RACIAL PROBLEM

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 December 1934, Page 2

RACIAL PROBLEM

WHITE MEN AND BLACK. | The vexed question that troubles j South Africa is the colour question. | When Anthony Trollope went to South Africa in the year 1877, after I dining with governors, sleeping in I Boer farmhouses, chatting with Hottentots, poor whites, Dutchmen and English folk, chronicling the revolt I by Kreli and the Galeka. natives, and studying the importance of the diamond mines, he penned his dictum: “South Africa, is a. country of black men —and not of white men.” Even to-day, every now and then South Africa. sits up suddenly and asks if that may not true, writes Sarah Gertrude Millin, authoress of “The South Africans/’ This work, first I published in 1926 and reprinted seven | times between then and 1929, has now been recast and virtually rewrit- I ten. . ' “the time has arrived when Africa can no longer ignore its native question, can no longer depend on it to solve itself. The black man and the , white man, they are irking one another; and’ the yellow man is troubling both,” writes Mrs Millin. “.There remains the question of how far the African can accompany the European on the advance towards civilisation. The other question —whether he should be allowed to make the attempt—is no longer in question. The thing is finished. The black man has been started on the road, and will not go back. “It must be denied that the black races are to-day the equal of the white. After all, people are still debating women’s equality, with man; as women are proving themselves, so one day may negroes.” In the meantime, the black man is not so different from the white man as he is disagreeable and perhaps dangeious to him. A Cape select committee on native education found that “the belief of the inability of the native to develop at a. normal rate beyond a certain stage is not supported by facts,” and Professor Pyle, an American, stated that about one fifth of negroes were equal or superior mentally to the average of the white, although three-quarters of the whites were equal or superior to the aveiage of the negroes. Professor Pyle, however, spoke of American negroes, who are not of necessity pure-blooded black people. What will be the eventual outcome of this serious racial conflict, Mrs Millin admits herself unable to say. She refers to George Bernard Shaw, who, in “Back to Methuselah,” prophesied that in two and a-half centuries the Minister of Health m the British Isles would be a negress, and who made the subject of a recent work a black girl In search of God.