"South Africa Has 10 Days Life Left"

Press, Volume C, Issue 29520, 23 May 1961, Page 15

"South Africa Has 10 Days Life Left"

(N.Z. Press Association— Copyright) LONDON, May 22.

The Union of South Africa had 10 days of life left, the “Daily Express” reported from Johannesburg.

It had 10 days left before it became an outcast of the Commonwealth and a pariah among all nations of the world.

In 10 days, the report said, the Afrikaaners would exult —except those who perceived that the racial route of Dr. Verwoerd was also the route

to an ultimate, inevitable, and fairly-soon damnation. It was too early to speak of panic: but in Durban, women were buying up reserve stocks of food and some were girding themselves with guns. Some time during those days police or troops may fire, or strikers might fling stones: and the retribution might begin. South Africa had always been an uneasy country. Today it was a country nervous to the point of genuine fear. Children had gone from the streets and public meetings were banned, said the report.

“Blindly, as in a Greek tragedy, the country moves towards an inevitable disaster.” Whose fault was it, the report asked.

The jingoistic Britons whc fought and won the Boer War?

The supine blacks who took their social degradation for granted? The money-loving Indians and coloureds who preferred social indignities to jeopardising the money they made by trading? Or —as was altogether too easy and comforting to assume—the Afrikaaners, the stern, simple, godfearing farmers For the Afrikaaners it would be a day of triumph. The English had been sunk tn lethargic gloom. Racialism was triumphing —the racialism of the Boers, said the report. In Natal, in the Cape, all was gloom. In the Transvaal and in the Orange Free State the stern farmers, one hand on the Old Testament and the other on the trigger, saw arriving their day of glory/