a Government official exactly half an hour to turn him into an African. i>'rom then on, he had to carry a pass; he had to leave his home and try to find another in an African location. He lost his job. He could not even EEn&zitEKzfcBx&xxsix claim his war veteran's pension when he became old - Africans are not eligible for such pensions.

In some big hauls in Johannesburg, Coloured people were rounded up in the streets on their way to work or while shopping; or were taken from their jobs. They were taken before a tribunal where questions were fired at them: 'What does your mother look like?Did your grandfather have crinkly hair? tfhere did your grandmother come from? What is your wife? Her father^ Her grandfather? Is her complexion darker than yours? What is the length of her hair?Do you eat porridge? Do you sleep on the floor or on a bed?1 By such questions, they determined a person's racial category.

But how do you decide to what group a person goes v/hen that decision must be made contrary to every known biological law? Is this man to be classified as African or Coloured? His job, his home, his whole future and that of his children, depends on the outcome. Stick a pencil in his hair and ask him to bend down; if the pencil stays in, he is Bantu - African; if it falls out, he is Coloured. Will this woman be classified as White or Coloured? In court, appeali.i;.: against her classification as a Coloured, she is asked to bare ber skin, her arms, her neck - see, her skin is lily- white, her lawyer states. Two eminent anthropologists, Professor Dart of the University of Witwatefcsrand and Dr. Breutz a government ethnologist, are called to give evidence before the tface Classific­ation Board to prove that an 80-year-old man should be classified as Coloured, not African. Cross-examined on his evidence, Professor Dart says Mr. ./angra is not an African, "his forehead is elevated, the head broad and short, his nose has a high bridge with the typical curved contour of an Armenoid nose. He has neither the jutting lower jaw nor the flared nostrils of a Eegro." The man is made to turn his face this way and that, so that the Board can examine all points

and compare them with the pictures of different racial types.But there is only one race on earth, says another South African,

the famous archaeologist, Professor van Riet Lowe, and that is the human race. Talking of roan's origin, he decleres we are all one; whether you ere yellow, black or white, he says, you belong to the human race.

Not in South Africa today.The 3haae of the pigmentation of your skin determines whether jtou

can go on living in your borne, continue in your job, send your children to a decent school. There is no protection by society or State for what the Declaration of Human Rights calls 'the natural and fundamental unit of society, the family'. Brothers and sisters must part; a mother hides one of her children - darker by a few shades than the others - in a back room so that the family can go on living e.s White.

Where science fails to bolster these policies, justification is sought in the Bible. God created black and white and intended them to be separate and different. Where division does not exist it is forced into being, ’‘here something tends to blur division, it is changed.

By 1963 there were still more than 20,000 people living in a twilight 'no-man's-land' - borderline cases not yet categorised according to race. There was, also, a steady flow of court cases as people appealed against their race classification. The courts have sometimes proved too liberal in their interpretations of the law, and finally this year the Minister of the Interior decided to amend the Population Registration Act once again (amendments had already 'closed loopholes') to stop 'insidious integration' by Coloureds slipping over the line.

Yet it wax is doubtful whether a single family which has been in South Africa for five generations can prove that is does not have Coloured relatives (3)? i*'1 the South African parliament a United M.P., Captain Jack Basson, upset members by saying that if people are to be classified solely on the grounds of descent, then 'there

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are very few people sitting in this Assembly today who could be classified as "White"'. He produced a book, 'Contributions to Genealogies of Old Afrikaans Families' by Dr. J. Hoge to support this view.

He told parliament of a couple who had come to him for help.The woman was White in appearance but when she became engaged to a White man it was found she had been classified as Coloured. Captain Basson had tried to obtain re-classification, but failed, and the woman and her fiance committed suicide.

When Mrs. H. Suzman (the only Progressive Party member of Parliament) referred to the 'sick obsession with race and colour in South Africa', e government M.P. called out to her: 'You have rot a sick obsession with humanism'.

The new amendment will finally close the South African stud-book, so that the country's three end a half million Whites will no longer wake in a sweat at night thinking of the few thousand near- Whites trying to cross the colour-line Now you can oe as fair and aryan as you like, but if the records show you had a Coloured great­grandmother, you must be classified as Coloured. When the records are not clear, then in determi^ig a person's classification his 'habits, education, speech, deportment and demeanour in general shall be taken into account', - as though you can determine a man's skin-colour by his educstion and personal habits'.

'In the long and sordid history of racialism this must rank as one of the most peculiarly obsessive Acts ever recorded' . (4-) What is most dismal is that when the provisions of this monstrous piece of legislation are tightened up again and again, no Nationalist ever raises jwoice of protest; a whole people stand by and watch this injustice being perpetrated on another people without showing any visible signs of disturbed conscience.

