Foreign News: The Black Man’s Burden

South Africa’s white men have decreed that South Africa’s black men must carry official permits to travel, to work or be absent from work, to walk the streets after 9 p.m., to have their wives live with them in “locations” (suburban areas, usually overcrowded shantytowns, set aside for natives). Some 75,000 blacks go to jail each year because they are without proper passes. A hangover from slavery days, the pass system is a major grievance of the black majority against the ruling white minority.

Last week, in a location at Krugersdorp, a mining town 20 miles from Johannesburg, rumor spread that the pass system would be extended to black women. When a native speaker excitedly called for a strike, smoldering racial resentment burst into flame. Before dawn, picket lines armed with clubs gathered at the location gate, threatening to maul any black who went to work.

Thirty white policemen soon arrived to disperse the pickets. The blacks retaliated by stoning white auto drivers on a nearby road. Prancing and chanting old tribal war songs, thousands of black men swept toward the location superintendent’s office, set fire to a few buildings. Rioting continued into the night. Police and strikers exchanged gunshots. Three were killed, many others wounded.

Next day at a truce parley, Krugersdorp authorities explained that a new regulation for “voluntary registration of native women” did not mean that they had to carry passes. But in the parley, the aroused strikers did not sit down, in the traditional gesture of humility, when the whites addressed them. It caused one police official to complain: “I have never yet been to a meeting where the natives stand when you speak to them. It’s most disrespectful.”

The black man’s paper Inkundhla ya Bantu warned: “The old generation of Africans who believed in resolutions, deputations, petitions and peaceful conciliations is fast dying out . . . There is growing among . . . African youth a spirit of almost uncontrollable anti-whiteism.”