Ah But Your Land Is Beautiful

by Alan Paton

  However, I can promise you that an important step will soon be taken. The punishments for sitting in white waiting-rooms and in white libraries are so light that it is no hardship to go to jail for a week every few months. More than eight thousand people have done it so far and they are clogging up the jails. They think it is a kind of joke but in fact they are defying the Government and Parliament. Most shocking of all, they are defying the State, which all Christians believe to be ordained by God. Was it not Paul himself who wrote that rulers are not a terror to the good but only to the evildoers? It is true that Peter wrote that we must obey God rather than men, but he had clearly not grasped the point that those men who became rulers were in fact ordained by God. This difference of opinion has caused much trouble among the wavering kind of Christians, and has also been seized upon by those who hate any kind of authority. It has also been exploited by the communists, who are the champions of civil liberties until they come to power, after which they destroy them all. It can also be pointed out that Paul was a scholar, while Peter (through no fault of his own, I hasten to point out) was only a fisherman. Now the Afrikaner has a profound respect for scholars, but he can hardly be expected to have the same respect for fishermen, most of whom are coloured men. Some of these coloured men still have the old Cape vote to send white M.P.s to the white Parliament, but this anomaly will soon be removed, for while it is the aim of the National Party to give civil and political rights to every man and woman in South Africa, they must achieve these rights as members of their own groups, each enjoying sovereign powers in its own sphere. This is the political doctrine of separate coexistence, a doctrine which has no parallel in any other country of the world. In any case Peter can hardly be expected to enjoy the full confidence of Afrikaners; he founded the Roman Catholic Church, which Scripture has likened to a harlot sitting on seven mountains.

  You must not allow to enter your mind any thought that the Government is frightened of the Defiance Campaign. Our Prime Minister bears a name that is revered only second to that of Paul Kruger. My own Minister believes that it is his sacred duty to be a terror to evildoers. Even more unshakable than they — if I may say so without disloyalty — is the Minister of Native Affairs, our revered Dr. Hendrik, who is regarded by many as the supreme architect of the doctrine of separate coexistence. They are three great men, three of the greatest in the history of Afrikanerdom, and they are implacably determined to destroy the Defiance Campaign. They will destroy it not by the killing of the protesters, as Stalin would have done (some say Hitler also, but this allegation has been put forward mainly by Jews and liberals, and can therefore be regarded with scepticism), but by the use of the powers given to them by Parliament. My Minister says that after forty years of the spineless rule of Botha, Hertzog, and Smuts, it is the Malan Government that has given teeth to democracy. And they mustn’t cry if they get bitten, he says.

  I have just come from the Minister. I have never seen him so angry about anything as he is about Duncan. He expressed his anger to me in forcible language.

  ‘Tell me, Van Onselen, how can a white man do a thing like that? How he can join forces with Indians and Africans against his own people, I just cannot understand. I sit here at my desk and I try to understand it, but I just cannot do so.’

  The Minister is waiting impatiently for the Security report on Duncan. There may be something in it that would enable him to destroy Duncan. But whatever the case, he wants to know exactly what kind of man Duncan is.

  As for me, my dear aunt, I continue to live my own, what some people would call, cloistered life. I enjoy my work, I like my Minister, I read Die Transvaler and the Star, and of course I have my table tennis. I must modestly confess that I am a bit of a champion. Dear old Sophie gives me my breakfast, and stays for a couple of hours. I cannot say that I like living alone. I think of my mother every day. But life has not been unkind to me.

  The mountain kingdom of Lesotho, called Basutoland by its British administrators, is austere and beautiful. The nation itself was the creation of the great Moshweshwe, the ruler who sent his enemies gifts after he had trounced them in battle. He gathered together the remnants scattered by the Mfecane, the dispersion of the tribes caused by the rise to power of Shaka, who also created a nation, and sent clan after clan fleeing over the Drakensberg. Those who fled from Shaka in their turn scattered the tribes of the interior, and it was Moshweshwe who made the remnants into a new nation, the Basuto. This new nation in its turn could have been scattered by the all-conquering Boers, but in 1868 the British took the Basuto under their protection, so that they became, in Moshweshwe’s words, ‘the lice in the Queen’s blanket’.

  Patrick Duncan served the Basuto well in his capacity as a judicial commissioner. He was renowned for his courtesy, which was considered remarkable for a white person who had been born in South Africa, but then of course he had been educated at Winchester College, where manners makyth man. He was intelligent but his greatest gift was his vitality. Out of his bluest of blue eyes shot flames that consumed any cruelty or cant within burning distance, and he had the ruddiest cheeks in the world, giving him the appearance of abounding health. He was a man of passionate beliefs, and had a veneration for Mahatma Gandhi. He believed with all his heart that satyagraha, the soul-force, the power of truth, was able to topple empires.

