Published date
Related Collections from the Archive
"Apartheid - the Indictment"
One of the biggest failures of any group of people this century has been the failure of the ruling white minority in South Africa to discard policies which have nothing but destruction and disaster to offer for the future of the country. The failure is the bigger for the insane determination of the authors and high priests of these policies to push them to their logical extremities against a rising tide of indignant world opposition and in defiant unconcern for the consequences.
"If we are destroyed," they say, "it will be our fate, not our fault." But if they are destroyed, it cannot help them to argue or complain afterwards that it was their fate. The fate-not-fault theory is, however, important because it reflects an attitude of mind which is basic to the policy of apartheid, namely, that South Africa is populated by people and non-people. In the following discussion the situation in South Africa will be examined with special reference to this attitude of mind on the part of the whites.
Apartheid, in its more comprehensive connotation, is the sum total of all the policies and practices, stratagems and methods, beliefs and attitudes that have been marshalled and are being employed in an attempt to ensure and entrench the political domination and economic exploitation of the African people by the white minority.
Colour and Race
Paramount in the strategy of the South African rulers, therefore, is the use they make of colour or race differences. In the workings of apartheid, colour comes first in importance, race next, and human beings last. In the terminology of apartheid, it may be correct to say "the population of South Africa is 16 million", but it would be incorrect to say "there are 16 million people in South Africa". There are only 3 million people. In their public speeches, the political leaders of the Nationalist Party are always meticulously careful not to exaggerate the number of people in South Africa. Seldom if ever does the Government in its publications and official documents refer to the "people of South Africa" in a meaning that extends beyond the 3 million whites.
The very first clause of the current Constitution of the country states:
"The people of the Republic of South Africa acknowledge the sovereignty and guidance of God."
The Constitution was conceived of, drawn up, discussed, approved, and adopted as an Act of Parliament (No. 32 of 1961) by whites only, to the deliberate exclusion of all other South African inhabitants. Its provisions express their wishes and nobody else`s.
The "people" referred to are therefore the whites. The Constitution of the Union of South Africa (South Africa Act, 1909) contained an identical clause with "Union" instead of "Republic" of South Africa. That Constitution was, like the present, the exclusive creation of whites. But the "guidance" clause was only inserted in 1925 through an amendment introduced by the then Nationalist Party Government led by General J.B.M. Hertzog. Because of the importance attached to it, the new clause was made Article No. 1 of the South Africa Act, 1909, as amended.
But Hertzog and his Party were not the originators of the concept of "people" as covering whites only. They had brought it down from an earlier page of their history. The Constitution of the Boer Republic of the Transvaal prior to its annexation by Britain in 1877 had the following provision:
"The people will permit no equality between whites and coloured inhabitants, either in Church or State."
In 1896, the Transvaal Republic, having been reconstituted, declared, in its laws, that
"The people will not permit the equalisation of coloured with white inhabitants."
The Free State Republic had similar provisions, the word "people" being used in the same context.
The distinction between people and "non-people" can be traced to two further successive sources. Before doing so, however, reference should be made to its other manifestations in the political jargon of the exponents of apartheid.
Until very recently, Nationalist Party politicians seeking votes or support spoke of the "two nations", meaning the English and the Afrikaans-speaking whites. Needless to say, a discreet distance between Afrikanerdom and the other nation was cautiously maintained. Now that South Africa is a Republic, there is more frequent talk of "the nation". The rest of the inhabitants of South Africa, who constitute the majority, have never been either a nation or part of the "nation". They are "non-people", and are identified as Bantu (formerly "native", formerly "kaffir"), Coloureds (formerly "Hotnots"), and Indians (formerly "Coolies"). Chinese and other Asians - excluding the Japanese - belong to this last category. [ Consciousness of these colour and race differences is nurtured, encouraged, maintained, and even enforced by means of numerous devices transcending every conceivable sphere of life, and invariably placing the African, with his black skin, at the rock bottom of the human scale, the white man at the top, and the rest at an intermediary level close to the African. So long as this consciousness of colour and racial dissimilarity, with its concomitant stratifications, is kept alive in the minds of the inhabitants, it is hoped, colour and race can serve the interests of domination and exploitation, with the "people" living off the "non-people".]
We have followed the history of this relationship, in so far as it is a matter of government policy in South Africa, to the late nineteenth century. Its true origin, however, is neither governmental nor political. It emanates from the pitch-dark days of slavery.
