Brotz & Fagan, Fagan & Brotz

The Politics of South Africa: Democracy and Racial Diversity By Howard Brotz Oxford, 164 pp., $11.95 Howard Brotz, an American sociologist now at McMaster University in Ontario, proposes to talk sense about the political relations of the races in South Africa. He might have warmed up on one of the Labors of Hercules —slaying the Nemean lion, perhaps. For white South Africans are widely regarded abroad as simply a crowd of bigots dedicated to exploiting the indigenous black population and willfully indifferent to “world opinion.”

Brotz knows better than that. He knows, undoubtedly, that in many areas of South Africa the ancestors of today’s whites were on the scene long before the arrival of the ancestors of today’s blacks. He explicitly recognizes that “the common franchise, as it would work in South Africa, would not unite the citizenry but trigger an ethnic struggle for power with the consequent political destruction of the numerically smaller whites.” He is sensible enough to acknowledge that “Constitutional democracy in an ethnically plural situation should not require a people to commit ethnic suicide just because they are in a minority.” He thereby implies, correctly, that South Africa’s whites have no intention whatever of committing suicide merely to accommodate our era’s Great Simplifiers. He may even share my suspicion that the South African government will shortly have at its disposal the nuclear weaponry to deter anyone at all from seeking to bring it down by force.

WA

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William A. Rusher

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The Politics of South Africa: Democracy and Racial Diversity By Howard Brotz Oxford, 164 pp., $11.95 Howard Brotz, an American sociologist now at McMaster University in Ontario, proposes to talk sense about the political relations of the races in South Africa. He might have warmed up on one of the Labors of Hercules —slaying the Nemean lion, perhaps. For white South Africans are widely regarded abroad as simply a crowd of bigots dedicated to exploiting the indigenous black population and willfully indifferent to “world opinion.”

Brotz knows better than that. He knows, undoubtedly, that in many areas of South Africa the ancestors of today’s whites were on the scene long before the arrival of the ancestors of today’s blacks. He explicitly recognizes that “the common franchise, as it would work in South Africa, would not unite the citizenry but trigger an ethnic struggle for power with the consequent political destruction of the numerically smaller whites.” He is sensible enough to acknowledge that “Constitutional democracy in an ethnically plural situation should not require a people to commit ethnic suicide just because they are in a minority.” He thereby implies, correctly, that South Africa’s whites have no intention whatever of committing suicide merely to accommodate our era’s Great Simplifiers. He may even share my suspicion that the South African government will shortly have at its disposal the nuclear weaponry to deter anyone at all from seeking to bring it down by force.