SOUTH AFRICA: Of God & Hate

(7 of 9)

Workaday apartheid, as applied by Malan, is simply another word for turning down the screws on the blacks. It is 100,000 Negroes jailed each year for failing to carry a pass. It is 60-year-old Jane Zuma, a Johannesburg washerwoman, trudging ten hot miles to deliver her mistress' laundry because she is not allowed to ride on the white man's buses. It is Veteran John Kumalo, a talented Negro broadcaster, beaten up and jailed on the way to his broadcasting studio, and released three days later, innocent of any offense. In Malan's "New Jerusalem," the black man works but he does not vote; he pays taxes, but government schools for Negroes scarcely exist. If he is sick and visits a white doctor he must wait outside or go to the back door.

"I Can't Sleep Nights." Unable to see any prospects of bettering themselves, thousands of Negroes have turned in sheer hopelessness to drink, drugs and crime. In the noisome slums that disfigure the outskirts of Cape Town, 200,000 Cape Colored live in fear of the Skolly Boys, a gang of Negro gangsters whose favorite murder weapon is a bicycle chain. In Johannesburg, it is the "Russians" who terrify white & black alike, chopping their victims with axes and leaving the bodies to be carried away by the night soil removers. In the Rand goldfields, police estimate, there are three murders every two days; in the concrete "locations" where the black miners live, separated from their families, prostitution and sodomy flourish.

Native crime has made white South Africa tense and fearful. Johannesburgers barricade their doors at night, and many sleep with .25 automatics tucked under their pillows. Yet fear seeps in. It is an inward-growing fear, the kind that made a Nationalist M.P. cry out recently: "I can't bear this apartheid. I don't know what to do." It was a fear movingly described by Author Alan Paton in Cry, the Beloved Country: "Which do we prefer, a law-abiding, industrious and purposeful native people or a lawless, idle and purposeless people? The truth is that we do not know, for we fear them both . . . For we fear not only the loss of our possessions, but the loss of our superiority and the loss of our whiteness."*

Malan has a naively simple solution to the problem of native crime: hire more cops, build more prisons. (The jail population of South Africa is greater than that of Britain, which has four times its population.) But increasing numbers of South Africans—both Boer and British—are beginning to realize that jails are not enough. They recognize—though somewhat reluctantly—that, short of mass murders, there is nothing that can prevent the black man from eventually attaining political and economic rights, either by law or by revolution. It is for the white man to choose which way.