Like Eichmann, there people are perfectly sane. 'It is the sane ones, the well adapted ones, who can without qualms and withoutK

nausea, aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane one3, have prepared*. (5)

•The sane ones say 'Why shouldn't we discriminate? It's our country, isn’t it?' In Britain thousands of sane people close the doors of their apartments and offices and industries against people of different skin colour.

You must have a 'sick obsession with humanism' to find something terrible in the laws of a country which say that a smiling, eleven- year-old girl may not live with her own parents and her brothers because her skin is a little darker in colour than theirs.

ends

(1) The term 'Coloured' is used here in the South African sense, meaning a person of mixed racial descent.

(2) The Mixed Marriages Act prohibits marriage between people of different races.

(3) ^Btement by Dr. 0. .ollheim, a Cape Provincial Councillor arid member of the Progressive -rai'ty.

(4) This, and tie rest of the points in this paragraph, appeared in an article in the Johannesburg Sunday Tiros written by Stanley Uys.

(5) Peace iiews, 19 May, Thomas Merton.

Novosti

A SICK OBSESSION V/ITH COLOUR.

by Hilda Bernstein.A little girl has become tbe epitome of one country's obsessional

racial policies. She is a pretty, sailing, eleven-year-old, Sandra Luing, who may no longer legally live with her own parents and her brothers, because the laws of the Christain Republic of South Africa have assigned her to a different racial g "oup to thorn.Although her parents aay circumvent the law by keeping her as their servant, provided that stae lives in separate quarters to them.

Does this sound impossible? But it is true. Sandra's picture has appeared in the newspapers several times, as her parents fight for the right to keep their child. Sandra's mother and father are white, and her two brothers are White, and they hold that precious passport to the good things in South African life - White identity cards. But Sandro's skin is darker than theirs, and in appearance she is Coloured (the term Coloured is used here in the South African sense, moaning a person descended from a mixed union of White and Africauxjhc or White and Malay.) Parents of children at the V-hite school which Sandra attended complained tb the authorities, and the Secretary of the Interior re-clasnified Sandra as 'Coloured'.Thi3 meant not oaly that she had bo leave school immediately, but also that by law she may not live in a 'White' area, with her parents. Sadra's oarenbs appealed to the courts against her classification, but the Supreme Court at Pretoria finally dismissed the fabher's aopeal after the child had been duly inspected by the Deputy- Secretary of the Interior. The Judge, Mr. Justice Galgut, with a certain judicial reluctance, referred to the impossible situation created and added: 'It needs but a little reflection to appreciate the difficulties that can arise in a household where all the other c/dldren are classified as White and this child

only is cla^jified as Coloured'. However, he found the Secretary of the Interior had not acted irregularly in altering her class­ification.

The difficulties that arise for Sandra are simply that she must be taken from her own parents - it is illegal for her even to live in the same locality. Her brothers may go to good schools, to University, live in comfortable houses and earn good salaries.She must now go to a second-rate Coloured school, and as she grows up the best Jobs, the better homes, will not be for her.

In South Africa it is the shade of the pigmentation of your skin that determines where you live, what work you do, what education your children may receive. There is no protection by society or State for what the Declaration of Human Rights calls ‘the natural and fundamental unit of society, the family'.

Recently, the South African parliament has passed a new am ridment to the Population Registration Act. This Act, which has already been amended several times, was origianlly passed in 1950 and it is an essential piece of apartheid legislation, designed to decide cnxe and for all the racial group of every1 single South Africa.The definition is necessary for all other apartheid laws, such as the Bantu Education Act, the Group Areas Act ( hich sets aside certain areas for people of different races) aud all the laws that discriminate in trade unions, work, training and so on.Before 1950 there were definitions of the various racial groups incorporated in a number of aoartheid laws, but the system was not rigid and immutably fixed. People could, and did, pass from one group to another if their physical features allowed. And many did so even when is meant breaking with their families, for if a Coloured person could pass as White a whole new world of jobs and better living conditions opened up. For Africans who could pass as Coloureds the rewards in a way were eveii greater, because they then became free of the whole system of pass laws end similar restrictions.

Within the range of the spectrum, from black Africans on one

side with negroid features to White Caucasians on the other with 'European' features, there exists every possible gradation of colour and of mingled facial characteristics.

With tne Population registration Act, every single person had to be registered according to racial classification, and fchat registration is recorded not only on identity cards, but on birth certificates and all official documents.

