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SOUTH WEST AFRICA: Unhappy Mandate

3 minute read
TIME

South West Africa is a big (318,000 sq. mi.), largely treeless land that once belonged to imperial Germany and now has the unhappy distinction of being the last of the League of Nations mandates. Other such territories are either free or have been placed under U.N. trusteeship; but the adjoining Union of South Africa goes blandly on ruling its old mandate as if it were a permanent province.

Only last month, having for the eighth time condemned the Union for its drastic racial policies, the U.N. General Assembly called on it to begin talks to put South West Africa under the U.N. The Union was piously proclaiming that it was just this kind of “interference” that was to blame for the bloody outbursts that had just been quelled in the South West Africa capital of Windhoek.

Spilled Beer. The Windhoek riot was the sixth major one to erupt in Union territory this year, and like all the others, it was the direct result of the whites’ measures to keep the blacks in their place. A few miles outside Windhoek, the government is completing a $5,000,000 “location” for the capital’s 16,000 blacks. Though the austere new houses are quite an improvement over the old tin shanties, they not only cost eleven times as much to rent, for people whose pay ranges from $3 to $10 a month, but are regarded by the blacks as nothing more than one more ignominious step toward complete apartheid. When the mandate’s administrator flatly refused even to receive a delegation from the location, the voteless blacks turned to the only weapon they had left—a boycott of the city-owned buses and beer halls.

As tension in Windhoek mounted, a beer-hall picket knocked over a can of malt beer that had just been bought by a woman customer. The woman called the police. Within minutes, police and an angry crowd of several thousand were scuffling. The blacks set the beer hall on fire, stormed the city jail, and freed all the prisoners. Some even dared the soldiers and police to shoot them, taunted, “You are too frightened by the United Nations.” The soldiers and police obliged: by the end of the day, twelve Africans had been shot to death.

Understanding. Anxious to place the blame elsewhere, the Union’s Minister for External Affairs Eric Louw declared that he had warned the U.N. all along that “incitement among nonwhites would give rise to disorder.” And just to make sure that the outside world would not be so misguided in the future, a group of South Africa’s richest men, headed by Sir Francis de Guingand, onetime Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Montgomery, and including Harry Oppenheimer, head of the De Beers diamond trust, announced that they were setting up a foundation devoted to promoting “international understanding of South Africa’s way of life, achievements and aspirations.”

Convinced that they already had a perfectly clear understanding of South Africa’s aspirations, nine African nations sent off a letter to U.N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjold protesting against the “shooting and killing” at Windhoek and sharply reminding the world that after all, South West Africa has “an international status.”

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