NATIVES IN AFRICA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 126, 30 May 1935, Page 11

NATIVES IN AFRICA

FUTURE OF THE BLACKS. DEPENDENCE ON THE WHITES. CAPETOWN, April 8. The view that tho treatment of the native in South Africa was “terribly amiss” was put forward by Mr. Lionel Curtis, representative of The Round Table, and one of the delegates to the Imperial Press Conference. “I must also say,” said Mr. Curtis, “that the treatment is, in my opinion, injuring the white man more than the black. I will go so far as to prophesy that if a hundred years hence the black man is treated no better than today by then white society in South Africa will be utterly demoralised and ruined. To take one instance, you cannot, in my belief, enforce the colourbar without ensuring the ruin of the white worker.” Many years ago Mr. Curtis was town clerk of Johannesburg, and in those days, he said, he had come to believe that no reasonable opinion on native policy would develop until South Africans had come to feel that the whole responsibility from first to last rested on them. “1 felt that South Africa was socially and economically ono community,” he said. “Cut up into separate colonies they could not control interests common to them all, like native affairs. That was the primary .reason why 1 thought that the people of South Africa should establish one paramount Government responsible to themselves for the whole of South Africa. I thought then, and I think even more strangly now, that the Native Protectorates were part and parcel of that indivisible whole.”