In Place Of Apartheid SOUTH AFRICA IN SEARCH OF A LEADER

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28324, 9 July 1957, Page 12

In Place Of Apartheid SOUTH AFRICA IN SEARCH OF A LEADER

[Specially written for "The Press”)

[By

HENRY KATZEW]

Johannesburg.—“ South Africa needs someone to come forward with a fresh approach to replace the present approach of anxiety and fear. Whoever can do that will in the long run have the whole country at his feet.” The speaker was Mr J. G. N. Strauss, former leader of the Opposition, making his last speech in South Africa’s Parliament before retiring at the early age of 50 to become an “ordinary citizen.”

The cry for a new and brave leadership has been echoing in South Africa for the last few years. Mr Strauss’s was merely another voice. But his was the most poignant. He has been one of the sternest critics of the present Government’s Apartheid policy. Yet he had to confess that the official Opposition has no alternative policy, that “a new leader” (clearly not his successor in the United Party) and “a new approach” were the country's deepest requirements.

All South Africa feels this. A sign hangs over the nation’s sky, reading: “Wanted: a Man of Stature to Rescue Us.”

Mr Strydom “Inadequate” The present Prime Minister, Mr Jy G. Strydom, is clearly seen as inadequate. When he came to power in 1954 he found himself faced not with the problems to which he had given his life and tremendous tenacity—the right of the Afrikaner people to their rightful place in the society of white South Africa, for the Afrikaner had by then won this place for himself —but with the entirely new problem of the survival of the white man, Boer, Briton, Jew, and other elements, in the new post-war setting of awakening and numerically superior black people. Mr Strydom’s first answer—“baasskap,” domination of black by white—was nothing more than a confession, to all who could read, of inadequacy to the challenge. Mr Strydom has never been anything but a sectional leader. There is nothing in his past or his outlook to command the faith of all South Africans, white and black. His is the tragedy of many a sincere and gifted politician. He did his best work in opposition. He had shone as a rebel and as a doughty fighter for Afrikaner rights. He rose to the top by sincerity. But his was a partial sincerity. He loved not all men, only his own. When he came to power. South Africa was sick to death of the feuds of the Boer War. Fear and Bewilderment South Africa has been presented to the world as a "police state,” and its rulers as Nazi-minded. But we who live in South Africa know the men of our government not as desperate conspirators, but as men too shallow in their political experience and too narrow in their sympathies to handle so complex a problem as the emergence of a

rising giant in their midst. Their fears and bewilderment are shared by most white South Africans.

We have now had 10 years of the Nationalist Government, of which Mr Strydom is the head, and of its application of the policy of Apartheid (in its visionary terms the separate development of white and black). In all this period the Government has not initiated a single piece of legislation or executed a single design to equip the white man for the more ardous role implicitly envisaged in the policy of separate development.

White South Africa does not jet see the pattern of the future, that is, whether there is to be separate development of black and white or whether there is to be integration of the two in an eventual mixed society. But clearly if there is to be separate development it will have to start with the white man (who says he wants it), not with the black man.

A Popular Longing For this, we white South Africans need the leader of whom Mr Strauss spoke. Boer and Briton, who are more closely welded than the South African politician cares to allow, await a man of mystic fire who, like Ben Gurion in Israel, will hammer the theme of self-labour and lead them into a fresh pioneering colonisation venture within the country to carve out their own white man’s land within the present borders. We are slowly groping to the vision that the South Africa of tomorrow could achieve some tranquillity if it consisted of (a) an exclusive black state; /b) an exclusive white state; and (c) mixed societies too late for unscrambling. The virtue of this vision is that it desires change, not by disruption but by growth through self-dabour and idealism. The idea is not impracticable, for a stage has been reached in South African affairs where popular longing for courage and idealism in politics is slowly becoming an explosive force.