Let Blacks Govern Blacks

"I do not have any aversion to black government, not when they govern blacks. But I wouldn't like to be governed, and it isn't because they're black, it's because they're different, it's because they are alien."

"We tell them that in Zululand you will be Zulus governed by Zulus, in the Transkei you will be Zhosas governed by Zhosa..... In the white areas it is white territory governed by whites." (NZ Listener, March 22, 1971).

Black South Africans are aliens, then, in "white" South Africa - they are citizens, under the Bantu Homelands Citizen Act, of one of the eight Bantu National Units.

And though more than half of South Africa's blacks live in "white" South Africa, they have no option but to accept this "homeland" citizenship.

Laws devised, decided, promulgated and enforced by whites determine that blacks are not citizens of a greater South Africa - they are South Africans with citizenship rights only in the "homelands" to which they have been allocated, even if they have never seen their personal "homeland".

And in "white" South Africa, they are immigrants. "Our pass laws", said Mr Philip, "are your immigration laws....We have eight million Africans in the white area and only four million whites. Until we can get that eight million down to proportions which can be handled in terms of community relations, we can never solve our problems." I NZ Listener, March 22, 1971).

Mr Philip is, of course, a friendly liberal. He never propounded any theories of white superiority - at least not in the sense of actually claiming that blacks are congenitally inferior. They are, he said, different - as Frenchmen differ from Italians, or Germans from British.

The big difference is, of course, that the French do not decide the fate of the Italians. White South Africans, and they alone, have claimed and, in fact, exercise the right to determine the long-term future of blacks.

South Africa, Mr Philip frequently said, is making slow but steady progress. We are solving, he claimed, our own problems in our own way.

So there may be a few differences between the South Africa I visited five years ago and that existing today Some park benches, until recently strictly segregated, may now provide an integrated vantage-point from which blacks can contemplate their position.

The basic issue remains that a black South African has no choice but to comply with a myriad of laws which, in a variety of ways, make it quite clear that he is a stranger in "white" South Africa.