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It was not yet Naziism; it was not and might never be civil war. But it was portentous. In this faraway land, closer to the South Pole than it is to the U.S., the problems are homegrown and special, but the fears and passions which they generate are as universal as man's inhumanity to man.
The Triptych. The conflict in South Africa is not simply a matter of black v. white. It is a triptych of Boer, Briton and Bantu Negro.
The Boers (1,500,000 strong) are the inbred descendants of Dutch, French and German immigrants who settled in South Africa some 30 years after the Mayflower. The last big migration ended in 1707. Proud, hardy men, seeking freedom, their claim to the country is older than that of the Bantus: the blacks, sweeping down from Africa's interior, came later. With their flocks and tented ox-wagons, and their Bible, the Boers trekked across the veld in search of the Promised Land. The isolated life of the veld stamped itself upon them and they did not notice the world change behind their back; the French and American revolutions passed them by.
The Boers regard South Africa as their only home; unlike the British, they have nowhere else to go. Bruised into self-consciousness by British imperialism, which snuffed out their independence in the bloody Boer War (1899-1902), they are the backbone of Malan's Nationalist Party, which seeks to separate South Africa from the British Commonwealth.
South Africa's British (1,000,000) are clustered in Natal and Cape Province. They are mostly city folks—traders, bankers and bus drivers who have exported a little bit of Britain to South Africa. Against the Boers' fervent nationalism they have no spiritual counterforce. So long as they are making money (as they are), British South Africans tend to sit back and sip their tea while the Boers make the politics. And in their hearts many of them agree with the Nationalists' persecution of the Negroes. "The Dutchmen can handle the coons" is a frequent British attitude.
There are 10,000,000 non-Europeans in South Africa. The vast majority (8,500,000) are black Bantus. A third of them are still semibarbarous, living in kraals and reed huts on the native reserves; few speak the white man's language. Alongside the Bantus live 300,000 Indians, most of them shopkeepers and plantation laborers in sugar-growing Natal, and 1,100,000 Cape Colored, i.e., mulattoes, coffee-colored descendants of early Boer settlers.
The mulattoes until recently had limited civil rights, e.g., in Cape Province they could vote for white M.P.s. The blacks and browns have none, and in official census reports, they often do not count as population.