TH E
W H ITE SIN SOU TH A FRIC A
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all
the armed forces and police .at their command and .with a
ruthless
will to use them,the South African Whites. may well
maintain
their rule for a decade despite the winds of change.
And, as an Afrikaner professor said to me, ten years is a little
more than the millenium nowadays. It is as well then perhaps
even for a realist to consider what kind of creatures these per–
istent white dodos are.
I must preface my picture of South African White life by
declaring some of the factors which inevitably limited my as–
ament. My time there was too brief; I am not a trained
journalist; and I had to rely on what I believe is a more than
usual
capacity to make an easy rapport with many people in a
short space of time. This power is one of my chief advantages
as a novelist and I believe it served me well as a general observer.
Nevertheless I did not have an opportunity to meet and assess
more than a handful of Afrikaner farming people, and those
I did meet were in the more civilized Cape area. I did not in
fact come face to face with Apartheid extremism in the farms
of
the Orange Free State or the Plattenland of the Transvaal,
that last unreclaimed area of Uitlanders whom even the Orange
Free State farmers think of as "wild." Here would be found the
most crude expressions of racial prejudice, as indeed of anti–
English feeling and of anti-urbanism; here are the isolated farms
from which reports and, indeed, police cases of ferocious
ill
treatment and even murder of native servants come. Neverthe–
less I met urbanized Afrikaners-"poor white" (a very compara–
tive term in South Africa), business men, and professional men–
ardent supporters of Apartheid all, who, in the great push of the
Afrikaners to the towns, which is the main white social pheno-
I
menon of South Africa, had only left the Plattenland in the last
I
decade
or so·. In all of them could be found the self-made man's
nostalgia for the coarser, simpler life he has fought to leav·e
behind him. This nostalgia is often accounted a sentimental af–
fectation in the successful, but I have always found it one of
their
few genuine emotions. Iri these moods .of nostalgia for their
