624
ANGUS WILSON
man summed up this ostrich behavior by saying that he pro–
posed to give up flying to Europe and return to the longer
sea voyages-"At least," he said, "one won't come down in
these damned airports run by a lot of natives."
It
is natural
then for the English South African to look back to a golden
age, to the days when the native knew his place. He cannot
face this change in its wider African context. To attribute it to
the unwise extremism of the Afrikaner government comfortably
limits its scope from world to domestic politics. "There's no
need to put all this Apartheid down on the Statute book," 1
was told, "we had a sort of Apartheid before and the native
accepted it because it wasn't rammed down his throat." These
English South Africans know, of course, that the hardening, the
legalization of Apartheid has only come about because the
"native" was no longer willing to accept a lower status unless
he was compelled to do so. But looking back to the happy past,
inclining naturally towards English empirical, instinctive govern–
ment, the English South African business community feel that
they are being governed by a set of theorists-Afrikaner pro–
fessors and Calvinist ministers. As the English are
in
a minority
of two to one to the Afrikaners and as they have no alternative
policy, they give themselves the luxury of withdrawn grumbling
and hope vaguely that in the end "good sense" and world
"business opinion" will save the day.
Commerce and industry, of course, are no longer exclusively
English.
It
has taken a long time for the ambitious Afrikaner
to throw off the Calvinistic rejection of the city and of money
as the works of the devil, but there is now a growing new
Afrikaner business class.
Do
they or will they temper the aca–
demic, theoretical rigidity of Apartheid racial doctrines? Only
very little, I think. Some element of expediency is creeping in.
For example, the laws which prevented African consumption
of alcohol have now been abrogated under pressure from the
White wine producers of the Cape who want the native market.
Yet if there are ways in which the doctrinaire quality of Apar-
