SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES

Taranaki Daily News, 30 March 1932, Page 8

SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES

EMPLOYERS AND WHIPPING. CONTENTIOUS CLAUSE IN BILL. (New Zealand Herald Correspondent). Capetown, Feb. 10. The question whether an 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, but Mr. Pirow favoured the removal of the age restriction. The thrashing of natives was a rare occurrence, the Minister said, and the native himself did not object to corporal punishment when he knew he 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 he felt that it should be made general, instead of being confined to juveniles. The bill also proposes to deal with the native “squatters” —aiming at putting lan end to native farming which, said Mr. Pirow, was' eating like, a canker into the life of the country. By the terms of this bill natives outside locations and purely native territories will be unable to farm on their’own and will tyave no other alternative to hiring themselves as labourers to European farmers. The Leader of the Opposition, General Smuts, l. _.sed the measure. The question of native squatting, he said, had hitherto been found insoluble, yet here the Minister made a provision which, if . carried out, would lead to absolute chaos. i There were 750,000 natives on the land in the Transvaal alone, a very large i

percentage of whom were squatters. “You will make landless and homeless hundreds of 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 all over the world. .. .. s . .J The bill passed its second reading.