SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17738, 26 March 1932, Page 2

SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES

EMPLOYERS & WHIPPING CONTENTIOUS CLAUSE IN BILL CAPETOWN, Feb. 10. The question whether nil employer in the Transvaal and Natal should be entitled to administer a whipping to his native employee for certain offences was one of the questions raised in the House of Assembly on the second reading of the Native. Service Contract Bill. The Minister of Justice, Mr. Oswald Pirow, who moved the second reading, explained that this was not a Government measure. The Select Committee on the bill advocated that only natives under 18 years of age might be whipped, hut Mr. Pirow favored the removal of the ago restriction. Tho thrashing of natives was a, rare occurrence, the Minister said, and tho native himself did not object to corporal punishment when he know lie deserved it. Personally, he {Mr. Pirow) did not approve of ■ corporal punishment. but- he felt, that they could not outstrip public opinion, and must consider existing conditions. Corporal punishment was in many cases the only kind of. argument a native understood, and lie felt that it should he. made general, instead of being confined to juveniles. The hill also proposes to deal with the native “squatters”—aiming at putting an end to native farming which, said Mr, Pirow, was eating like? a. canker into the life of the country. By the forms of this hill natives outside locations and purely native territories will he unable to farm on their own and will have no other alternative to hiring themselves as laborers to European farmers. Tin? Leader of the Opposition, General Smuts, criticised the measure. The question of native squatting, he, said, had hitherto boon found insoluable, yet here the Minister made a provision which, if carried out, would lead to absolute chaos. There were. 750,000 natives on the, land in tho Transvaal alone, a very large percentage of whom were squatters. “You will make homeless hundreds <>f thousands of natives and inaugurate a tremendous migration toward the towns, which are already chock-a-block with natives,” he declared. General Smuts also objected to the whipping clause. He urged the House not to set at defiance public opinion against whipping, which was growing nil over the world. The bill passed its second reading.