South Africa: Liberty or Death

Opposition to Daniel F. Malan's Nationalist government of the Union of South Africa is beginning to scatter like a dandelion gone to seed. The Boer-dominated Nationalist Party has found the stumper for its United Front critics. When voices are raised against a new law to oppress and subdue the African Negroes, the Nationalists simply ask: "Well, do you want equality?"

That does it, that question.

When Malan demanded special powers to suspend all laws when he should feel like it, the British-dominated United Party began to protest. "Do you want racial equality?" the Nationalists inquired. The United Party caucus last week decided to give Malan dictatorial powers.

When the Minister of Justice proposed a bill to punish by two to five years imprisonment, heavy fines, and public whipping, any broadly defined "incitement" to violation of race laws, the United Party squirmed publically. "Do you want equality?" asked the Malanists. The United Party put its tail between its legs.

A member of the Labor Party, a tiny group even more strongly opposed to Malan than the United, made this statement in Parliament last Wednesday:

"If we want domination, we must take all that goes with it, and that is complete dictatorship for all of us. We cannot continue to be a free European people. We cannot be free men ourselves if we want to enslave the rest of the population. Is democracy so vile, so worthless that we should throw it away because the Minister of Justice has difficulty with native agitators?"

The Nationalists asked him the same old question. He had no answer.

The alternative to this ironic domination is equality: abolition of "Jim Crow" (apartheid in Afrikaans), permission for Negroes to own property, equal economic opportunity. Even the right to vote is crucial to the alternative, certain as it is that they would dominate the government as they dominate the population.

It so happens, of course, that this about face is as likely as a free election in Russia. White South Africans may argue about the methods of maintaining "white supremacy," but on this point they seem to be just about unanimous. Ask them: "Do you want equality?" They will answer "No!" every time.

They prefer to enslave the rest of the population rather than be free themselves. They continue to turn their government into a dictatorship. They continue to punish Negroes for such crimes as walking the wrong streets, riding the wrong streetcars, and criticizing the laws that enslave them.

But how long can it last? The jails are already full. How long will it be before the Negroes cease to care about whippings and beatings and killings? How long before they decide to slit every white throat in the Union, headless of the risks?

The whites may hang on for another year or for another decade. But they have chosen the road to a violent death. And when it comes, who will say they did not deserve it?