Giving up the White Man's Burden? Western relations with a free South Africa

Abstract

When Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) exhorted his readers to 'take up the white man's burden' in 1899, his poem's subtitle cited the USA and the Philippine Islands. As Britain fought an unexpectedly long war with Afrikaners for control of what the British government regarded as the 'richest spot on earth', the Imperial bard called on the Anglo-Saxon Americans, then fighting to acquire portions of the Spanish Empire, to join their elder siblings in world management. Kipling's friend, Cecil Rhodes, had already scribbled his first will calling for a global condominium of English-speaking white countries. The Afrikaners, like the Spanish, were regarded by the imperialists in London and Washington as not quite white enough to take on such responsibilities in the modern world. Nevertheless, the constitutional planners of the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910, envisaged that the two white races-British and Boer-would take charge of their own 'natives'. Jan Smuts who had commanded troops against the British at the turn of the century, became not only the leader of white South Africa, but also an international statesman. Smuts played a leadership role in the British Commonwealth and in the League of Nations. He also participated in the drafting of the UN Charter, without noticeable awareness in that organisation's first gathering that the document's human rights provisions might have some relevance to Smuts's own country. In the four decades since the Second World War and the founding of the UN, the rigid racism of the National Party government in Pretoria has come into dramatic opposition to the Third World drive for freedom and the heightened international consciousness of racial injustice. Even Pretoria's allies have been dragged step by step into verbal condemnation and then into token sanctions against the apartheid regime. But the de facto alliance between the major Western powers and Pretoria is still largely intact, in economic and even military spheres. Even when the regime is condemned for its intransigence that mocks Western pleas for reform, Western statesmen are more likely to