Thirteen years after the Population Rep^istration Act was passed, in 1963, there were still more than 20,000 people living in a twilight 'no-nan's-land’ - people who had not yet been categorised according to race because their race was so difficult to define. There was, also, a steady flow of court cases as many appealed against their classification. The courts in South Africa have been slower than the State to enforce all the rigidities of apart­heid. Often the courts upheld appeals, and allowed G&oureds to be classified as Whites.

finally, this year, the Minister of the Interior decided to amend the Act once again to stop what he called the 'insidious integration' of Coloureds slipping over the colour-line.

The new amendment was debated in parliaiiient, when a member of the United Party (the official opposition) upset members of parliament by .saying that if people are to be classified solely on the grounds of descent, then there are 'very few people sitting in this Assembly today who could be classified as White'. He produced a book on the genealogies of old Afrikaans families to prove his point. For the new Amendment will force borderline cases to xs e classification „ccording to descent; that is, if your great grandmother was Coloured or African, you are Coloured, even if you look White.

One member of parliament told the house about a couple who had come to him for assistance. The woman was White in appearance, but when she became engaged to marry a White man, it was found

she had been classified as Colo\ired. This meant thst they could not marry, because the 'Tixed Carriages Act prohibits marriages between people of different races. The member of parliament tried to obtain a re-classification for the woman, but he failed, and the couple committed suicide together.

i'he new amendment will finally close the door, so that only those now classified as White can have White identity cards. Yet there is not a family in South Africa th&t has been there for several generations that docs not have ‘Coloured' blood.

In the long and sordid history of racialism, the Population Registration Act, as it is now amended, must rank as one of the most pecualiarly ohsessive Acts ever recorded. When the only Progressive member of parliament, Mrs. Helen Suzszan, spoke against the Act and referred to what she called 'the sick obsession with race and colour in South Africa,' a member of the Government called out to her: 'You have got a sick obsession with humanism.'

Perhaps to be concerned about the happiness and future of one eleven-year-old girl r.ay be called a 'sick obsession with humanism'. People of other countries, however, are likely only to see South Africa’s sick obsession with the question of skin colour, an obsession that is cruel and degrading for the people of South Africa, and a menace to bhe peace and security of the whole world.

ends.

Hilda Bernstein 43 Frognal,London, N.W.3»England.

iV3

Hilda Bernstein's PERSONAL COMMENT17/3/68

The newspapers cast a blight on my Sundays. I am referring to the Sunday Times and the Observer; we used to get only one, but we became sick of it, so now we have two that make us sicker.

My trouble is that I am too intellectual for the popular papers (Parson and Grave-digger Swop Wives) and not intellectual enough for the ST and 0. Their reviews constantly remind me of how many books I have never read, how many plays I have never seen; and worse - how many writers and artists of whom I have never even heard. They are mentioned in passing, with the bland assumption that the reader knows all about them. Bits of French and Latin quotations are thrown in. I don't know French or Latin. Some reviews - for example, of art exhibitions - are incomprehensible to me, although I have tried reading passages over, straining after what they might mean. They seem to conceal meaning, to obscure understanding. Sometimes I think the reviews are written for small in-groups in a language and with references which only those reared and Educated in the same way can appreciate.

There is a deadly predictability among the feature writers. (Personal Comment, at least, gives you a change each week.)Malcolm Muggeridge, unforgiving to all in the world that robbed him of his idealism, spits and scratches and spitefully denigrates everything. Kathleen Whitehorn is so bland, so amusing, so civilisaS.. One could almost compfee the articles written by the 'oligists'. Edward Crankshaw is a sort of Rip van Winkle from the thirties, ignoring so much in his hoary analysis of 'Kremlin' motives. China is treated in a totally unreal fashion. Latin Anerica scarcely exists.

In many things I feel that the ST and 0 are on the side of us against them - Stanstead, for example, and town planning. But often it seems a sort of cultivated liberalism overlays a hard reactionary pro-establishment view of life: the riots in American cities analysed with sympathy, but nothing to expose the real role of American imperialism in the world today.

Fashion models, with their boots and wigs, inhabit a world I have never entered and the clothes they display were not meant for

[$s

people like me, broad in the beam, with varicose veins and crooked teeth. Do many women really spend all that time decorating their eyes and faces?

The trouble is that in addition to all this, there are often excellent articles. All week I stand in the kitchen, peering between a mess of congealed chop bones and kitchen waste, reading bits I missed on my blighted Sunday.

* * * *

March 21st marks eight years since Sharpeville, that devastating 40 seconds in which 705 rounds from Sten guns were fired into the backs of running men, women and children. In addition to the 249 killed and wounded grotesquely sprawling in the brilliant high-veld sun, the guns of Sharpeville also killed legal political struggle in South Africa and mortally wounded peaceful protest.

