Tuesday, April 5. 1960 University Daily Kansan
Page 3
Apartheid Adds to South African Problem
By Carolyn Frailey
A little-known and seldom heard word has become the basis for strife, splits and riots in our world today, and is causing general concern in the United Nations over the future peace and security of the Union of South Africa.
Apartheid is the policy of the South African Nationalist Government to introduce gradual separation of the three racial groups—white, Coloured and native. The word itself means "apartness" or separate development of the races.
The apartheid policy has brought constant criticism and disapproval from countries all over the world. The most significant criticism has come from other countries in Africa, especially those newly nationalized, which have gone so far as to threaten to march on masse to South Africa in an effort to stop racial discrimination practices.
The word is apartheid.
Many countries, including those in Africa already have boycotted trade with South Africa and several others have threatened to do so if the apartheid policy is not lifted or revised.
The Union of South Africa is in the dominion of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, but the government actually is run by a governor-general, senate, house of representatives and a council of ministers.
A quick look at this southernmost country of the African continent, which has a total area of only 472,685 square miles and includes four provinces, shows that the population of natives exceeds the European population by more than four times. In between these two groups lies an extensive group of racial mixtures which is referred to as Coloured.
The natives are divided roughly into three classes — tribal natives of the reserves, the resident laborers on farms belonging to Europeans and the town dwellers. They are practically all of Bantu stock and are characterized by their strong sense of family responsibility. The reserve dwellers derive their income almost exclusively from farming, with the wives doing most of the cultivating of the land.
Most of the Bantus leaving the reserves do so because all of the reserve land cannot be agriculturally self-supporting.
However, the mode of life and glamor of the cities also play their part in luring the natives from the reserves. European church missions have succeeded in educating approximately 30 per cent of the native population.
Edwin S. Munger, American Universities Field Staff and specialist on Africa, lists five specific areas where the apartheid policy is straining the peoples' patience the most — franchise, academic freedom, freedom to work, freedom of movement, and freedom of association.
The franchise problem has arisen over efforts of the Europeans to abolish the right of Africans to vote for members of parliament, a franchise they have exercised with various restrictions for more than 100 years. In return for the removal of qualified Africans from a common roll since 1936, the Africans were guaranteed the right to vote for three out of 162 members of parliament and were promised 24,000 square miles of land. After 24 years, only two-thirds of the land promised to the Africans has been purchased for them.
The Coloured population — those other than the Europeans and natives — is bound by close and emotional ties of language, religion, and history. For more than a decade, this group has been steadily moved away from the white group and subjected to negative legislation. Many of the Coloured group try to pass as whites to avoid these restrictions and have found it relatively easy to do so. The tendency in South Africa is to "up-grade" the person if there is any doubt as to race.
According to Mr. Munger, no single apartheid issue has so aroused the condemnation of the Western world as the proposals of the South African government to increase segregation in higher education. The government proposal is to force the "open" universities of Capetown and Johannesburg to exclude non-white students, and to make faculty members of the nonwhite universities subject to the
. . . Books in Review . . .
By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
THERESE RAQUIN, by Emile Zola. Bantam Classics, 50 cents.
Zola was bursting the shackles of conventionality at the same time that his painter friends were being denied showings in the Salon. Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" was a shocker only two years previously. Other artists were preparing to cast off the rigid patterns of the past — Ibsen and Strindberg in Scandinavia, the naturalistic followers of Zola in America.
"Therese Raquin" is still a shocker. It is a story that seems familiar to us today, one that popular novels and the movies have made almost a stereotype (I can recall rapidly James M. Cain's "Double Indemnity" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice"). It is the theme of thieves falling out, though in this case it is not thieves but man and woman who plot the death of a husband who is in the way. After they bring about his murder, and consummate their unholy alliance in marriage, they find that even sex — or especially sex — cannot exorcise the ghost of the dead man. His green body, bloated by the waters of the Seine, lies between them in the bed. And eventually all that is left is for them to destroy each other.
control of a cabinet minister in regard to their place of teaching and tenure.
Here is the brutal objectivity that would come to characterize naturalism, as well as Zola's pessimistic determinism and essential amorality. One cannot help wondering, however, how Zola and the other naturalists — notably Dreiser — could profess both objectivity and amorality. Zola clearly was taking a position when he chose to write the story of Therese Raquin and her lover Laurent.
In 1867 Emile Zola termed the critical reception of his first important novel "A handful of mud thrown in my face in the name of morality." Critics were unprepared for such a novel. Not even the amoral story of Julien Sorel in Stendhal's "The Red and the Black" or Flaubert's blunt and brutal depiction of the restless Emma in "Madame Bovary" had equipped the critics to handle such a sojourn into the darker paths of mind and action.
The cover, incidentally, is illustrated with Renoir's lovely "Bal a Bougival," two lovers dancing in the half world of Paris. The painting is contemporaneous with "Therese Raquin," but one might ask if this beautiful work of French impressionism is the most apt decoration for this hideous story of stuffy and foul-smelling bedrooms, bistros and morgues.
Altnough the new non-white medical school in Durban has proved a success, the problem lies in so many different "tribal" universities plus one for the Coloured community. Educators in South Africa are in agreement with the criticism against further segregation and some professors soundly condemn it.
Freedom of movement in their own country is being steadily restricted for the non-white population, especially the movement of rural Africans seeking higher pay in the labor-short cities.
Freedom to work has been taken from the natives and Coloured population by "job reservation" laws under which certain categories have been reserved for white people. Some positions, now reserved for white people only, for many years had been filled efficiently by Coloured or native workers, with no complaints from employers or fellow workers. Mr. Munger says. No previously "white" jobs have been reserved for non-white people under this legislation. However, in certain areas where competition by non-Africans is prohibited, some professional posts, skilled trades and occupations have been opened to Africans.
Mr. Munger reports that a new cabinet minister is trying to forbid whites and non-whites from meeting each other in their homes. They now are severely restricted from meeting in public places.
housing for Africans in the cities has been vastly improved in the last 10 years, with more than 55 million dollars spent to build more than 100,000 homes. But slum clearance and rebuilding involved the termination of African landownership in the urban areas.
A new penal code allows poor prisoners to serve their sentences on weekends in order not to deprive their families of needed income. However, the number of convictions of white policemen for assaults, including rape, on non-
Positive achievements of the South African government along the lines of improving the lives of the natives can be found, but they all have their limitations.
whites continues to reflect on the South African police.
South African medical and social services are the best in Africa, but the nursing profession continues to be deeply concerned over government insistence on dividing the nursing register along racial lines. Mr. Munger observes that despite all of the recent trouble in South Africa over the apartheid policy, the racial situation is continuing to improve. Senior civil servants are sweeping and scathing in their criticism of the Nationalist party and the English press is slowly learning not to smother Afrikaner critics with fulsome praise. The man who wishes to be a constructive critic, but not an outright rebel, is so praised to the skies by the opposition that he has little choice but to be publicly silent, Mr. Munger says.
As the situation now stands, the apartheid policy of South Africa will have to be changed in one way or another before relative peace and stability can be achieved, not only within the country itself, but in its relations with the rest of Africa and the outside world.
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