The unexampled profits which slave labour yielded to slave masters and investors in an expanding world trade between European Powers and their colonies, with the clamorous demand for more slaves and more slave labour, initiated a wholesale invasion of the African coast and interior by slave traders, who seized thousands of Africans and flooded the slave market with slaves from Africa, to the total eclipse of non-African slaves. The result was that "slave" came to mean "African slave" and the black skin became the universal badge of slavery and inferiority.
As Europe and America grew more prosperous, and in order that they might grow even more prosperous, the humiliation, degradation, and dehumanisation of man by man continued as black African slaves were beaten, tortured, hanged, exposed to conditions which killed them in tens of thousands year after year, persecuted and terrorised, and in general confined to a separate existence of their own - an existence more animal than human, nearer death than life. All this was done in an attempt to subdue and subordinate them to rigid control and to extract more and more labour from them without the risk of a revolt. It was the status of the slave, the purpose for keeping him in that status, and the methods which it became unavoidable to use which were later to lend force to the movement for the abolition of slavery.
But the slaves were the private property of their owners and a vital economic asset. The Cape had not lagged behind in availing itself of this asset. By 1806, 25,000 settlers owned a population of 30,000 slaves. Thus it was that the decision of the British Government to order the emancipation of slaves in all British colonies was deeply resented by slave-owners at the Cape as being an unwarranted interference in their domestic affairs and personal rights, and as showing disrespect for their doctrines and beliefs. The slaves were emancipated, but the grievances remained and for many of the dispossessed owners became the chief of several causes of the Great Trek, which culminated in the establishment of the Boer Republics. Something else remained: the mental attitude which had learnt to recognise in a slave a black man, in the black man a slave, and in both a subhuman. This was not peculiar to South Africa, but while the rest of the world has now acknowledged that all men are equal, the "people" of the Republic of South Africa will permit no equality between white and Coloured inhabitants.
Franchise
There is no African, Coloured, or Indian member of the South African Parliament, and there never has been. For the African and Indian there is not even the pretence of a franchise. The Transkeian gathering of Africans called a "Parliament" represents no extension of franchise or political rights to Africans in South Africa. In the context of the South African political situation, as also in the extent to which the Government, an interested party, interfered in the conduct of the election campaign and in the actual voting, the make-believe elections, at which the "M.P.s" were elected for the "Transkeian Parliament", were patently farcical. Since the people could not stop the elections, however, they took the opportunity to protest at apartheid by casting their votes overwhelmingly against government-supported candidates in spite of pressures and techniques, sometimes subtle and often crude, to swing the votes in the opposite direction.
The so-called "Parliament" is at best an administrative institution. By clear intention and design, it is dominated by chiefs who are civil servants in the pay of the government, and whose first loyalty is to their government and employer. No decision that this "Parliament" takes will have any validity unless approved by the Government, and the latter will approve nothing which is not in the interests of racial discrimination and white domination. And the bantustan scheme is nothing if it is not an attempt to entrench racial discrimination and white domination throughout the length and breadth of South Africa. That is why the Transkeian bantustan has had to be constituted over the dead bodies of scores of African people, and under the crushing grip of a State of Emergency.
The Coloured people of the Cape Province may elect a meagre four whites to represent them in a House Assembly that contains 160 members. But this represents a loss, not an increase of rights. In 1909, 10.1 percent of the registered voters were Coloured, as against the 85.2 percent European. The Africans, although their population was more than double the number of whites, accounted for 4.7 percent of the registered votes. Africans and Coloured could not be members of Parliament.
In Natal, also a "liberal" colony, the franchise for non-whites was a burlesque. Figures for the year 1907 show that the whites constituted 99.1 percent of the registered votes. The remaining 0.9 percent was made up of 150 Indians who had managed to qualify for registration, 50 Coloured, and exactly 6 lonely Africans. And yet the non-whites comprised 91 percent of the colony`s population.
It could be justifiably claimed, however, that for the years 1907 and 1909 these franchise rights, however limited, represented at least a faint glimmer of light which would grow, given enough time, into the brightness of a full day. It did not grow. If faded when Union was formed in 1910 and was later to vanish altogether under Nationalist Party rule.
