Dervla Murphy - South From the Limpopo: Travels Through South Africa

By 1952 I had begun to collect books about South Africa and to realize that apartheid was not in fact a new anti-black weapon forged by the Afrikaners. Since the 1870s British observers including Anthony Trollope, J. A. Froude, Lord Bryce, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Milner had been warning the Colonial Office about the danger of extending the franchise to natives. In 1901 Lionel Curtis fresh from New College, Oxford, one of Lord Milners infamous kindergarten of youthful colonial officers wrote: It would be a blessed thing if the negro, like the Red Indian, tended to die out before us. Two years later John Buchan, Lord Milners Private Secretary, produced a blueprint for the countrys future native policy and noted that:

Mentally the black man is as crude and naive as a child, with a childs curiosity and ingenuity His instability of character and intellectual childishness make him politically far more impossible than even the lowest class of Europeans.

Lord Milner then appointed a Commission which recommended segregation policies that shocked his more civilized compatriots. When the South Africa Act was passed in 1909 Keir Hardie protested that MP s should not assent to the setting up of the doctrine that because of a mans misfortune in having been born with a coloured skin he is to be barred the possibility of ever rising to a position of trust. But Lord Balfour argued, You cannot give them equal rights without threatening the whole fabric of civilization. The Red Indians are gradually dying out. The Australian Aborigines are even more clearly predestined to early extinction. But with the black races of Africa, for the first time we have the problem of races as vigorous in constitution, as capable of increasing in number, in contact with white civilization. Not only Afrikaners feared the swartgevaar. the black peril.

It is no coincidence that several of the designers of Grand Apartheid studied at German universities during the 1930s. Many English-speakers were at first appalled by the Afrikaners creation of a totalitarian state, yet there is no escaping the fact that apartheid was supported, actively or passively, by the vast majority of South Africas whites. It was also supported by a minority of South Africas blacks who, for personal gain, collaborated in the setting up of the independent homelands.

By 1983 the cracks in the apartheid edifice were visible from Ireland. As an Irish citizen I could then have visited the country for sixty days without a visa, but so brief a visit would have been pointless. Optimistically I applied for a twelve-month work permit ostensibly to write a travel book. After an eight-month delay Pretoria, rightly distrusting my motives, said no. Instead I went to Madagascar.

As the apartheid state disintegrated, amidst increasing, uncontrollable violence, many influential right-wingers both at home and abroad rallied round Chief Buthelezi, the Zulu Inkatha leader, still hoping the ANC might be held at bay. Ten months after Nelson Mandelas release, Laurens van der Post dismissed him as someone who has nothing more than tired rhetoric to offer and praised Buthelezi as a man of vision, better prepared than any leader in South Africa to lead the way ahead. Margaret Thatcher, too, drooled over the Inkatha leader and asserted that the day the ANC is elected South Africa will be in cloud-cuckoo-land.