On South Africa

Abstract

Corbzs-Bettmann South Africans concerned about the future of their country must have discovered, in the past decade of life abroad, a very simple proposition: in the absence of any physical force able to dislodge the repressive regime in South Africa, all the moral weight that their case commands avails nothing. The morality of their case has a marginal benefit, of course, but just thatmarginal. There are a great number of liberal individuals in Western countries who are bitterly ashamed at the indecencies perpetrated in South in the name of white or Civilization, whatever you want to call it. That Civilization has always preserved, at the inner core of the socalled civilizing mission, a savage aggression and an ineluctable violence is acknowledged by some and not by others; the idea of inevitability is, in any case, abhorrent to most liberals. It is assumed that had expansionism (just another name for colonialism) been wise and right in its choices, the cruelties and the barbarities that have gone hand in hand with imperialism would somehow have been avoided. What Western liberals dislike, therefore, about the white South the Rhodesians, and other white settler minorities left behind to carry on what essentially was the original task of the civilizing mission is that these colonials have refused to share with the native peoples the fruits of European Civilization. This is an important objection, however superficial a reading of history it may turn out to be. It constitutes the main reason for the support given to nationalist movements for liberation in Western metropolitan countries. However, it is not the kind of support that can withstand the vicissitudes of African politics forever; as reels from one coup to another and instability remains a pervasive phenomenon, liberal support becomes more and more tired, equivocal, and uncertain; the support for the theory of Africa for Africans, which