Whites end blacks' camp diet

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32958, 3 July 1972, Page 13

Whites end blacks' camp diet

(N.Z.P.A-Reuter—Copyright) KING WILLIAM’S TOWN (South Africa), July 2. Mrs Jean Sincleair, one of several whites who resumed their normal diet yesterdayafter living for a month on the rations given to displaced Africans, said: “The only difference is that for us, the agony ends today. For them it is a way of life from which they have no escape.”

The whites, protesting against the Government’s monthly rations — worth only 2.85 rand (about S 3) — given to Africans at the Dimbaza resettlement camp near King William’s Town, had lived on that amount of food. Some were forced to give up through ill health, but others, including Mrs Sinclair, persevered. “I have suffered terribly, she said, “but it has been a real eye-opener. Perhaps for the first time we have really come to terms .with the suffering and deprivation of these people.” A week’s ration at the Dimbaza camp comprises: Two ounces of salt, eight ounces of skimmed milk powder, four ounces of margarine, 20 ounces of beans, and seven pounds of maize.

But for the man who began

the campaign, the Rev. David Russell, the Anglican curate at St Matthew’s Mission, in the Grahamstown diocese, the ordeal is not over.

He returned today to his monthly budget of five rand ($5.30)—-the amount, he says, an African old-age pensioner receives. Mr Russell began living on that amount on April 14, and plans to continue doing so for another four months. Each month he writes an open letter to the Minister of Bantu (African) Administration (Mr Micheil Botha), telling him what it is like to be constantly hungry. In an editorial on the campaign today, the “Johannesburg Star” comments: “It has successfully drawn more attention to the borderline character of the State’s charity to the people whom it forces to live out of reach of supplementary income.”