South Africa's Role in a Changing Africa

Abstract

IT IS just over a month since I left South Africa and, in that short time, there have been momentous changes in many parts of Africa. The Union is to become a republic, if possible inside the Commonwealth. Nigeria has become independent and has a most important and promising part to play in Africa and in the Commonwealth. In the Congo, UNO's desire to be exquisitely fair to everyone has operated to prevent any clear cut solution emerging and the country has drifted deeper and deeper into chaos. There have been civil disturbances in Rhodesia followed by drastic legislation designed to maintain law and order; and the Monckton Commission has published a report which has been highly praised and violently condemned. I am sure you will understand that, in these circumstances, I am approaching my assignment to-day with diffidence and I hope you will excuse me if my speech covers a wider field than might be suggested by its title. I am very grateful for the opportunity of speaking to you. I wish more South Africans had the opportunity of travelling and bathing in the stream of world opinion. South Africa is curiously isolated, intellectually and morally. South Africans are conscious, perhaps morbidly conscious, of adverse world opinion but they tend to react against it rather than be influenced by it and South Africa's case (and South Africa has a case) is often put in terms so out of line with the trend of modern thought as to be unlikely to be understood, let alone to evoke sympathy. Mr. Macmillan in his great 'wind of change' speech in Cape Town earlier this year, called for a policy based not on racial discrimination, but on individual merit alone, and he emphasised the importance of winning the emergent African states for the West. He made it clear that, on both these grounds, there was a cleavage between the policies of the British and South African governments. Naturally, in South Africa, most people look on the matter in a different way. South Africa is strongly anti-Communist. It fought with the West in Korea and will be with the West in any measures which may prove necessary to contain the Communist powers. There is no question of South Africa putting itself up for auction, as some other African states do, between East and West. The policy, therefore of, for instance, financing the capital needs of uncommitted states on favourable terms while boycotting South Africa looks, to many South Africans, like the old ignoble, always unsuccessful policy of sacrificing your friends to appease your enemies.