Racist Laws and Cheap Labour
In the fifty-three years that have passed since Union, the South African Parliament has produced the most appalling collection of racist laws to be found in any single country anywhere in the world. Their cumulative effect and the increasing ferocity with which they have been enforced during the past sixteen years have given to apartheid the basic characteristics, if not the exact dimensions, of slavery. But to the African, for whom the policy has meant humiliation and degradation, starvation, disease and death, jail, beatings, torture and hangings, the difference is academic.
Masters and Servants Laws, a relic of pre-Union times, make it an offence against the State for an African to disobey his master, to absent himself from work without permission or good cause, or to commit some breach of contract of employment. These laws serve to invest the employer with powers to exact submissiveness and docility from the African so that his labour can be the more effectively exploited. They are supplemented by and are themselves part of an elaborate network of discriminatory laws, such as the Industrial Conciliation Act, and the Natives (Settlement of Disputes) Act, which make strikes by Africans illegal; the Mines and Works Act, which confines Africans to unskilled employment; the Native Land Act, which robs Africans of rights to all but a final 13 percent of the land; the Natives (Urban Areas) Act, and a long list of other laws, all amended from time to time for greater effectiveness, and supported by numerous regulations, ordinances, and proclamations. By this network of laws the African population is held in the compulsory service of South Africa`s whites. Interlocking systematically with the entire range of racialist legislation, and knitting it into a fine mesh, the notorious Pass Laws guaranteed to the whites that this service is not only compulsory but also incredibly cheap. How else could the "people" prevent the "equalisation of persons of colour with white inhabitants"?
"Abantwana balala ngendlala!" This is the anguished but all too familiar cry of a starving mother in South Africa`s reserves, writing to her husband, telling him that the children are starving. He is working on a white farm, in competition with convict labour, or he is in a mine receiving wages far below those enjoyed by white miners, or may be he is sweeping the streets of some city, and earning £3 a week, from which he pays for his food, rent, train or bus fare to and from work. Wherever he may be working, if he sends any money, it is all spent within a few days of its receipt. His wife writes a second letter reporting how many of the children are ill, and a third one telling which of them has already died. But, precisely because the children are starving and dying of starvation, he must remain working. He must find work and accept any wage.
The reserves are overcrowded, poor, and unproductive and are the scene of perennial famines. He must seek work outside the reserves. If he goes to the mines, he may never return, and if he does he may bring back a broken limb or miner`s phthisis. If he goes to work on a farm, he may be beaten to death. At the very least there will be a sjambok and a boot urging him to work harder and yet harder, and at the end of the contract his earnings will have accumulated to a mere pittance.
Where he offers himself for either the mines or farm labour, he will have little difficulty in proceeding to his place of employment. His travelling expenses will be met by way of a loan, to be recovered by compulsory deduction from his wages. But if, because of the unpopularity of the work in the mines or on farms, he enters an urban area for the purpose of seeking work, then from the time of such entry he is like a convict at large, liable to be taken to the nearest prison on meeting the first policeman; for the Urban Areas Act and the Pass Laws make it practically impossible for him to escape arrest, unless he plays a cat-and-mouse game with the police - spending the night in a wide variety of backyards, taking illegal shelter with friends, if any, while during the day, as he moves from place to place, exploring various avenues to lawful residence and employment, he avoids the police as if they were wild carnivorous beasts waylaying their black-skinned booty at street corners. The obstacles placed in the way of taking up a job completely deprive the African of the power to bargain for satisfactory terms of employment and place him at the unrestricted mercy of the employer. The result is cheap labour.
Forcible Removals
Another device by which African labour is kept cheap is the insecurity of homelessness. The true essence of home is not where one is forced to live, against one`s will and against all reason, but where one chooses to live, and it includes the right to live with one`s family.
If ever the reserves were anyone`s home, they have long ceased to be so for most Africans. Besides, the Government has given itself powers to remove any African or group or community of Africans from any part of the country to any other part if it considers this desirable "in the interests of good government". Many Africans and African communities have been forcibly removed from their houses under these arbitrary powers.
On the farms, the regular farm-labourer lives on his employer`s property. If he loses his job, he loses his home simultaneously. He cannot enter an urban area because of pass and influx control regulations; he cannot eke out an existence from the barren hillsides of the reserves. He therefore wanders from farm to farm with his family and belongings, seeking employment. In general the fact that he has been expelled from one farm makes him an undesirable character in the eyes of other farmers. In these circumstances he is open to ruthless exploitation.
