GIVING AFRICA OVER, TO THE BLACKS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 12, 13 July 1935, Page 25

GIVING AFRICA OVER, TO THE BLACKS

Mr. Bernard Shaw has returned home from South Africa an advocate of intermarriage between the white aud black inhabitants, says a "Daily Telegraph" contributor. By this means, he suggests, the white population of South Africa can solve the vital problem on which, in his view, its very existence depends.

A few hours after his arrival in London, I had a special interview with him. Pacing vigorously up and down his study, he told me of the seriousness of the situation as it appeared to him.

He has come back tremendously impressed by the extraordinary pleasantness of the climate. But it is the wonderful sunshine which is creating the danger.

"The question," ho said, "is beginning to arise whether white people can survive in these places. 1 do not mean that you die of the climate— you .don't.

"The question is whether your descendants will breed. While J was in South Africa a rather astonishing thing happened. Mr. Oswald Pirow, Minister of Railways, made an appeal for immigrants, who «were 'necessary to keep up the white" population." What does that.mean?

"The white population in America Is normally fertile, and it might be thought that there would be no difficulty in filling up South Africa. But South Africa does not fill up. It is not a question of birth control, because many people there are desirous to have children, but they do not have them.

"I suppose it may be there is too much sunshine for people with white skins. The probable remedy iis for them to darken their skins.

"This means, in South Africa, by marrying Bantus."

"Would not such an idea be highly repugnant to white people?" I asked.

"Well," replied Mr. Shaw, "there are a great many half-breeds. In Hawaii they told me that the South Sea Islanders were disappearing and that very few purebred ones are left.

"In South Africa the mixture of the two colours may provide the solution to the problem. It is not a question of black and white. In the first place there is no such thing as a white man on the face of the earth: the Chinese call us the pinks, very properly.

"The Zulus are a markedly superior type of person, and all attempts to keep them in an inferior position seem to break down before the fact that they are not inferior. Certainly when you see them working you wish you could see British workmen working that way." Mr. Shaw suggested that the problem was not confined to South Africa, but extended to a very large part of the African continent.

"People," he' said, "are speaking glibly now about giving the Germans back their colonies. There is Abyssinia on which Mussolini is thinking of laying his hand. "You may parcel the country out among the European Powers, but at the back of it one day Africa will say, 'None of you will have it.' Africans, whether Afrikander, black, white, or anything else, will see that Africa belongs to the Africans and not to so many competing European Powers. "There may' be mixture of blood, and so on, but the native has a good deal of capacity; in the long run it may be seen that he has the capacity to live in Africa and the others have not." '