Page 51 - Afrika Must Unite

36 AFRICA MUST UNITE
people resisted the ‘white m an’s medicine’, because they
suspected it of being evil rather than good. Acceptance of
twentieth-century medical techniques demands a certain level of
education, and without this m any of our people accepted death
and disease as part of an ordained pattern.
Just as the colonialists failed to develop our countries, they did
little to enlarge our intellectual and social horizons. The reasons
they gave for this were as much resented by us as the denial of the
advantages. The African, it was m aintained, would not
appreciate better conditions. He was incapable of education
beyond certain lim its; he would not respond to the incentives of
higher standards of life. All these arguments, produced over and
over again in the past, have since been shown to be no more than
slander and calumny.
In many parts of our continent, Africans were deliberately
barred from attaining necessary skills to raise wages and
standards of living. An industrial colour bar has existed. Africans
and Europeans doing the same job, as in the Copper Belt, are
given very different pay; in most cases Africans are getting about
one-tenth of the European equivalent. Conditions in South
Africa are too well known to need illustration, though it may
come as a surprise to some to learn that in Cato M anor, a suburb
of Durban, about 95 per cent of the inhabitants live permanently
below the bread line. Even on the Reef, the richest part of the
country, 70 per cent have incomes below the essential mini­
m um .1
A W orld Health Organisation report by Dr J. A. M unoz2 has
revealed that in Basutoland the already low standard of living
seems to be sinking even lower. The birth-rate which was 30.6
per thousand in 1951, had dropped to 22 per thousand in 1957, it
being thought that infertility was due to lack of food. The infant
m ortality rate doubled between 1951 and 1957, when it reached
116 per thousand children.
European colonization has been responsible for much of the
suffering of so many Africans. A recent writer has gone so far as to
say that ‘imperialist rule, far from bringing about progress, has
1 Ronald Segal: The Agony of Apartheid.
2 Patrick Duncan: Contact, 9 January i960. Quoted Africa Digest, February
i960.