For a few days confidence in the country's stablility was shaken, gold reserves dropped drastically, and the future of apartheid hung in the balance. Then the jail doors slammed on 20,000 men and women detained under the State of Emergency (which lasted 5 months); White supremacy re-asserted itself, foreign investors came back, the crisis was overcome.

But the name of Sharpeville, the photos of the fleeing children, the bodies in the sun and dust, the indifferent policemen leaning on their guns, the mass burial with lorry after lorry-load of coffins - all this is graven on our minds as though from stone. Sharpeville marked the end of one long struggle, the beginning of a new one. Sharpeville was the day that SEa&bx&x the people of South Africa decided never again would fehssyzKBHdbeBJtfc petitions and empty hands confront the revolver and Sten gun.

* * * *

THIS SOUTH AFRICA. The case of a 10-year-old orphaned Coloured boy who was kept in jail for a month while awaiting trial on a charge of stealing mealie (maize) meal, will be investigated by a senior police officer and the Chief Magistrate of Paarl.

The boy was found guilty of stealing mealie-meal to feed his grandmother's chickens. His case had been adjourned a number of times during the month he was in custody. Sentence was postponed for three years.

Hilda Bernstein'sPERSONAL COMMENT.

19/3/69

'We've allowed you too much - you don't appreciate what we do for you* 'You blacks are getting out of hand these days.'

If you heard statements like these, made not seriously, but intended as a joke, would you find them funny? I think not; because too many people say such things and mean them; because the 'joker' would be suspect (Freuds he says it as a joke, but actually he means it); because it isn't funny; it is offensive.

Now substitute the noun 'women' for 'blacks' above, because that is what was actually said. And listen, all you men, we women find this type of ha-ha conversation just as nauseating, offensive and revealing as coloured people do.

Following a patronaising little paragraph fe^xEKit&xKxtx in the Observer, (she looked delightfully feminine - ohl), Pendennis then published emasculated extracts ftfom letters of protest so edited that they tended to prove his point rather than the writerst

Therefore I am impelled to return again to this question of the position of women.

'I find the whole feminist thing very boring. They say they arti fighting for thousands of under-privileged women when in fact their reasons are totally personal.' - Diana Rigg, quoted in The Times.

'It's purely an economic question; when society no longer needs to exploit women, the problem will disappear' §KfiBtexzx8Bex iHixzx?xfciia4z±B3bdt - Statement by a socialist woman friend.

How people love to reduce complex issues to a throw-away phrase (feminist thing) or simplified formula.

Because the struggle for equal rights for women (votes, ed­ucation, jobs, pay) was the practical expression of the need to free themselves, these things have taken over as ultimate aims. They are not, they are only symptoms. The inferior status of women is used to depress wages - not the other way around. Women

chose these as pzmdctaalx objectives around which to fight for recognition. But they are not the source of inequality and the last two or three decades should have taught sincere socialists not to reduce all evils to one phrase: tfhange the economic system.

Women have inferior status not only in capitalist society, and the problem of women and their needs and their role remains a problem even in socialist societies (where nominally the obstacles to women's advancement in education and in work have been removed).

Historical, economic, socielogical, psychological and of course sexual factors all have a bearing on women's status in all types of society. But the biggest single factor is biological - the simple fact that women bear the babies and therefore are more directly and deeply involved with rearing them. This means that a woman who has children relinquishes a major portion of most active and product­ive years of her life to a task which, while in long-term results may be considered noble ('makers of the new generation') at the actual point of operation consists in physically and mentally de- habillitating and degrading repetitive tasks of indescribable dreariness, fil

Of course their are rewards - in our contracepfeive^p-conscious society there would be no children at all if this was not the case - and I could never be-little these, for they bring great happiness, from the glorious moment of birth onwards. Joy, satisfaction, achieve­ment. Splendid rewards, and many women think they should be enough.

But the central problem remains: how a wife and mother can, for years on end, preserve for herself some part of her life, some area of activity* which is hers and hers alone. A real privacy, more than the simple privacy which every pother of young children lacks (she can't even go to the lavatory undisturbed.)

The average women is consumed, devoured by her family and its demands, and if she is aware of her deep basic need (which many women only feel in an entirely negative fashion, a sense of disastisfaction) she has to struggle continuously, even with an enlightened husband, for the right to this area of her life. The family wants to take it all. Most women are defeated before they begin. They compensate for

19>

for their loss by emphasising their feminity in physical and in degBading ways.

There are things that can be done here and now - no doubt I'll return to this subject again and again - but I begin by making this simple suggestion to all men:

Never again make those derogatory little jokes about women, idtifc abeKKKfc Women smile, like the black man smiled when he was the butt - and store up bitter resentment and hate that grows with the years.

