THE
WHITES IN SOUTH AFRICA
631
mystic will to fight on at all costs was .hollow, that
it
would
as suddenly give way to a masochistic capitulation. All other
observers of the scene whose opinion I valued believed that the
Afrikaner Nationalists will never give way of their own accord.
Is there any element in South African life that will force the
Apartheid supporters to compromise short of the eventual racial
war that everyone else believes will come sooner or later? All
but the most intransigent Apartheid Afrikaners and the most
extreme African Nationalists (I suppose also Communists who
are making hay with the present situation) hope desperately to
avoid
this
conflict. The factors on which they pin these hopes
do not seem to me very immediately reassuring. There is much
talk in liberal circles of the pressure that international finance
will
bring to bear on the South African government to modify
its policy. Much hope is pinned on various Johannesburg mil–
lionaires. Various fancy dialectics are invented to describe this
inevitable antithesis. I am not competent to judge the purely
economic arguments, put the political arguments reminded me
all too forcibly of the hopes placed on an "inevitable" conflict
between Thyssen and Hitler in the 'thirties. Outside pressure?
Once again it is the moral duty of certain South African liberal
circles to urge the foreign visitor to encourage anti-South Afri–
can economic and political policies in his own country. I have
no doubt that this is morally right, but of any immediate or
even near effect I am far more doubtful. In any case the agree–
ment of foreign countries to impose economic sanctions upon
the new Republic is a thin hope. What of internal dissensions?
I feel sure that the official opposition, the United Party, will
prove ineffective, and that the English speaking community
which mainly supports it will do little more than grumble. Their
main strength came from their relation to England. This has
. now been severed. In any case for some time now they have
been alienated from a welfare England that they felt to be alien
and "socialistic," a place mainly to be dreaded as the least un–
comfortable refuge should flight from a black Africa become