In urban areas, Africans are huddled into depressing and soul-destroying "native locations", which are clusters of little houses largely built to the same monotonous pattern and arranged in rows. In these locations, as in all areas set aside for African occupation, the numerous conditions governing such occupation are such as to reduce the African`s residential rights to a precarious tenancy.
The village of Sophiatown was literally razed to the ground with bulldozers to force its residents out of their properties and move them to locations. A series of these mass removals has been carried out in different parts of the country. The latest is taking place in Alexandra Township, an African village on the outskirts of Johannesburg. This has been an established community with many of the families living there already in the third generation. Thousands of families have already been forcibly removed to locations. There remain 10,000 married couples and 21,000 children. These are now to be eliminated. The village is to be bulldozed out of existence, and in its place eight hostels are to be built, each to house 2,500 single Africans. The women and children, remnants of the broken families, will presumably be driven into the overcrowded and denuded reserves. It is as if a farmer was taking part of his cattle to a camp on one part of his farm, picking out the oxen from the remainder, and placing them in another camp in another part of the farm, and driving the cows and calves to a third camp some distance away. He can of course not be expected to consult, much less seek the approval of, his cattle, and he does neither.
Disparity in Wages
The destruction of the sense of security that comes from having a home and family is therefore the aim and effect of government policy for the Africans in urban as well as in the rural areas. It has contributed enormously to the maintenance of a regular supply of cheap labour, and has helped, as few other things could do, to highlight and preserve the time-honoured difference between the "people" and the "non-people". Although South Africa is by all accounts "blessed" with a vast reservoir of cheap labour, the guilty try to soothe their consciences by stating, in a blind comparison, that Africans are better paid in South Africa than in most countries in Africa. Yet wages have reality only in relation to the cost of living. Instead of comparing an African worker in South Africa with another in another country, let us compare the wages of two workers in South Africa: an African and a white labourer. In 1946, the average earnings of an African worker employed by manufacturing industry amounted to £159.1 per annum, as against £734.28 for a white employee in the same industry. A white employee therefore received 4.6 times an African`s wages.
In 1958, the corresponding figures were, for an African employee, £173.25, against £915.89 for a white worker, giving a ratio of 5.28:1. In 1961, an African received £176.6 as against £991.28. The ratio became 5.6:1.
These figures show that between 1946 and 1961 white earnings rose by 35 percent while African wages increased by only 11 percent. In that period the cost of living far outstripped the negligible increase in African wages.
The wages paid to an African mine-worker have hardly improved since the nineteenth century. He receives one sixteenth of a white worker`s wages. In 1962 mining profits exceeded £140 million. The African mine-worker, however, is still paid 3s. per shift, plus a ration of third-grade mealie meal, some inexpensive meat, potatoes, and a few items produced on white farms where African wages are even lower, with a white employee earning 17 times what an African earns. The forcible sale of a man`s labour by another for the other`s sole benefit is a right enjoyed only by an owner with respect to his property. The subtleties of apartheid do not make it obvious that a mechanism exists in South Africa by means of which Africans are forced to work for wages that the employers pay to the government for its sole benefit.
Imprisonment and Police Violence
It is now common knowledge that at least one thousand Africans per day are convicted by South African courts for petty pass offences. There are also convictions for tax offences, failure to pay municipal rents, breaches of numerous government proclamations and ordinances in urban and rural areas, as well as convictions for offences the commission of which is the inevitable result of the drastically repressive conditions under which Africans live.
When all these are taken into consideration, the number of Africans driven into South African jails every day, year in and year out, must be of the order of 2,000. From the jails they are distributed as convict labour to farmers and other employers, and payment for the labour thus given is made to the government. The practice makes the law, the police, and the courts appear as a simple device whereby the African is summarily stripped of his rudimentary rights and then forced to work as if he were a slave.
The practice of apartheid has made South Africa a lively cemetery. Between 1948 and 1960 the total number of Africans killed by police bullets in the course of political protest, including the victims of the Sharpeville massacre, was approximately 300 according to official records. Since then there have been scores of Africans killed in the Transkei when the African people opposed the Government`s attempt to impose a bantustan on them.
Some Africans have been killed, not by the police but in circumstances initiated by general opposition to apartheid. Others have been sentenced to death for alleged offences committed in similar circumstances. The total number of unnatural deaths accountable to apartheid and resulting directly or indirectly from some government provocation must be well in excess of 500.