* * • *

Americo Boavida, was killed in the struggle against Portuguese imperialism in September of last year. Because he had not madethe same contacts with the Western world, his death was not noticed in the same way as the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane; but he was an equally impressive and noble figure.

Before the age of thirty, assured of a safe and brilliant career in specialised surgery, he declared himself a nationalist rebel against Portuguese imperial rule and when the period of armed struggle began in Anglia he devoted his academic training and medical skill to working in the Angolan Volunteer Corps for Aid to Refugees. In 1966 the MPLA under Agostinho Neto mbxksI cleared an area inside Angola large enough for essential services to be installed there, and in thefollowing year Boavida set up field clinics and hospitals. After many years of bitter struggle and sacrifice he saw at last some positive results. Less thqn tmo months after a trip to East Africa to super­vise the chanelling of medical supplies, he was killed by Portuguese bombing at an MPLA base near Muie, while in charge of medical seritces. He was 4-5. 'I am doing what I have to do,' he told a writer, 'and I can tell you that I have realised myself in a way I can never regret.I have thrown away my personal career and I am glad. I am working for my people. I am where I belong.' We will remember him.

* * * *

The 'mini-olympics' at Bloemfontein (South Africa's answer to its exclusion from Mexico last year) present a shoddy and unedifying

spectacle, demonstrating to the world just how obnoxious South African racial attitudes can be in everything they do.

The competitors are all-White ('There will be no let-up of Govern­ment opposition to any form of racial integration in domestic sport inside Sout)a Africa', Vorster has declared), but there was a protracted haggle over whether non-White spectators could be admitted or not.Those pressing for admission did not argue on the basis of justice or anything like that, nor did they find the attitude of the Bloemfontein City Council, firmly opposed to such admission, as reprehensible or against the sporting spirit. No, they felt that if non-Whites were not admitted, this might react badly for White sportsmen in the international sphere.

In the end the council yielded to allow nonwhite* spectators into certain sections, excluding some, like boxing, which command most interest for nonwhites. They also charged nonwhite spectators a higheg admission fee than Whites (e.g., to watch soccer, 70c for nonwhites,60c for whites - reason: to cover the cost of separate lavatory and other facilities they must provide for nonwhitesi) and the maximum number of nonwhites fcBzfeBxaflta±fcfcKBt permitted to watch is 750, out of a stadium with a capacity for more than 40,000. Indians, of course,can't go at all, because provincial barriers prohibit them fuom entering the Free State (site of the games) except in transit.

And they accuse xx the anti-apartheid movement of 'introducing politics into sport.' It's time British sportsmen stopped being so opportunistic over this question.

* * «

\

20/9/69 Zoo

RESETTLEMENT - AN EXERCISE IN HUMAN ALIENATION

Hilda Bernstein.An American phrase adopted for current usage, the credibility

gap« aptly applies to the mainstay of apartheid theory, the concept of African homelands or Bantustans.

The gap appears between what is being said and what is happening; between words and deeds; between myth end reality.

The massive resettlement of hundreds of thousands of South Africans ('approximately 900,000 Bantu have been settle elsewhere under the National Party regime . • . since 1959• Surely this is no mean achievement' the systematic uprooting of individuals,groups, tribes, urban communities, is part of the grand design of apartheid. This must be measured against the claims of a better life for all in the Bantustans. That is, the actuality of the removals, the groups ta’cen, their conditions before and after removal, the reasons given, the general line of development for such communities in the future, all this must be weighed carefully against the stated policies of the statesmen responsible. This brings us to the brink of an unbridgeable chasm, the credibility gap.

Africans are removed for various reasons. The unproductive are uprooted from urban areas, the dictum being that Africans outside the reserves are all migrant labourers, tolerated as long as they can make a contribution in the form of labour to the white economy. Who are unproductive? Men who become too ill or too old to work; women whose husbands are foolish enough to die; children and youths who have not been syphoned to work on the farms; unemployed; that loose group into which political activists fall - 'undesirables'.In rural areas the uprooted are more likely to be tribes and comm­unities who have been designated black spots. A black spot is a any area where Africans live which whites want for any reason.

flhere are they sent? One hundred and thirteen sites have been selected for the establishment of towns and villages to accomodate the evacuees. Resettlement camps. So from homes in towns where there were at least some amenities, schools, transport, industries,

2*f

clinics; or from ancestral lands, often lush and lovely, they are tkane, these idle and undesirable, these widowed and chronically sick, these too old and too young, and dexposited at Limehill,Sada, Welcome Valley, Mdantsane, spewed off the government lorries with what possessions they could take . . . and left to resettle.

