South Africa “racist laboratory”

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32565, 26 March 1971, Page 1

South Africa “racist laboratory”

In South Africa, nonwhites were treated like things, a former bishop who was deported from the republic said in an interview in Christchurch yesterday. The Rt Rev. E. Crowther, who was formerly the Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman, contrasted South Africa with the United States, which also had racial problems, he said, but where the move of the white voters to share their legislation with non-white citizens was almost unequalled in history. Bishop Crowther was deported from South Africa on the order of the Minister of the Interior, in June, 1967. He was recently appointed Assistant Bishop of California. The United States had one of the most serious racial problems in the world, but it differed from South Africa’s, in that the United

tl States was legislating fqr i civil rights, and South Africa llwas legislating for the di-

minution of civil rights, he said. “The oppressors of the world tend to always rationalise their oppression by saying that it is in the interests of the oppressed. So it is in South Africa.” South Africa had legislated out non-white suffrage, equal education, freedom of movement, equal freedom under the law, and the right to work according to ability and training. The non-whites in South Africa constituted 17m in a population of 21.25 m, but by law the non-whites were only allowed to own and develop 13 per cent of the land in the republic, he said. The policy of separate development of white and nonwhite as South Africa’s answer to its racial problem, was the worst way to deal with the issue, Bishop Crowther said. . “It’s a very good way from the white’s point of view,” he said. “But the problem of {integration is only resolved

by the elimination of apartheid. The whites have no credentials to decide how the black people shall live.” Asked if he had been given “in the public interest” as the reason for his deportation, Bishop Crowther said that in South Africa in the public interest meant in the white interest. “No allegations were made against me. I was not charged with any offence. I was simply deported. It was not in the public interest of the black people, or if it was, they were not given the chance to say so.” South Africa was a triggerpoint of possible racial conflagration because South Africa was a laboratory of racism in which the most brutally enforced system of white supremacy in the world was found, Bishop Crowther said. VIETNAM EFFECTS One of the tragedies of United States involvement in the war in Vietnam had been the slowing down of the im-

piementation of laws on civil rights. “Many white people are balking now. They are not prepared to open up American society by implementing what they verbalised in law,” he said. President Nixon was very retrogressive in his civil rights posture. "He is going slow in the South on black rights because he cannot afford to lose the southern white vote in the 1972 elections.” Bishop Crowther has been lecturing in New Zealand on apartheid. His two-week visit is being sponsored by the New Zealand Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa. On Monday he leaves for the North Island where he will visit Masterton and Napier before leaving New Zealand on Wednesday. Though bom in Britain, he is an American citizen. Bishop Crowther also lectures in the department of African studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.