The covenant - James A. Michener [645]
Dear Professor Vandenberg,
One of the best bits of advice you ever gave me was to wait a year before reaching any conclusions about South Africa. Ten years would be a better study period. But I've worked diligently with Afrikaners, Englishmen and lots of blacks. I've also been in all parts of the nation. And I've reestablished contact with the local Salt-woods, whom our branch last knew in 1810. I offer you these tentative speculations.
South Africa must be one of the most beautiful lands on earth, surpassed in my experience only by New Zealand. All thinking must start from this. It's a land worth keeping. For whites it also has one of the highest standards of living in the world, and if people in Europe and America knew how grand the daily existence was, they'd all emigrate. Compared to the upper South African white, rich people in Texas and Oregon live like serfs. If you taught here, at your salary, you'd have four servants, a life of ease, and all the amenities. The South African way of life is worth preserving (for whites) and even worth fighting for. I have never lived so well.
For urban blacks the standard of living is also higher than I have seen in Nigeria, Zambia and Vwarda, and much higher, I'm told, than in any of the surrounding black countries, which is why hundreds of thousands of blacks in those countries would like to emigrate to South Africa. Personal freedoms, of course, are another matter, and much of what you hear in a liberal university like Michigan is true.
The people of South Africa perplex me. Even cursory investigation proves that what we call an Afrikaner is rarely of pure Dutch descent. The mix seems to be Dutch ancestry thirty-five percent, German a hefty thirty, Huguenot twenty, English five, other European five, and a submerged and denied five percent due to early miscegenation with slaves from Madagascar, Angola, Java, Ceylon and lots of Malays, with a liberal salting of brown Hottentots. But apparently one drop of Dutch blood supersedes all'other European strains and can even mask black infusions, if they occurred long enough ago. A man who is demonstrably seven-eighths German, Huguenot and English will say proudly, 'My ancestors were Dutch.'
But in recent times the process seems to have been reversed, for now one drop of black blood contaminates ninety-nine percent of white blood, which accounts for the steady rise of the Coloured population. You could live here a thousand years, Dr. Vandenberg, and never understand this problem. The Coloureds, who should be the natural allies of the pure-white manif ever there were a pure anythingare kept in limbo without any fixed place in society. The Afrikaner language evolved in large part because of contributions from the various languages spoken by the Coloureds, as did many of the social customs and habits, like the Afrikaner's love of spicy foods. Anyone with training in history, like you, would have to conclude that one of the saddest mistakes the Afrikaners made was to divorce themselves from people of great ability who are in effect their half brothersthese Coloureds.
Such argument would infuriate the Afrikaner, who is absolutely convinced by his historians,, his teachers and his predikants that the white-slave mixture was the consequence exclusively of sailors and soldiers roistering into Cape Town on shore leave, and that no self-respecting Dutchman ever touched a slave girl. A naughty lad at Witwatersrand University has calculated that to achieve the amount of infusion that obviously occurred, every soldier and sailor would have had to come ashore with his trousers half down, go to work immediately, and not stop till the bo's'n blew his whistle to summon them back to the ship.
A phenomenon