NATIVE POLICY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 34, 10 February 1930, Page 9

NATIVE POLICY

SOUTH AFRICA’S PROBLEM GENERAL SMUT’S VIEWS. “If we could evolve and pursue a policy which would promote the cause of civilisation of Africa without injustice to the African and without injury to what is typical of and specific in the African,” declared General Smuts in the course of his third and final Rhodes lecture at Oxford University, “we should be rendering a great service to the cause of humanity. For there is much that is good in the African which ought to be preserved and developed. “The negro and negroid bantu form a distinct human type which the world would be poorer without. Here, in a vast continent with its wide geographical variety and immense climatic differences, this unique human type has been fixing for thousands of years. It is even possible, s< some anthropologists hold, that this a, as the original mother-type of the human race and that Africa holds the cradle of mankind. But, whether this is so or not, at any rate we have vast results of time which wo should conserve and develop with the same high respect we feel towards all great natural facts. “This typo has some wonderful characteristics. It has largely remained a child type, with a child psychology and outlook. A childlike human cannot be a bad human, for are we not, in high spiritual matters, bidden to be like unto children? Perhaps, as the direct result of this temperament, the Africans are the only happy humans I have come across.

Need foi; Different Policies Seen. “It is clear that a race so unique, so different in its mentality and culture, from those of Europe requires a policy very unlike that which would suit Europeans. Nothing could be worse for Africa than the application of a policy the object and tendency of which would bo to destroy the basis of this African type, to de-Africanize the African and turn him either into a beast of the field or into a pseudo European. “We have tried both alternatives in our dealings with the natives. At first we looked upon the African as essentially inferior or subhuman, as not having a soul and as being only fif to be a slave. As a slave he became an article of commerce and the greatest article of export from this continent for centuries. But the horrors of this trade became such that the modern conscience finally revolted and stamped out African slavery, peacefully in the British Empire, but in the United States with the convulsions of a civil war and a million dead.

“Then wo changed to the opposite extreme. The African has now become a m r n and a brother. Religion and politics combined to shape this new African' policy. The principles of the French Revolution, which emancipated Europe, were applied to Africa, so that liberty, equality and fraternity vould turn bad Africans into £ood Europeans. The political system of the natives was ruthlessly destroyed in order to incorporate them as equals into the white system. The African was good as a potential European, but his social and political culture was bad, barbarous, only deserving to be stamped out, root and branch.

Past Policies Called Bad. * ‘These are the two native policies which have prevailed in the past, and the second has been only less harmful than the first. If Africa is to be redeemed, if Africa is to make her own contribution to the world, if Africa is to take her rightful place among the continents, we shall have to proceed on different lines and evolve a policy which will not force her institutions into an alien European mold, but which will preserve the unity of her own past and build her future progress and past and buid her future progress and civilisation on specifically Afilcan foundations. That should be the new policy, and such a policy would be in line with the traditions of the British Empire. “It is a significant fact that this new orientation of African policy had its origin in South Africa, as its author was Cecil Rhodes. In his celebrated Glen Grey Mr Rhodes’ African policy embodied two main ideas—white settlement to supply a steel framework and stimulus for an enduring civilisation, and indigenous native institutions to express the specifically African character of the natives in their future development in civilisation. “The principal innovation of Mr Rhodes in his new legislation was, so far as possible, resolved on direct native rule of the natives in their local and tribal affairs. The system of native councils was inaugurated for the smaller areas, from which, again, delegates met to form the larger general council under the chairmanship of the resident magistrate of the area. “Powers of taxation, administration and recommending legislation to the government were conferred on these councils.

Private Property Instituted. “His second innovation was to make it possible for the’ natives in their tribal areas to become possessed of their own separate plots of agricultural land instead of the traditional communal holding and working of the land, which is the universal native system throughout Africa. “His provision for individual agricultural holdings has been a great success and has been the principal means of native advance where it has been adopted in the South African Union. “The new policy is to foster the indigenous native culture or system of cultures and to cease to force the African into alien European molds. As a practical policy of native government it has worked most successfully. Gradually the system of native councils and native self-government through their own tribal chiefs elected to the councils, has been extended from one native area to another in the Cape province until to-day about two-thirds, or roughly over a million, of the Cape natives fall under this system and manage their own local affairs according to their own ideas, under the supervision of European magistrates. “The new departure is most farreaching and has come none too soon. Already the African system is disintegrating everywhere over the whole African continent. Many factors have combined to produce this situation. Missionaries share the blame with the administrators and the fight against native religious ideas has been not less destructive than the deposition of native chiefs and the institution of European organs of government. Unfortunately, the earlier efforts of missionary enterprises were made without any reference or knowledge of the peculiar

native psychology or the light anthropology has thrown on the past of human cultures. Creeds and Sciences Oue to Natives. “ For the natives religion, law, natural science, social customs and institutions all form one blended whole, which enshrines their view of the world and the forces governing it. Attack this complex system at any single point and the whole is endangered. The introduction of the Christian religion meant not only a breakdown in the belief in primitive spirits, magic and witchcraft and abandonment of the practice of polygamy, it meant a breakdown of the entire, integrad native 1 seitanclnning,’ or outlook on life and the world. “A knowledge of anthropology would have enabled the missionary to differentiate between what was barbaric and degradinc in the native system and what was merely different from the Christian European system without being morally or socially harmful to the natives.

“The events of the great war on the African continent also contributed to this general disintegration. If the bonds of native tribal cohesion and authority are dissolved, African governments will everywhere sit with vast hordes of detribalized natives on their hands, for whom the traditional restraints and discipline of chiefs and elder* will have no force or effect. The old social and religious sanctions will have disappeared while no new sanctions, except those of the white man’s laws, will have been substituted. Unprecedented Situation Seen. “Such a situation would be unprecedented in the history of the world and the results may well be general chaos. The natives of Africa, from time immemorial, have been subject to stern, even ruthless, discipline, and their social system rested on the despotic authority of cir chiefs. If this system breaks down and tribal discipline disappears, native society will be resolved into its human atoms with possibilities of universal bolshevism and chaos, which no friend of the natives or orderly civilisation on this continent would contemplate with equanimity.

“There remains the big question of how far the parallelism of native and white institutions is to go. Is it to be confined to the local government, or is it to go all the way up to the level of full political or parliamentary government? Should the black and white cooperate in the same parliamentary institutions of the country? If so, should they separate their representatives in the same parliamentary institutions? “I do not think there can be, or, at bottom, there is among those who have given the subject serious attention, any doubt that in the supreme legislature of a country with a mixed population both colours should ultimately have representation. It is repugnant to our civilised European ideas that the weaker in a community should be unheard or should go without representation either by themselves or through European spok< mien here their interests are concerned. There can be but one sovereign body in a country and that body should represent the weaker or less than the stronger. As to the mode of representation of colour in a supreme parliament, there can be legitimate differences of opinion.” Before delivering his last lecture. General Smuts received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law. The students who packed the* historic Sheldonian Theatre gave him a rousing welcome.