THE COLOUR BAR SIR,—A correspondent 6,000 miles away is at
a disadvantage ; but I hope you will let me reply to Pat Sloan on South Africa and U.N.O. in your issue of January 31st. Your correspondent accuses me of justifying the colour bar, whereas I said expressly that I opposed it as the paper with which I am associated, The Forum, has consistently done. My point was that we can only advance step by step and by a practical idealism that is based on experience of this country and the state of public opinion. We have a public opinion to convert that has grown up under pioneering conditions, but that in practice is often much better than the political theorist supposes. Thus, economically the Indians are so well off here that they refuse to go back to India ; and politically rights are being offered them that are an advance on previous conditions. The point is that we must keep advancing, but if we go too fast a reaction is provoked. This deference to gradual growth was the Roman method and is, in the main, the British method.
In education we have been advancing. A far greater proportion of Indians receive higher education here than in India, and the number of Bantu students at the Universities of Cape Town and Johannesburg is steadily growing. The Government grant for non-European education has risen steadily every year, and the last Budget shows a substantial increase. But those outside the Union must try to understand the geographical difficulties in this land of open spaces, the economic problems of a small white community catering for a non-European population four times as numerous, and the fact that the primitive element I referred to needs generations before, as a mass, it can become civilised, It is no use your correspondent comparing the acts of savagery I men- tioned with conditions in England. If he lived in the countryside here, a hundred miles from the nearest civilised man, he would soon realise the difference. Aga-n I say we must not go in for racial generalisations— my book The Stranger at the Gate preached that gospel—but we must face realities and understand that right theories may be spoiled by being wrongly timed.—Yours, &c., T. J. HAARHOFF. University of the Witwatersrand.
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