A Complex Country

South Africa is a wealthy country, an immensely beautiful country, and a country in which unbelievable physical and psychological horrors are inflicted b> a minority white government on a majority non-white population.

Outside the white heart of Capetown lies Langa, one of three sister cities that house about 100,000 blacks who work in Capetown. It is surrounded by a solid wire-mesh fence topped with three or four strands of barbed wire, and it has only two or three road exits.

It can be surrounded by a fully-armed white force within ten minutes.

The houses are drab, dreary symbols of the hopeless apathy and despair of those who, in many cases forced to live apart from their wives and families, serve and sustain the white cocktail parties and private swimming pools.

I cannot be detached. My visits to Langa left me with a feeling of pity for my white South African friends who have lost the capacity to love, and a profound conviction that I could not condemn my black South African friends for their suspicion of whites.

It's a country of paradoxes. Ordinary, decent people, terrified of losing their standard of living, afraid of the vengeance that could be wreaked by blacks if they gained power, unwilling or Unable to see the effects on black people of their being systematically and painstakingly kept separate and poor, and determined to maintain their authority over the blacks; and they are locked in a hopeless anachronism.

It was, let us not forget, ordinary, decent people, who liked their railways to run on time in Italy, or who ignored the gas chambers in Germany.

And when ordinary, decent people band together to defend the Collective repression of other people, and to enforce a system of ruthless racial segregation, they are, collectively, neither ordinary nor decent.

And I know of no other country that so systematically enshrines in law and upholds in practice the complete separation of groups of people on racial grounds.

Our best bridges to South Africa can only be built when we have burned the bridges that some New Zealanders wish to build to white South Africa only.

For, in South Africa, those who would build bridges to Apartheid are the friends of "white" South Africa, and their support for white South Africa will he welcomed by "while" South Africans.