South Africa's Dreams by Robert J. Gordon

Author:Robert J. Gordon [Gordon, Robert J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789209754
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2021-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Selling Apartheid to the World

At the June 1960 Addis Ababa meeting of the Conference of Independent African States, Ethiopia and Liberia, both former members of the League of Nations, signaled their intention of instituting legal proceedings against South Africa for not fulfilling the mandate. They formally initiated such charges in November of that year. They demanded that the mandate awarded to South Africa by the league to administer South-West Africa be revoked on the grounds that South Africa had acted in bad faith by neglecting to fulfill Article 22 of the mandate, namely “to promote to the utmost the material and moral well-being and the social progress of the inhabitants of the territory.” South Africa’s rejoinder was that the ultimate end it was pursuing in the territory, apartheid, was in accordance with enlightened and liberal opinion. The South African state had anticipated this challenge, and already in February of the same year van Warmelo had written a long memorandum entitled “SWA from an Ethnological Point of View” for the Department of External Affairs. By April 1961 a special room had been set aside for all the relevant collected material, with “three men busy indexing it.” Experts in native administration from the universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria, and South Africa were called in as consultants. Writing to Jos Allen, the SWA’s additional native commissioner, van Warmelo, was not optimistic: “Most of what falls in my orbit, will be brushed aside as irrelevant. It’s like Eichmann’s trial. You could not find impartial judges on the whole globe, the issue being already pre-judged.”22 Little did he realize that it was not only international opinion that was to find his research irrelevant but also the South African legal team.

An undated memo entitled “Re: Applicants Instituting Proceedings” is a multi-authored essay in which Eiselen, the secretary for native affairs, played a leading part. While van Warmelo was to describe the physical, cultural, and linguistic diversity and the great differences between them that allegedly existed before colonialism and that the administration had simply recognized, Eiselen’s task was to make the general case for separate development, alleging that there was no such thing as a SWA nation, only a number of widely different nations and races who lived apart and preferred to live that way. He cited missionary sources from the thirties, including Joseph Oldham, secretary of the International Africa Institute, and Siegfried Knak, a major figure in German missionary circles. Eiselen then sought to justify the importance of race in the territory, thereby critiquing the famous 1950 UNESCO statement on race, by citing statements by the cross-cultural psychologist S. D. Porteus, published in the 1960 inaugural volume of Mankind Quarterly, a right-wing journal promoting the idea of “scientific” racism. Eiselen tempered his views, though, by claiming that black races were not permanently inferior but might be equal or even superior to Europeans in certain ways. Racial differences were inescapable; thus, while SWA was a multiracial country, it was not a multiracial community.23

The ICJ’s highly contested verdict in

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