“Verwoerd Like King Canute”

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29178, 12 April 1960, Page 17

“Verwoerd Like King Canute”

(Rec. 11 p.m.) NEW YORK, April 11. A “New York Times” writer today compared the South African Prime Minister (Dr. Verwoerd) with King Canute.

“Both have been unsuccessful in ordering tides to halt,” wrote C. L. Sulzberger from Paris. “But Canute at least was reconciled to the inevitable.”

The broad tide demanding racial justice was in a way more significant than the tide of democracy or communism because both converged in its support, he said. “By far the most desperate of crises is found in Verwoerd's unhappy nation, and the bloodshed that already stains the Cape is but a foretaste,” Sulzberger wrote.

“One sympathises with the dour, upright farmers, descendants of Boer and British pioneers who moved into South Africa even before the southward-trekking Zulus and built a prospering society. But they never faced that society’s most vital issue.” The answer to the question of equal human rights could not be found in repressive societies such as America’s Ku Klux Klan or the secret Broeder-Bond of the Boers, Sulzberger wrote. “World opinion is against oppression and time favours eventual justice and majorities. It would be presumptuous to counsel the Verwoerd Government on how to defuse the terrible bomb it has set under Itself.

“South Africa is not only a racially mixed society, it is also economically and intellectually mixed because the darker-hued majority has for so long been imprisoned in under-privilege,” he said.

‘‘But history cannot be frustrated and those who would do so court only violence and disaster. Apartheid, South Africa’s total form of segregation, is not only immoral but economically unsound. It produces a State vzhose material health depends on regulated slavery, and this is unworkable today.

“Its logic leads ineluctably to partition of the entire country, with the coloured peoples, some decades hence, surrounding a small white “Israel” and threaten, ing to engulf it "From Algeria to Alabama and from the Carolinas to the Cape, race problems are -eflected in vastly different forms among vastly different groups of human beings. But. In the end, it Is the same problem: establishing equality without respect to pigmentation.

“Dams may be erected here and there to check the tide of progress and for a while they may succeed But ultimately they are doomed. The tides of history are immutable. It is too late to try and emulate Canute upon the angry wave-beaten beach," said Sulzberger. The New York “Times” was the only newspaper in the city to comment editorially today on the shooting of Dr. Verwoerd.

It said: “It was difficult yesterday to establish a connexion between the attempted assassination of ... Dr. Verwoerd and the racial tensions which the Verwoerd Government had been attempting to cure by shooting, beating or imprisoning the Bantu leaders. “Just how did a wealthy, middle-aged white farmer, described by his friends as quiet, kindly and not interested in politics, come into the picture with a revolver in his hand and an intent to kill?

“There are many white South Africans, including some of Dutch as well as some of British descent, who see no future in a tyranny of white overlords holding the African masses in serfdom. Such a policy is an invitation to disaster

“We don’t know just how David Pratt stood on this issue, but his vicious act ought not to affect it one way or the other. “The truth remains, as it was when the United Nations Security Council passed its recent South African resolution and as it was before that: human relations cannot be permanently based on the subjugation of a darkly-pigmented majority by a lightly-pigmented minority.

“Nor can this status be reversed. We should all be horrified to see a Bantu government doing to South African white people one-tenth of what the white Afrikaners have done to the Bantus. “The South African situation —and the African situation as a whole—is acute. Yet it is only a part of a crisis in which the white men must deal, all over the world, with a far more numerous multitude of men whose skins are black, brown, yellow or red. If the colour of the skin is to determine mastery, the future will be too horrible to contemplate . . . ," it said.