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By Root 3625 0

the Afrikaner will not be able to hold his country against a combination of outside pressure and inside urban warfare, and that if he tries, the land will go down in terrible revolution. He advocates that white men, all of them, retreat voluntarily into the old Cape Province, there to establish a real republic in which Afrikaner, Englishman and Coloured work together as full partners. I was really jolted when he drew the outlines for me on a map. Pretoria and Johannesburg would be surrendered, as would Durban. Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown would be retained, as would Kimberley and Bloemfontein. This beautiful, rational area would be as big as Texas. It would be ruled by those whites who refused to cooperate with the black government of the north, plus the many Coloureds. Safe on the southern tip of Africa, they would become a new Hong Kong. When I asked if the triumphant blacks would permit such a withdrawal and consolidation, he said something profound, which I want you to discuss with your students and all who are interested in Africa. I'll try to give it in his words:

'If the black men in Africa refuse, as they seem to have done elsewhere, to allow any reasonable partnership for indigenous whites, the result would be harmful to Africa but disastrous to the United States, because your country is in the throes of accepting and defining justice for its black minority. If it sees a black majority in Africa denying comparable justice to whites in countries that they dominate and slaughtering them on television, the backlash could be frightening.'

I said that he was asking blacks to define their behavior as a majority before they attained an equality, and he said, 'That's when the definitions should be made.'

Which of these four scenarios do I subscribe to? I've had pretty good luck as an engineer working on the principle that if I'm smart enough to see something, the people intimately involved must have seen it too. If every sensible man knows what concessions ought to be made right now, my constant hope is that they'll be made. Therefore, I incline toward the first solution: peaceful, accelerated change leading to a nation in which all men and women vote and in which the black majority safeguards a place for white participantswhom they might not likebecause they are needed, just as today the Afrikaner accepts as a partner the English-speaker whose ancestors he opposed so bitterly.

I'm going to ignore the die-hard machine-gun type of Afrikaner who shouts, 'Over my dead body.' The Afrikaner leaders I've met are at least as prudent as the American politicians I know, and more so. I'm going to put my faith in them. And I want to make one point clear, which is never ventilated in the South African press. The blacks of South Africa are as capable as any people with whom I've worked. Wherever I've supervised a mine, I was relieved to find some South African black to take charge, because he was sure to be clever and hard-working and informed. If blacks inferior to him can run Zambia and Tanzania and Vwarda, however awkwardly they may do so at the moment, he can surely run South Africa. As a matter of fact, a grand coalition of black capacity, Coloured adaptability, English skill and Afrikaner force could forge a nation that would be one of the most powerful on earth, situated in one of the best settings, and with a way of life that most other people would envy. This is what I hope for.

If, as some fear, any rational solution becomes impossible because the stubborn Afrikaner refuses to yield any of his prerogatives, then I see great pressures along all the borders, encouraged and sometimes engineered by Communist-bloc countries, incipient and real civil war within those borders, with the Afrikaner able to defend himself for the rest of this century, after which other pressures which we cannot now foresee will alter the picture radically. On one thing I have been convinced. The young Afrikaners I know will use their guns. They will go forth fighting, to defend a way of life which God himself has ordained and which, for them,