South African Fortnight

Yes, there are a hundred, and a thousand voices crying. But what does one do, when one cries this thing, and one cries another? Who knows how we shall fashion a land of peace where black outnumbers white so greatly?

No one knows surely how to fashion a land of peace in South Africa, but what one does, at least, is to listen to the voice of Henrik Verwoerd— listen, I say, and not merely because his is one voice, out of a hundred or a thousand, but because his has become the voice of South Africa, which thinks it has found its way eighteen years after Alan Paton, crying for his beloved country, wrote so plaintively, so hearttearingly, that there were one thousand voices telling his countrymen what to do, yet nothing much was done. “It suited the white man to break the tribe,” the black evangelist Msimangu said, in Paton’s book, “gravely.” “That much we could understand—you cannot stop the world from going on. My friend, I am a Christian. It is not in my heart to hate a white man. It was a white man who brought my father out of darkness. The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief that it cannot be mended again. It suited the white man to break the tribe, but it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken. I have pondered this for many hours.’’

About the Author

William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

Yes, there are a hundred, and a thousand voices crying. But what does one do, when one cries this thing, and one cries another? Who knows how we shall fashion a land of peace where black outnumbers white so greatly?

No one knows surely how to fashion a land of peace in South Africa, but what one does, at least, is to listen to the voice of Henrik Verwoerd— listen, I say, and not merely because his is one voice, out of a hundred or a thousand, but because his has become the voice of South Africa, which thinks it has found its way eighteen years after Alan Paton, crying for his beloved country, wrote so plaintively, so hearttearingly, that there were one thousand voices telling his countrymen what to do, yet nothing much was done. “It suited the white man to break the tribe,” the black evangelist Msimangu said, in Paton’s book, “gravely.” “That much we could understand—you cannot stop the world from going on. My friend, I am a Christian. It is not in my heart to hate a white man. It was a white man who brought my father out of darkness. The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief that it cannot be mended again. It suited the white man to break the tribe, but it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken. I have pondered this for many hours.’’