If you have never seen these lands, if you have lived all your life in a small, verdant and temperate land, it requires an extraordinary extension of the imagination to picture them. Black spots must be removed and resettled on land which will not be needed nor desired by whites, now or in the future. This is the criterion. Therefore it must be harsh and terrible country where nothing grows; where earth is so iron-hard that even the digging of a latrine cannot be done by men without machines; where there is no natural feature which might enhance its value, no shade from ferocious suns, no grass, trees, crops; far from the white KBHgBiat conglomerates, therefore lacking in roads, telephones, doctors, social and other amenities; a great distance away from any sort of civilisation.

To these savage and arid places, to this grotesque and desolate countryside, to a few rows of unshaded iron or asbestos huts, or inadequate tents, the displaced are taken.

This is the physical setting. More difficult to assess is the other side, the alienation. People are like plants - you cannot just pull them up and fling them somewhere else, expecting them to root themselves and grow. Those who are least able to cope with the trauma of the removals, families without their menfolk, the old, the ill, these are the ones taken. Bewilderment strikes to the very roots of the soul; apathy in the face of problems too great to over­come; sickness, decimating those least able to resist; death.

This story is now told coherently in a booklet issued by the International Defence and Aid Fund. It is called: 'Resettlement' - the new violence to Africans. It gives accounts of removals, descriptions of the resettlement camps by those who have seen them, quotations and statistics relating to the whole scheme. It also

has photographs that convey more h an any words the±BXK±±J!LEXXXXloneliness and desolation of the camps.

8x05titeiifeijEy£ The central objective of all our endeavours should be to eliminate human suffering and misery and to build local communities, provinces and a national State which offer human dignity and opportunities for self-realisation for every citizen.' Tb e speaker? Mr Llaar Coetzee, Minister of Community Development, formerly Deputy Minister of Bantu Development. Yes. And it is estimated that the new pay rise for African miners has brought their minimum earnings, cinluding food, accommodation, medical care and other benefits in kind, up to R18 a month; and the Institute of Race Relations has worked out that not quite 70 per cent of Soweto families live below the minimum poverty budget line. And out of every 100 children in the districts of Oumbp, Tsolo, Mount Frere, Mount Fletcher and Libode, 40 die from malnutrition before they reach the age of 10.

'The credibility gap.'....the mass removal of people in South Africa is a violence;

the contemplated removal of 3.8-million superfluous appendages - to quote the hon. the Deputy Minister of Justice - is a violence; the thousands upon t ousands of Africans in resettlement areas, leading hopeless and helpless lives of poverty and unemployment, is a violence; the very way in which those removals have taken place is a violence . . . '

Read this booklet, and understand a little more why jftsBxxzBctKKKK sit an armed struggle for freedom is less of a violent distortion of peoples' lives than this other kind of violence to the people of South 'frica.

(1) Dr. P. Foornhof, Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration, Houseof Assembly, Feb 4, 69

(2) Mrs Helen Suzman, M.P., House of assembly, June 17» 69.

ivi

%Hilda Bernstein's PERSONAL COMMENT. 50/10/69

1 0 3

Words with blood on them. Wish words to rise and cry, to clamour in the ears, words beating an intolerable battering of tin drums over th« head. Wordsto be swords, to be knives, daggers, cut, thrust strike, tear open soft flesh, raw wounds jagged from which slew blood drops . . . my words drip with blood.

I Much of Dr. Muller's speech was aimed at getting across the message that South Africa did not live under any kind of dominant croup.

The country's separate development policy was not based on kcolour or race but 'on the diffe ent characteristics and separate identities' of each of its various peoples.

It was today one of the most stable, prosperous and peaceful areas on the globe, 'mainly as a result of our policy of separate development which resulted in the removal of the main causes of friction between the different population groups . . . '

Morsgat. Early last December trucks rumbled through the dust along rutted tracks to small settlements, mostly near quarries, where people lived in little brick houses or neat stone and mud huts, and where they and their fathers had so lived for up to one hundred years. Back and forth for a week or two. More than JOG African families were taken to Morsget, brown scrub, uncleared bush, giver ‘ents; and in these tents through summer heat and freezing win'ur they have lived ever since.

No saniitary facilities. They were stopped from digging lavatory pits and told amenities would be provided - nearly a year later, the ameniities have not materialised. The only source of water is a borehole supplying a tanlfc in which the malodorous water surface is covered with slime.