Poverty and Disease
It is, however, in the matter of health that the inherent evil of white domination appears at its most heartless. One of the topics which the South African Government discusses least in its propaganda material is the state of health of the African people. The only information that seems to be available relates to Baragwanath Hospital. We are repeatedly told that this hospital has three miles of beds and the best and highest of everything. No other hospital seems to exist in South Africa. There is not the faintest hint as to the annual mileage covered by African graves. The reason is not far to seek.
Apartheid keeps African labour cheap. It has to in the interests of the "people". Cheap labour keeps Africans underfed. In the urban areas four out of every five families are starving. The rate is higher in the country areas. The result is that the African population is exposed to the ravages of diseases easily traceable to poverty. The average life expectancy of an African is 37-42 years. For whites it is 67-72 years, a difference of 30 years!
In breathless praise of the government`s showpiece hospital, Baragwanath, the Director of Information of the South African Embassy in London declares: "Every hour of the day and night a baby is born in the maternity ward." But out of every 100 African babies born, 57 die, before they reach their fifth birthday. The rate for whites is 5 per cent.
This mass destruction of innocent babies is the work of apartheid. In the midst of so much wealth and so much food, there has to be so much poverty, and so many deliberately starved to death.
And yet the boast persists: "South Africa has never had it so good." Indeed it has not. On the weary and laden shoulders of African labourers stand the great finance houses of the Western world. South Africa is pulling down its old buildings and replacing them with skyscrapers that rise to dizzy heights. The London Stock Exchange is pouring fortunes into the bulging treasure bags of British investors. Cheques are dropping on the marble desks of United States financiers with unfailing regularity, each fatter than the last. And what goes into the roughened and empty hands of the African who digs up all the wealth? Nothing but poverty and early death - and on top of it all, taxation.
Taxation of Africans
There is a sharp contrast between the system of taxation for the Africans and that for the whites, because the purposes of the two systems differ. The taxation imposed on the African people is another ruthless instrument designed to compel them accept work on the white-owned mines and farms. To this end, for Africans, but not for whites, failure to pay tax is a criminal offence.
While an African man above the age of 18 years must pay a minimum of R3.50 A Rand (R) was then equal to half a pound sterling. per annum, irrespective of whether he earns an income or not, whites are only liable to pay income tax if they earn R600 per annum or more. For whites anything less than R600 is regarded as inadequate for the purposes of taxation. For Africans no distinction is made between married and single, and no rebates are granted for dependents or the possession of insurance policies, as in the case of whites.
In addition to poll tax, Africans have to pay local tax; tribal levies to Bantu Authorities; a Bantu Education tax; ploughing, dipping, and grazing fees.
Apart from direct taxation, statistics for 1957 show that Africans contribute between £42,500,000 and £50,000,000 per annum in indirect taxation. Despite this huge contribution there are hardly any social amenities for the African people. The government uses the revenue from African taxation to develop apartheid institutions which the people reject, such as Bantu Education. It has often been said that "taxation without representation is tyranny". In South Africa the Africans are taxed by a white minority government in order that it may forge and build the instrument of its tyrannical rule.
Not satisfied that the interests of white domination have been fully secured, and anxious to perfect the machinery of exploitation of the African people for the benefit of white South Africa and her friends, Dr. Verwoerd has now thought up the "Bantu Laws Amendment Bill". It is suitably colour-washed with such sugared phrases as "Peace Officer", "law courts", and "Aid Centres". But the savagery of the Bill is the product of a mind that combines the ruthlessness of a slave-driver with a sadistic admiration for Hitler`s system of labour camps.
Group Areas and Population Registration
So far, only limited reference has been made to the impact of apartheid on the other Coloured races in South Africa. This is not because this policy is any less inhuman to them. Racialism is an essential element in apartheid and is incapable of humanity. What has been said in relation to the African people covers the fate of the other non-whites but with slight variations in degree. Mention must be made, however, of two laws, both passed in 1950 and both intended to affect everyone in South Africa.
The Group Areas Act, 1950, amended in 1957, sets out to carve up South Africa into racial group areas and force each group to live in an assigned area. In practice it turned out to be a vehicle of hate and an instrument for the persecution in particular of the Indian community. Government representatives openly admitted that its aim was to ruin the Indian people economically. Its harsh provisions carried out with a callousness more suited to a society of jungle-bred headhunters than a "Christian" country. Under this Act Africans have been pushed from area to area and forcibly broken up into ethnic and tribal groups to facilitate their suppression.
