Apartheid ‘What Africans Want’

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30901, 6 November 1965, Page 15

Apartheid ‘What Africans Want’

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, Nov. 5. Apartheid was a Christian policy which the black people of South Africa wanted, the South African Ambassador in London (Dr. Carel De Wet) said today.

Because of apartheid, South Africa was the industrial giant of the African continent, he said at a meeting of the Royal Commonwealth Society and the Royal African Society.

The purchasing power of the black people in South Africa had increased five-fold in the last 10 years. There were about one million foreign non-whites in South Africa who could not be persuaded to go back to their own countries because they were “so happy" in South Africa. There was no doubt that the black people of Africa wanted separate development and South Africa was certainly going to give it to them, Dr. De Wet said.

Socially, they could live their own lives.

Apartheid was not Nazi in concept, he said. Although the white people referred to themselves as Europeans, they were in fact “white Africans.” His ancestors had settled in South Africa at the same time as the Bantus had come down from the north. The Bantus occupied 46 per cent of the country and would have full separate political and voting rights.