Another extract runs: —
== "We have a piece of land at the edge of our estate cutting right into land owned by various Natives, and we are willing to dispose of this land to Cele for this reason. We understood that the Department of Native Affairs raised no objection, but we were astonished when everything was "cut and dried" to find them refusing the application."*
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* U.G. 22, p. 557.
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How then can the Native be expected to survive this organized opposition, on the part of the authorities, and also of these official beneficiaries and prospective pensioners of native taxes? Will it be believed that these gentlemen of the Native Affairs Department, whose salaries are actually paid by us, should have sent messengers at our expense to convene a meeting of their colleagues, at which letters were dictated prohibiting the sale of this land to Zulus — the stationery, the typewriter and the typist's labour, to say nothing of the cigarettes smoked by those present, being paid for out of native money?
Is it surprising if we feel that their adverse interference in matters which so vitally affect us has long since become intolerable?
It may be asked what useful purpose is served by the Native Affairs Department as it now stands? This would be my answer: —
The Department is responsible for the gathering in of all native taxes throughout the Union. And after paying the salaries of the staff, it pays over annually a huge surplus to the Union Exchequer for the benefit of "a white South Africa". Further, the Transvaal Natives believe that they would get along much better with the white population, and with officials of other Departments of State, were not "the Native Affairs Department continually stirring them up against us." The justice of this complaint is well exemplified at Johannesburg, where the autocrats of this department are armed with, and liberally exercise, the peculiar and exceptional powers of locking up Natives without warrants, without any charge, and without a trial — powers which even the Judges of the Supreme Court do not possess.
General Hertzog's Scheme
It may interest the reader to know that General Hertzog is the father of the segregation controversy. The writer and other Natives interviewed him before Christmas, 1912, at the Palace of Justice, Pretoria, when he was still in the ministry. We had a two hours' discussion, in the course of which the General gave us a forecast of what he then regarded as possible native areas, and drew rings on a large wall-map of the Union to indicate their locality. Included in these rings were several Magistracies which he said would solve a knotty problem. He told us that white people objected to black men in Government offices and magistrates in those areas would have no difficulty in employing them.
General Hertzog was dismissed shortly after, and it has been said that in order to placate his angry admirers the Ministry passed the Natives' Land Act of which this Report is the outcome. Judging by the vigour with which the Union administration has been weeding Natives out of the public service and replacing them with Boers without waiting for the Commission's Report, it is clear that they did not share General Hertzog's intention as regards these magistracies. I cannot recall all the magistracies which General Hertzog mentioned as likely to fall in native areas; but I distinctly remember that Pietersburg and Thaba Nchu were among them; while Alice and Peddie (and possibly a neighbouring district) were to be included in a southern reserve into which the Natives round East London and Grahamstown would have to move, the land vacated by them to be gradually occupied by the white settlers now scattered over the would-be native block. He went on to forecast a vast dependency of the Union in which the energies and aspirations of black professional men would find their outlet with no danger of competition with Europeans; where a new educational and representative system could be evolved for Natives to live their own lives, and work out their salvation in a separate sphere. But the lands Commission's Report places this plausible scheme beyond the region of possibility, for no native area, recommended by this Commission, includes any of the magistracies mentioned.