THE SCHIZOID STATE SIR,—You, your correspondents and other readers can
be assured that my failure, until now, to reply to the several letters addressed to me in your June 3 issue was not due to discourtesy but to the time-lag that delays the arrival of the Spectator here. With your permission I will repair that.
Mr. Rashid Karapict suggests that it is no more necessary 'to have suffered in South Africa in order to protest with justification about apartheid' than it is to be a survivor from an atomic bomb to support nuclear disarmament. I counter-suggest that although the terribly maimed people of Hiroshima may be less 'truly idealistic' supporters they must be far more realistic. First-hand experience of 'the bomb'— as of apartheid--must change theory into fact.
First-hand experience of apartheid does not con- firm Mr. Rashid Karapiet's assertion that 'the white man hates, because he fears, the black man.' Speak- ing from first-hand experience I think, in all fairness, that my equally positive assertion should be accepted —that I have seen no evidence of white people (as such) hating black people (as such) or vice versa. There is ample evidence that black people hate certain of the white man's laws, such as apartheid, the Pass laws and Bantustanism—all of which were originated and introduced as legal enactments by white Tory-British governments.
Mr. R. F. Harwood is justified in believing that living among this white-black population for thir- teen years does not necessarily equip me to know the, moral attitudes of the two peoples. It does, surely, equip me better than those critics who have not lived here at all. Of. the many hundreds of people (including educited Bantu) that I have questioned, not one has denied the widely accepted fact here that the black people are instinctive liars. They are unlike Mr. Harwood's 'most people' in Britain who 'though rarely resorting to the lie direct, are prepared t" tamper with the truth to suit their ends'—an over: mild reproof that almost condones modern ethical standards. With the Bantu it is not a case of 'rareh'
nor of not 'resorting to the lie direct. •
Mr. Arthur S. Wigfield must pardon my use el italics again, but there are certain operative words: used above, in speech indicated by a verbal emphasis, that in writing only italicisation can give' His contention that the low moral codes of 011 average Bantu—and the average arc uneducatchi only two generations removed from savagery; the fact must not be ignored—are due 'basically to an economic' cause is almost, not entirely, correct,. 'Basically' they are still responsive to an inherigajt savage-tribal code—Mr. Wigfield would be shoclictir, at the extent of the influence of the witch-doctors' themselves corrupt and the apostles of corruption' among even the de-tribalised and urbanised Bantu' and this jungle code is, in turn, responsive to Or challenge postulated by scandalous economic exploitation. It is when the point of view of Mr. T. D. Powell' Davies and mine collide that the real issue becomes clear. He is an environmentalist and I a hereditalist; He rejects 'inherited moral concepts' in favour t,i 'controlled environment' while I believe that charar ter is the one clement that all men inherit. &canse it is inherited it is fundamental and the degree of its conditioning by environment is—so runs my area; ment—determined by mental susceptibility; :111' because the Bantu, as a race, are too close to their inherited savagery changes of environment, soda as have been taking place only over the past two t°, three generations, can only have, as yet, a limited effect. From my study of racialism here I am convinced that it is this inability of those unacquainted with the Bantu in general--as distinct from the cxcer tional individuals—to appreciate their mental and moral retardment, imposed by the British and slowly being corrected by South Africans' during the past fifty years, that explains the dangerously wrong assumptions respecting 'the colour problem' in this country that are made oveiseas.—Yours faithfullY, ALLitii1A6
Johannesburg
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