(3 of 9)
Thin Bridgehead. The two white groups—British and Boer—fight among themselves. They are engaged in a second and so far bloodless Boer War to determine whether essentially British ideas or essentially Boer ideas are going to run South Africa. But behind every feud and behind every raw nerve booms one supreme fact: the whites fear the docile blacks. Outnumbered four to one, they see themselves as a thin bridgehead of "European civilization" braced against an ever-pressing tide of black men. In their hearts are bloody remembrances of the "Kaffir Wars" fought by their fathers against the southward-marching legions of Matabele and Zulu, and in the teeming black slums fringing their cities they see, or imagine they see, shadows of Tchaka the Zulu, who slaughtered 7,000 women in honor of his mother, and of Dingaan the Vulture, whose assegai-hurling warriors massacred 600 Boers in 1838.
In the frontier battles of rifle against spear, the white man was victorious. In the battle of populations, he is steadily losing ground. Three million Bantus (four-fifths of South Africa's industrial labor force) have swarmed into the mushrooming cities and labor camps to mine the white man's gold, wash his dishes, mind his babies, empty his garbage cans, and dig his grave when he dies. Another 3,000,000 harvest the nation's corn, herd its cattle and gather its grapes for the wine press. Without the black man's labor, the white man's civilization would shrivel up and die.
This fact frightens the white man more than Dingaan the Vulture did. He is hagridden with fear that little black children will one day play in the ruins of his cities. The rising black tide already seems to press against the poorer whites, most of them the sons of Afrikaner farmers, who come to the town for jobs. They rely on Malan.
Prime Minister Malan has compared the clash of urban black & white with the Battle of Blood River, where Boer pioneers fought and defeated the Zulu. "The towns," said Malan, "are becoming blacker. On this new Blood River battlefield, our people and the non-Europeans . . . are in much more stressful struggle than 100 years ago when the white-tented wagons protected the laager, and rifle and assegai clashed . . . The [Boers] meet the non-Europeans half or completely unarmed, without the entrenchment between them and without the protection of the river. They meet him defenseless in the open plain of economic equality."*
Velevuta. It is Daniel Malan's self-appointed task to deepen the entrenchments and widen the rivers between black & white. He has dedicated his life to protecting "the sacred Boer race" from "pollution" by the black man. A bold paunchy Boer with restless little eyes and a pale square face, he is a man of enormous, if misguided, conviction.
When Malan speaks—which is often—he is apt to enmesh his audience in thickets of Old Testament references: "We must be cautious as snakes and sincere as doves." Africa's black men, who hate and fear Daniel Malan, call him Vele-vuta, "the man born with a fire inside him." His fire is religious. Trained as a