No medical facilities, but an ambulance wilV^ake the seriously ill to a Catholid hospital 25 miles away. Most patients from Morsgat suffer from tuberculosis; also kwashiokor. Morsgat children are plagued by a skin affliction, terrible sores, the skin peels offthe body. People call it 'lekkerkrap' (a good scratch) . . . 'I

neve?? believed the human skin could carry so many sores * • • '

'They are now able to live in harmony with full confidence in the future and without fear of one group being dominated or swamped by others. This applies to the white nation with its Christian /.estern culture and way of life as well as to the various nonwhite nations in our midst or on our borders.'

The average wage of Morsgat breadwinners is & R3 to R4 a week.(R1 - H/S). Their lives are complicated by the fact that families who once lived together close to where the breadwinner worked, have now been ipoved so that the men have become rural migrant labourers stele to afford only weekly or fortnightly visits home from the quarries. The return bus fare, said one man, is R1,80. Etfen so, they will pay this and go without food because they are so worried about their families. 'At a meeting they told us bricks to build a house would cost R80. Cne of the people said this was too much and he was told he was a communist.' The woman laughed angrily. 'We can barely afford food.'

'They can bull;: a nice little house for aboufi R1,000,' says the white works foreman.

People who really knew what was going on in Southern Africa not only rejected the 'gloomy and distorted' picture of its being on the threshold of a major racial clash, but believed it to be 'one of the aost exciting areas of the world.* . . . I wisn to emphasise that there is no substance to the accusation that the white man made an unfair division of South Africa. Indeed, the division was not made by the whites, but was the result of an historical process,and it is by no means unfavourable to the Bantu.' Although an extremely diffivult and costly task, the white South Africans were prepared to give their wholehearted support to the advancement of theVLess developed people in our midst . . . '

Poor, often non-existent facilities; unhealthy and degrading living conditions; additional costs eroding wages that are already

•ZS5"1

far too low; the enforced break-up of families^ these are the morale-3hattering hardships responsible for a comment that is heard again and again in Morsgat: 'We have been thrown away.'

Hopeless resignation . . . a short laugh, a shrug of the shoulders: 'You get nothing by complaining - it's their country.'

'Our policies are frequently condemned as morally wrong and impracticable. These charges are, however, completely unfounded.How can a system be wrong which leads peoples to self-determinationand provides them with higher social, educational an ;anomic standards than can be attained anywhere else in the continent?Which guarantees security for all by avoiding a struggle for power between black and white in South Africa? The results already achieved are indeed gratifying.'

—

Fathe Colia Davis, an Anglican rector who began taking an interest in Morsgat when pari3hloners told him of severe malnut­rition there and diseases th|.at sounded like kwashiokor and pellagra, woke at three in the morning, hi3 children screaming, as stones and half-bricks rained down on his house. The attack was repeated on two other nights . . car tyres let down, windscreen smashed.

The window of a shop belonging to Mrs P, Gould was smashed.Ghe .vas more furious than afraid. 'Let's put it this way,' she says,'I'm furious that T should be afraid to help people in distress.'

Officials refuse to answer questions. 'Let sleeping dogs lie,' said one, ’you'll just bring trouble.'

'Horsgat? iJhat's wrong with it?' asks the public relations man from the Department of Bantu Adminisration.

A white official jumps out of a van loaded with policemen with sticks. The official, Mr G.C. Vermeulen, doesn't know way news­papers should be interested in Horsgat. 'It's a lovely place,' t says.

(rlote: All italicised passages are direct quotations from a Press Agency report ofi/§88?PillA¥M8a'?I ^oreign Minister, Dr. H. Muller, to the Monday Club on 27th October. The report was headed:LET GOOD SENSE 'fiEUIL. HARMON? BETWEEN PEOPLES. 50 SEPARATE COLOUK

L ________L..i .[..OF: -THY. The stfi'v o: I.or . .it ich ..cu.is H ess-hole)_ is.

from a full report - three pages with photographs: 'Morsgat: South Africa's New Village of Shame', Rand Daily Mail, 25th October.)

Hilda Bernstein’s PERSONAL COMMENT 5/1/70

Writing a monthly column of comment has its pleasures and its piins. The pleasures include having a platform for something you feel must be said; getting it off one's chest, is the phrase, although it is not my chest that hurts, end having written tipc whatever it is does not leavp me cool and aloof. Another Pleasure is evoking a shout of agrement, as ha pened when I wrote an angry piece about contemptuous attitudes towards women. (Undoubtedly,I shall return to that one.)

The pains include the fact that once-a-month is too infrequent for leshing out at things that burn me up day by day; when the time comes, the subject has slipped into the background, or someone else has said it all anyway. And also a recurring sense of my own ordinariness - what have I to say, more than you and you and you, that has special value? Is it simply the value of a certain facility with words?

