The Black Man's Place in South AfricaNielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
History
The Black Man's Place in South Africa
Nielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
Black people -- South Africa
The thinking white man, who would fain be just to every one, is
perplexed by two conflicting emotions. He feels that the clean-living,
law-abiding, educated Native is a man not inferior to himself whom he
therefore ought to recognise as a fellow-citizen, but whenever he sees
this fellow-citizen aspiring or laying claim to the social recognition
that involves contact with white women he is filled instantly with wrath
which he cannot justify to himself and yet cannot suppress. It is easy
to see that where instead of common courtesy and mutual recognition from
one another of two sections of a community, constant irritation and
ill-will result, there the existence of the whole is threatened with
disaster. Under such conditions we must expect, not parallel progress,
but strife and enmity; not peace, but a sword.
The Jews may be cited to show how a separate and peculiar people may be
able to live together with other races without either clashing with or
being assimilated by these but we must remember that the ethnic
difference between the Jews and Europeans are too slight to sustain
serious and lasting race-antipathy. Parallelism, when applied to the
Native problem of South Africa, is clearly nothing more than the old,
plan-less drift continued in the pious hope that human nature will
sooner or later change into something better than what it is to-day. But
human nature will not change. We must never leave passion out of
account. If we recognise love we must recognise hate also as a moving
force of mankind. Neither must we overlook vanity and arrogance. The
white man, being human, will not cease to be vain and ambitious, he
will not cease to feel the hatred that comes from the fear of losing
possession of his mates, and possession is the natural man's definition
of love. Where there is a sense of possession there will also be
jealousy and hate, and it will only be by securing the white man in his
sense of racial integrity that peace and good-will can be made to last.
Territorial separation of the home-life of the two races is the only way
by which parallel development can take place. Some of the Native leaders
who have opposed this policy have done so in the belief that their
people might eventually be able to prove and enforce their claim to full
racial equality, but they have not realised that this claim will be
denied always on physical grounds, and not on considerations of moral
worth. These leaders mean well but they do not see well. Smarting under
the pain of their treatment they do not perceive that the real issue is
one of unalterable physical disparity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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