism.