Page 29 - Afrika Must Unite

H AFRICA MUST UNITE
The ruling class in South Africa consists of some three million
persons of European descent. This ruling class controls the
armed forces, which are armed and trained specifically to deal
with civil disturbance. The opponents, the remaining twelve
million inhabitants of South Africa, are unarm ed and lack the
elaborate political and economic organization which the ruling
class has built up. It is because of this that the ruling class con­
sider that their position is safe and that they can continue in­
definitely to pursue their apartheid policy.
History has shown that such a calculation is entirely false, and
if we look below the surface it can, I think, be shown that the
position of the South African Government is fundamentally
weak. There has been a significant repudiation of the regime by
a section of the intellectual class, significant in the context of the
South African situation, where even the slightest liberalism in
race relations brings down the w rath of the Government. It is
the cloud the size of a m an’s hand seen by the Prophet Elijah,
the inevitable approach of the storm.
A second sign of trouble to come is the division in the ruling
class itself. The two m ain political parties in South Africa, the
United Party and the Nationalists, though both dedicated to the
maintenance of racial inequality, differ about how this in­
equality should be m aintained. The significance of the division
is that it runs deep enough to have split the unity of the wielders
of South Africa’s intensive racialist policy, and the Government
cannot, therefore, claim undivided loyalty.
Also significant in recent years is the emergence of the Pro­
gressive Party, an organization of persons of goodwill allied to
some of the shrewdest financiers in the country. These financiers
are mainly of British stock and represent mining, manufacturing
and commercial interests, concerned with the erection of a wider
internal market and easier international relations than the
Boer-controlled apartheid policy allows. The intellectuals within
the party realize that there is something deeply wrong with
South Africa, and that if the Union is to survive, radical changes
must be made. Ultimately, however, they all fight shy of the
only change which can solve the South African situation, the
establishment of the principle of one m an one vote, irrespective
of colour or racial origin. Like most reforming parties which