  But his heart was not in the mountain kingdom. It was in the country where he was born. Great events were happening there, noble, stirring events from which his position as a British administrator excluded him. He was passionately stirred by the daily stories of men and women going to prison in protest against unjust laws. There was dear old Manilal, son of the Mahatma, sitting on park benches marked For Whites Only. There was this eighteen-year-old girl Prem Bodasingh who had now gone to prison for the third time in protest against the segregation of the libraries. And now the exciting news that Chief Lutuli had refused to obey the order of the formidable Dr. Hendrik to resign either his chieftainship or his presidency of the Natal branch of the African Congress. So Dr. Hendrik had deposed him from the chieftainship, and Lutuli, no longer chief, but always to be called the Chief, issued a statement of intention that will be remembered as long as any words spoken in South Africa are remembered.

  Who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? . . .

  As for myself, with a full sense of responsibility and a clear conviction, I decided to remain in the struggle for extending democratic rights and responsibilities to all sections of the South African community. I have embraced the non-violent passive resistance technique in fighting for freedom because I am convinced it is the only non-revolutionary, legitimate and humane way that could be used by people denied, as we are, effective constitutional means to further aspirations.

  The wisdom or foolishness of this decision I place in the hands of the Almighty.

  What the future has in store for me I do not know. It might be ridicule, imprisonment, concentration camp, flogging, banishment and even death. I only pray to the Almighty to strengthen my resolve so that none of these grim possibilities may deter me from striving, for the sake of the good name of our beloved country, the Union of South Africa, to make it a true democracy and a true union in form and spirit of all the communities of the land.

  My only painful concern at times is that of the welfare of my family, but I try even in this regard, in a spirit of trust and surrender to God’s will as I see it, to say: God will provide.

  It is inevitable that in working for Freedom some individuals and some families must take the lead and suffer: The Road to Freedom is via the Cross.

  Mayibuye! Afrika! Afrika! Afrika!

  The effect of Lutuli’s statement on Patrick Duncan was tremendous. He decided that he could no longer remain in Basutoland. He would join the Defiance Campaign, and that meant he would have to resign from the Colonial Service. This burning desire to be doing something, something difficult a
nd noble, the desire that had come to torment him more and more, would at last be satisfied. South Africa was approaching the greatest crisis in its history, and white South Africans must choose whether change was to come with or without violence. It was his duty to persuade them that there was yet time to make change peacefully. It was a task of which his father the Governor-General would have approved. Why should God not use him as the instrument, now that he was ready and willing? And if that made him famous, that would not be unacceptable. Like his friend Trevor Huddleston he would not object to being famous, provided the fame was earned by the doing of something good. In fact he would go to Johannesburg as soon as he could, to see Huddleston. He would go to Durban to see Lutuli and Manilal. He might even meet the girl Prem Bodasingh. It was a new world that was opening up to him. He was more happy, more confident than he had ever been in his life. He would not need to pretend any more. He would not need to pretend to believe in justice while he accepted unjust laws. He would not need to keep silent out of considerations of expediency. He felt within himself, not only intense emotions, but a new sense of power. Might he not be the man that God was looking for?

  You must hurry up, Patrick Duncan, if you are going to save South Africa. Black people are rioting in Port Elizabeth and East London and Johannesburg and Kimberley. Forty have been killed and hundreds injured, some of them innocent, a white man going to the office, a black woman going to the shop. Moroka and Njongwe and Lutuli watch the riots with anxious eyes. They are not warriors; two of them are doctors and the third is a teacher. Violence and bloodshed are painful to them, but most painful of all to them is the violence done in East London to Sister Aidan, herself a servant of satyagraha.

  Sister Aidan, whose professional name was Dr. Elsie Quinlan, and who had devoted her life to the care of the black sick of East London, while driving her car encountered an angry mob in the location. They had been holding a prayer-meeting, which had been ordered to disperse by the police, on the grounds that the meeting was not religious. Stones had been thrown by members of the mob, and shots fired by the police. Neither her record of devotion nor her Sister’s habit could save her. Her car was overturned and a man opened the door and struck her on the head. The Sister fell on her side and put her hands together in prayer. The man who had struck her lit a match and threw it into the petrol that was running out of the tank. The heat was so intense that none of those who hoped to rescue her could come anywhere near.

  When the flames had died down a woman from the crowd cut a piece of flesh from the body of the nun and ate it, saying that it would give her strength. Her example was followed by others. One woman who was ordered by others to eat refused to do so, reminding them that this woman had been a servant of their people. When threatened she took a piece of flesh, and wrapped it in a piece of paper, saying that she would eat it at home, but when she reached the privacy of her house she buried it in the earth of her tiny garden.

  Dr. Moroka, the national president of the Congress, condemned the violence on behalf of the African people. He blamed the police for causing the riots, and called for a full inquiry. Prayers were said in many churches for the repose of the soul of Sister Aidan. These services were marked not by anger at her death but by thanks for her life, and prayers for peace.

  Of course it is said, and how could it not be, that the Defiance Campaign is responsible for her death. And of course it is said, and how could it not be, that the real causes of her death are the laws of apartheid, and the poverty, and the frustrations, and the belief that the white rulers of South Africa know only one language, and that is the language of violence. It is the language they speak, and therefore it is the language in which they must be spoken to. It is not a campaign of protest, it is a war, and therefore everything white must be destroyed, even the sisters and their hospitals and their clinics and their schools.