What gives encouragement is rather negative; (the same criterion bolsters my love of drawing and painting and keeps me .oing): Hot that I am good, but others, with greater pretensions, more honours, are so often worse. Jvery .journalist, like anyone else, i3 cempted to coast along now and then. But the facile, uninformative, space- wasting, glib and endlessly-lengthy 'reviews of the decade* to wnich we have Deen recently treated, makes me think that some of them are determined to coast it allto through the next ten years.

* * * *

And who is your choice for the man of the decade? Or woman, for that matter, they add casually, if chere is one wno fits the role?I will £iHi£x3D?XES3i overlook ay contempt of t’ai^ silly game (for how on earth can you weigh in the scales the contribution made to mankind by people in so many diverse fields? Like asking, who is greater, 3eethoven or Shakespeare}) so that I can name my choice: the women of Vietnam. If ycu like, the woman of Vietnam, //hich woman? The one we saw stumbling blindfolded with a child in her arms and an American gangster with a gun in her back. The one

1

with hair drawn back in the soldier's hand and a gun at her head.She one sitting nursing her napalmed child, her tender arm heldaway from the hideously burned flesh. The one screaming rage at the molosters of her daughter the moment before she, and all those with her, were gunned down (see Sunday Times colour supplement).The one smuggling notes out from the hell-orir.ons of Saigon. And mcsl o f all the one, so young anri beautiful, so feminine withal, holding a pun in her hand as she gazes upwards from under he triangular straw hat, the hat that is so strangely the same as those mads by peasants far away in Southern Africa, in Lesotho. What love, what sacrifice, what endurance, what strength, can compare with that of the soman of Vietnam? What greater contribution has anyone made in the past ten years to justice, sanity, peace, in this insane world?

+ * * * *I have so much I want to write aDout Vietnam that this whole

pa^er would scarcely fill my needs; for new information keeps coming to light, new facts, new records, which show how much has been kept hidden from us. But for the space left this time I will use only one subject. It is the proceedings and debates of the First Session of the 91st Congress of the United States cf America, taken from the Congressional Record of 17 June, 1969*

Cgden R. Reid told the Senate about a report issued by a privatez&fcHdijrzjiBzrH inter-religious study team sent to Saignh to investigate stories of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment by the Thieu-Ky regime. The team were politically impeccable - including a Methodist Bishop, A rabbi, a retired Admiral, the Dean of Boston Colle-e Law School.

The team members visited a number of orisons, including one known as the 'show case prison' (because it has American funds and advisers for improved facilities). In the 'show case prison' there were an estimated 200 caildren from 10 to 14- years of age and 900 from 14 to 18 in the prison not yet sentenced. The team asked to see the children's section and were shown two cells. One room, about 40' by 25'» held 47 children under 8 years of age (one was

4- years old, said to be in prison because he was caught stealing a necklace). The children were squatting in one end of the bare room. No materials for play or study; the food looked inadequate; all, even the 4—-year-old, stood at attention and did not move or I S f nex ̂ C9H there were 67 children slightly older, bub under 10 years. The situation was the same.

After details of imprisonment, torture and brutalities in the prisons the team were permitted to visit, they reach the conclusion 'that the Thieu-Ky provernment has . . . imprisoned thousands of persons without the most fundamental elements of a fair hearing and in a shocking number of instances, without even apprising the imprisoned persons of bhe charges against them. This . * » has had such e devastating effect on the people of South Vietnam* and such s chilling iraoact on all political activities that it seems important to chronicle in some detail the process by wh ich the present Saigon Government, in the name of a wartime emergency, can deny persons arrested for political 'offences' all of the guarantees which Vietnamese constitution statutory law gives the persons accused of crime . . .'

Mr Reid concluded his report by saying chere is an estimate ofat least 20,000 non-communist politics! prisoners, ^orture andohysical abu3e are widespread. The majority are held simply becausethey oppose the government. Is this then what we are defending andfighting for? he asks.

t * * * *So here you have some of the meaning behind the latest Pentagon

catchphrase - 'Vietnamisation1. This is the regime to which Presi­dent Nixon has pledged full political and military support. This, let us understand clearly, is why America is there, this is the democracy they are preserving, this is the way of life they are defending against the threat of communism This justifies all, explains all. It is the reality behind the parrot-phrases: 'all war is brutal1 'the other side does worse things' 'what about Hue'. For the 'aberrations' (My Lai, and the thousand others) are all unfortunate, but a necessary part of the defence of the Weste n

Collection Number: A3299 Collection Name: Hilda and Rusty BERNSTEIN Papers, 1931-2006

PUBLISHER: Publisher: Historical Papers Research Archive Collection Funder: Bernstein family Location: Johannesburg

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