The Population Registration Act, 1950, required the registration of every person in South Africa, with particulars of race and other detailed information. The Act created a Board to classify borderline cases between the racial groups. As soon as members were appointed to this Classification Board, it summoned some whites to appear before it to prove that they were not "natives". Guided by the Act`s meticulous definitions of "white person", "Coloured", and "native", they carried out a witch hunt into their victims` past ancestry and unearthed ancient birth, marriage, or death certificates and other documentary evidence in their quest for the truth. They perused sworn affidavits and heard oral testimony. They scrutinised the hair, nose, eyes, lips, and skin of the "suspect". They questioned and cross-questioned him or her for hours, and having retired for a few days or weeks to consider the verdict, they ultimately arrived at a decision, and communicated their judgment to the person under investigation.
A white woman suddenly discovered, to her horror, that her husband was not white but Coloured and that her own beloved children had suddenly become Coloured. A shocked white man was told that his wife did not have pure blood, and his children promptly ceased to be white and automatically dropped out of white society.
The Board tore into the Coloured community with added vigour, setting off a paralysing wave of panic in every household as one Coloured person after another was adjudged a "native". No mediaeval Inquisition was ever more through or derived more satisfaction from its task.
Following the letter and the spirit of government policy, the Classification Board broke families and careers to pieces as husband and wife, parent and child, and brother and sister were wrenched apart and many cast into the caste below. Reportedly, at least one child in Cape Town, unable to bear the mental strain of it all, committed suicide.
As the wave of panic began to sweep into the white community, causing understandable unease among those who had been shouting loudest about the purity of their blood, the Classification Board was called off and disbanded, but not before its activities had demonstrated: what needless damage racialism had done in South Africa; to what bottomless depths one has to sink one`s soul to be an advocate of apartheid, or its supporter, open or secret; and yet, what impenetrable emptiness pervades the noisy myth that there is a pure race to be protected, to the last drop of its blood, against ordinary human beings living in their motherland.
The inhumanity of Population Registration Act is the inhumanity of apartheid as reviewed in the foregoing pages. It will be observed that, for this grisly and ever-widening trail of persecution, death, and destruction, the Constitution adopted by the select "people" in 1961 claims the "guidance of the Almighty God". But what a sordid record for such a claim!
Stop Trading with South Africa
The outline given so far of the diversified manifestations of apartheid makes no mention of the reactions of those affected by this policy. The impression may have been created that the oppressed have been the passive and meek victims of ruthlessness. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If the South African Government`s defence budget for the current year has had to be raised to the monstrous figure of £105 million, if the white population has taken to sleeping with loaded pistols under its pillows, if it has become necessary to maintain a large police force and army - both heavily armed and perpetually on the alert - it is because South Africa is in the thick of a vicious political struggle which has now reached a stage where women`s pistols, police arms, and a white army are all that separates the majority of the people of South Africa from their historic objective - the destruction of apartheid and everything that goes with it, and the establishment of a South African State of which all its people will be justly proud.
The struggle against apartheid and white domination has consumed half a century of patience, leaving in its place a yawning vacuum soon to be filled with bitterness, hate, and worse. But it has shown, as the experience of the African National Congress demonstrates, that there are South Africans, no less white than Mr. Vorster, and Afrikaans- as well English-speaking, whose hatred of white domination, racial discrimination and exploitation is second to none. Side by side with the Africans, they have fought against these evils, and so have been ostracised by their neighbours and friends. Like the oppressed, they have been banned, imprisoned in the solitude of their houses, held in solitary confinement, and subjected to torture; they are with the oppressed, facing trial - even death sentences; no less than Chief Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Robert Sobukwe, George Peake, Monty Naicker, and many others, they reject white supremacy and suffer for doing so. They are few. But this is precisely where the greatness of their courage lies. Their white countrymen have rallied to the support of a white regime. Other South Africans are abroad, in the company of the peoples of the world who have demanded a halt to racialism. Some have given and are giving of their best in the humanitarian cause which is no less vital in the final result. But what is to be the end of the world`s abhorrence of apartheid, if the world supports apartheid materially?
If this Conference should find, as the opponents of white domination in South Africa have insisted, that there is nothing the world can do if it does not impose sanctions to destroy apartheid, then let this Conference throw its full weight behind the demands of African, Asian, and other nations upon South Africa`s trading partners to stop trading with a country which refuses to abandon a slave system.