  It is this hatred that fills lovers of peace with despair. When Sister Aidan saw the mob, did she know she was looking at hatred, perhaps even for the first time in her life? Or did she not know it till she put her hands together?

  Ah, but your land is beautiful. That’s what they say, the visitors, the Scandinavians and the Germans and the British and the Americans. They go to see the Cape that is the fairest in the whole circumference of the earth, and Groot Constantia and the vineyards. They travel over the plains of the Karoo, bounded everywhere by distant mountains. They go down over the great wall of the Drakensberg, into the green hills and valleys of Natal. And if they are fortunate, they take the journey from Johannesburg to Zululand and pass through some of the richest maizelands in the world.

  Some visitors are more inquisitive than others. They poke their noses — one is sorry one cannot use nicer language — into District Six and Orlando and New Brighton. They even go to the courts, to see Mrs. Katlana fined ten pounds for going to church without her reference book, and to see Mr. Tsaoeli fined ten pounds for sitting on the roadside outside his employer’s house without his reference book. He told the police that the book was in his quarters, and he could get it in a minute, but the police said that they were not interested. These things are very unfortunate, but surely when South Africans visit Stockholm or Washington, they don’t go poking their noses into the courts.

  Ah, but the land is beautiful. It is the land where Sister Aidan met her unspeakable death, and fourteen-year-old Johnnie Reynders hanged himself in his bedroom because the white high school turned him away, although his brothers and sisters had been there before him. It is also the land where white fisherman Koos Karelse of Knysna jumped overboard to save the life of black fisherman James Mapikela; the black life was saved and the white life was lost.

  There is talk of another land too, where the tears have been wiped from every eye, and there is no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, because all those things have passed away. But here in the land that is so beautiful, they have not passed away.

  Mr. Harry Mainwaring, the Chairman of the Natal Executive, and member of the great Natal family, has been dealt a terrible blow. His son Hugh, a product of St. Michael’s like his father before him, has conveyed to his parents the most shocking news. He has decided to go to Johannesburg to join Patrick Duncan and others in an illegal entry into the black location at Germiston. In other words he is going to join the Defiance Campaign.

  What makes the matter worse is that the eminent Pietermaritzburg legal firm of Montgomery, Royston, and Macfarlane has just agreed to accept young Hugh as an articled clerk, and when they hear this news they will certainly withdraw the offer.

  – You know that, don’t you?

  – Yes, dad, I know it. I went to see Mr. Montgomery about it and he told me that he regretted that they would withdraw the offer.

  – Well, you know what I think about it, don’t you?

  – Yes, dad, I know.

  – It is with the utmost difficulty that I bring myself to speak to you. You have no regard for your parents’ feelings, nor for my standing in Natal. You make me ashamed to go to the Provincial Buildings or to the Club. I’m a governor of St. Michael’s, but you make me ashamed to go there too. I blame this damned National Union of Students for this. Ever since you joined it you’ve gone farther and farther left. And when you became the national president, you made speeches that I am ashamed to remember. I tried to be understanding about it, different generations, enthusiasm of the young, et cetera, et cetera. But this is the last straw for me. I cannot feel any pride in a son who plans deliberately to break the laws of the country. Now there’s one thing you must understand. If you go through with this, then on your return I’d be glad if you would find other accommodation.

  What is so painful for Harry Mainwaring is a gift for the press. What could be more dramatic than a protest led by the son of a Governor-General, accompanied by the son of a Mahatma? It is probably unique in history. And now it is to be joined by the son of a provincial chairman. What is more, Duncan is on crutches, having broken his leg in a car accident
caused by his being on the wrong side of the road. But that will not deter him, because after the violence in East London and Port Elizabeth he is anxious to demonstrate the power of satyagraha. It was this that finally persuaded Manilal to join him, because the son of the Mahatma does not like the word defiance.

  The protest has been made still more dramatic by the fact that the Governor-General has issued a proclamation under the Native Administration Act which prescribes a maximum of three years’ imprisonment or a fine of three hundred pounds for any person who incites any African to break any law, or who holds a meeting of Africans without authority. But this does not deter Duncan either. He was going to save a country from violence and destruction. The wisdom or foolishness of his action he must leave in the hands of the Almighty.

  In the event the protest went off quietly. Duncan on his crutches, to which he had tied yellow, green and black ribbons, the colours of the African Congress, led about thirty-eight people through the gate of Germiston location. There were plenty of policemen, but they made no attempt to prevent the entry. In a few minutes the protesters were lost in an excited crowd of at least a thousand people. Duncan called for a chair and he stood on it to say a few words in English, followed by some words in Sotho.

  – Today South African people of all kinds have come among you. They have come with love for you and with peace. We have not come to make trouble. I ask you on the long road that lies ahead not to make trouble but to do what you have to do with love.