South Africa: Is South Africa Near Revolt?

When I was in Africa in 1954, I met a white South African business man who was spending a few days in Port Gentil looking after his timber interests. He was a man of realistic and conservative opinion; his attitude toward the African would hardly have won him an award from an interracial society. Although not himself an Afrikaner, he had all the apartheid prejudices usually associated with the Nationalist Party of South Africa. Yet as we talked about the current situation in South Africa, he said quite suddenly: “There’s no future for the white man in South Africa. I’m going to set my son up in business in Canada. The white man has perhaps only five years left.”

I discovered that this was a commonly held as...