iCHALLENGE FROMI AFRICA

'Nothing short of undiluted = Christianity will save the day'
FR1CA stands at the parting
of the ways. Three or four
years ago who would have guessed that the great dormant Continent was about to wake into tense, angry life? How few of us had already heard the rumblings of the volcano or noticed the cracks appearing in the solid earth?
Today the non-white peoples of Africa are on the march, and the whole world, white or coloured, knows it. To us professing Christians it is a challenge, perhaps the greatest, most awe-inspiring and most glorious we shall ever get.
If we are to answer this challenge in the Christian spirit we must be clear on our basic facts, To begin with, our old enemy Communism is not the mastermind behind the present struggle between black and white. No doubt the Communists are ready to exploit the troubles in Africa. No doubt if we fail to solve them Communism will step in. But if Stalin and the whole Russian set-up had never existed, the African volcano would have erupted just the same.
Racialist disease
THE cause of the present crisis in Africa lies in the single word Racialism.
According to this doctrine the colour of a man's skin is the decisive factor in his value as a human being. Only the whiteskinned races are fully human, and it is their duty to maintain their supremacy over the coloured races at all costs.
Black Africans are regarded almost as the "missing link" between the race of animals and men. It is assumed that they are by nature incapable of achieving the higher attributes of humanity, such as technical skill and intellectual prowess. But, in a characteristically contradictory spirit, the believers in Racialism have passed numerous laws to prevent black Africans from acquiring the skill and knowledge which in any case they profess to believe them incapable of possessing. Hence the colour-barthe bar to African progress.
South Africa, unhappily, exhibits this racialist disease in its most virulent form.
Tragically and ironically, the Dutch Reformed Church (to which the Prime Minister Dr. Malan be
longs) claims to find a basis in re
By LADY PAKENHAM
ligion for its denial of Christian principles. Resorting to a crude and cruel interpretation of Old Testament pre-history, they assert that the black "children of Ham" are condemned by their loving Father to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for ever. Not hewers of their own wood or drawers of water for themselves— but for their white masters.
Apartheid mockery
THE South African Government have developed these racial theories into their policy of "Apartheid," meaning "separateness" or "apartness," whereby the white and black peoples of South Africa must exist apart from each other, each race developing separately along its own lines.
Such a policy, though quite out of keeping with Christian ideas of brotherhood, might be logically defensible if it had ever been adhered to. But it never has. The whites do not hew their own wood and draw their own water. On the contrary, the whole economy of South Africa depends, not on the segregation of the black people, but on their ever-closer association with the whites in the vast expanding industrial life of the mines, fields and factories. Without the black Africans to work for them the whites might as well go straight back to Europe.
Thus the doctrine of Apartheid is unmasked as a self-contradictory mockery.
Put bluntly, it simply means that the native inhabitants are to be separated from the whites as regards social amenities, culture, education, economic power, and political responsibility; in fact, all the things which make civilisation worth while. But they are one together, locked together as master and servant, in the grip of the industrial machine.
Furthermore, even the ban on education and economic advance for Africans is today being broken. In the larger cities a few black people are able to make quite respectable incomes, while others succeed in turning themselves into "educated" persons,
But this process, while it defeats the policy of Racialism does nothing to ease the racial tensions. Rather, it has exactly the opposite effect. The few educated, relatively prosperous Africans are still "beyond the pale" as far as Europeans are concerned : despised by one race, they become the leaders of the other, bitterly determined to raise their black brothers from servitude.
Lesson to whites
IN one respect at least many of
these sons of Ham seem nearer the spirit of the Gospels than their white masters. Recently they have organised a non-violent campaign of resistance to the unjust discriminatory laws against Africans. Several thousand self-sacrificing, self-disciplined Africans ha v e broken the colour-bar laws and have been arrested for their beliefs.
At the opposite pole from the things of Mau Mau these people have given a lesson in voluntary suffering. They have been joined, both in resistance and in prison, by a group of Europeans—among them Mr. Patrick Damn, son of the first South African-born Governor-General of the Union.
All honour to them, black and white, united in sacrifice.
Symbolic wings
WHAT is the true Christian attitude towards the coloured races?
Catholics may differ over details. But on the tremendous main issue we are agreed. Apartheid or any other form of Racialism is utterly abhorrent to Christian belief.
Our Lord came to save all men, irrespective of their colour, In the words of the negro spiritual, "Alt God's chillun got wings . . ." symbolic wings, to enable them to fly Heavenwards after death, and to carry their capacities to their highest possible pitch while on earth.
If the black African is capable, in time, of developing the full powers of civilised men, let him develop them. If he can do skilled work now, let him do it. It is the plain duty of Christians to help him, encourage him, bring him on —never to bar him from work or responsibilities of which he is already capable.
We Catholics know that in Africa every year black men are ordained priests, Can we for a moment believe that though a black man is worthy to be a priest he is unworthy of sharing a waiting-room with a white man, unworthy of buying a stamp at the same counter, eating in the same hotel? Yet that is the un-Christian lesson of the colour-bar.
Colour bar here
' T this point it is essential to emphasise—what must surely be obvious— that we British are in danger of trying to cast out the "mote" from South Africa's eye while ignoring a similar cause of offence in ours. Though the colourbar is not legally enforced in British territories in the same way as it is in South Africa, nevertheless it exists. Many white settlers are Racialists at heart, though they express their beliefs less brutally.
The editor of a European paper in Central Africa was expounding a Racialist gospel, albeit in the mildest possible form, when he said at a meeting: "The Africans must become our partners, yes. But always the junior partners." Neither in science nor in Christianity is there any justification for that "always."
Affairs in Kenya make startling and terrible headlines. Let us agree that Mau Mau expresses itself in murder, robbery with violence, and obviously must be suppreesed. But after that admission? Many reforms are overdue in Kenya. We read of land hunger among the Kikuyu tribesmen, and the need for something nearer a living wage for African labourers. We read of 10,000 homeless Africans sleeping every night in Nairobi. I have been told on good authority that there have never been more than 12 Europeans in Kenya at a time who spoke the Kikuyu language. Yet we are responsible for their welfare.
Nothing. less .
AS Christians, what should we Alt do? Briefly, we must apply the whole of Christian principles to Africa, not just a part. Christianity has already come to Africa as the greatest revolutionary force ever known among the tribes. Missionaries have struck at ancient tribal customs—polygamy, female circumcision, animism. Industry has broken up the tribe itself, bringing the black labourer into the towns away from his land and family.
We who have destroyed so much that was bad—some things that were good, too, in their way—what can we put in its place? Nothing less than the full gift of Christianity, the unqualified belief in man's equality before God, with its corollary of justice among men.
Amid all the complex questions which face us in Africa today (which would require another article as long as this even to touch on) nothing short of undiluted Christianity will save the day. If we water it down with selfish or expedient heresies or half-truths, we shall lose Africa—for God and for democracy.