FUTURE OF AFRICA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19992, 8 November 1927, Page 8

FUTURE OF AFRICA

GREAT COLOUR PROBLEM NO SHORT CUT POSSIBLE. South A rica, said Mr L. S. Amery, ■Jit Secretary of State for the Dornin•.oas. .a an address to the 1820 Memoria; Setti-rr- Association at Cape Ti’rr. is. from the point of view of ’.iimate ani physical conditions, an . leal base from which civilisation can work. That is to say, a country in which white men can work and live just as well as the black man. “It is only the accident that the black man has come down from the interior.” Mr Amery said, “that has prevented this country being like Australia, a purely white man’s country. The question, however, is, is the white civilisation going to survive in thrs continent? It seems to me that thadepends entirely upon whether it is going to be reinforced by a steaoy stream of fresh blood and its numbers strengthened during the generation immediately ahead of us. I know that that is not altogether an easy matter. Once you have got your whole social structure based on the use of coloured labour, you can’t suddenly shift to an entirely new basis. “A Labour colleague of mine in the House of Commons the other day suggested that 150.000 working men should be brought out from Great Britain to displace native labour on the mines and elsewhere. Well, it only requires a little familiarity with South African conditions to know that these short cuts are not possible. You have got to begin at the end where the worit is at present carried on by white men and gradually enable the sphere of the white man’s work to extend. You cannot do that in a single week, but yov ran do it by steadily and persistentlyfollowing a definite purpose, because what seems clear to n«n is that if white civilisation is not going to extend

field of activity a.> compared w?lh coloured labour, then it will begin to go back.

“If once South Africa reaches a stationary position, with no fresh blood coming in, then you have, reached a position when the white element is beginning to be merged into the and year after year one sphere or another of occupation will be lost to the white man; and once it begins to go back then the country will cease to be a country to attract a white population from other parts of the world, and it will become definitely a countryin which sooner or later the white race will be submerged in a parti-col-oured population.

“This,” said Mr Amery, “is not an ordinary political issue. It cannot be settled by ordinary methods of political contest but by the people of South Africa as a whole realising what lies in store for the future and; determining to get themselves strengthened and refreshed and invigorated by a steady stream of fresh blood of the right sort from without.”