South African liberals
Sir: Mr Vaisey's first piece on South Africa was so obviously beneath comment that I never considered it. Now, incredibly, this preposterous person has been allowed to reappear.
He made it perfectly clear that on his visit (of about a week?) he used only the most expensive hospitality, and luxurious transport, offered him; that he allowed himself to be wrapped, dispatched and delivered like a parcel, sponsored everyWhere. Why take a lift in the rich Afrikaner's Mercedes? In a South African Railways bus, he could have talked with less glib and more transparent people. Why loll about Johannesburg swimming pools, fed with snacks by an African houseboy, who, when on duty, will hardly have been conversational? Civilized people don't accept hospitality from those they dislike and despise, and especially not from those whom they intend later to bitch in print. Paying his own way in a cheap hotel would have been both more dignified and more informative. Eating in cheap cafés, he might •have met some lowerincome Afrikaners, and discovered why they make up the essential voting strength of the present government. The houseboy with the snacks, and one black professor (who was probably as glad as I would have been to get back to his colleagues and escape a luncheon with Mr Vaisey) seem to have been the only Africans he met. Why not 'have put himself to the discomfort of walking the hot streets, or the OK Bazaar, and talking to anyone there who had time to bother with him? It's not illegal.
Did he even open a newspaper'? It would quickly have disabused him of the notion that everyone who criticizes the government goes to jail. All the English-language papers would require a new editor and leader-writer once a week, as well as a cartoonist. I myself, like many others, have written, and signed, letters about the government quite as rude as this one, and am still at large.
He should postpone writing about South African Liberals till ale has met one. The credo is, and always was, immediate universal adult franchise and full integration. His pool-owning hosts were no doubt solid united party. • If he was lazy or pushed for time to see things for himself, he might as well have stayed at home;
in fact, probably better.
As for Mr Maud, one need only say that his home studies on South Africa cannot have included history. Distant armchair pundits of just his kind insisted, after the South African War, on a soft peace for the poor underdog Boer, who has never looked back since. They supported the Act of Union, which has enabled the reactionary Transvaal to dominate all three other provinces, two of which (the Cape and Natal) would certainly never have had apartheid laws without it. Forgetting everything, learning nothing, their spiritual heirs continue to bombinate in the void.
M. Cha liens Cape Town
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