Rugby players for S.A.

Press, 21 December 1978, Page 16

Rugby players for S.A.

Sir, —Mr G. McNabb’s (December 15) sense of outraged morality apparently only takes offence when the victims of violations of human rights are blacks. Most African leaders have demonstrated by word and deed that they have little interest in Western concepts of human rights. At a seminar held in Tanzania in 1973, it was bluntly proclaimed that international covenants on human rights were alien to African reality. This pronouncement reflects African reality more accurately than the West’s Don Quixote engagement in knight-errantry charging across the African “La Mancha” with the purest of ideals. Nowhere else in the Third World or the communist world is regard for human freedoms in greater evidence than in South Africa —even with apartheid, which is now being phased out. The presence of so many foreign Africans in South Africa for work opportunities should effectively counter those who continually depict South Africa as a police state where the African is unscrupulously exploited.—Yours, etc., P. R. LINDHORST. Consul-General. December 18, 1978.