South Africa in the Seventies

Extract

Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. It is only to be expected that this strange looking-glass country should even oblige one to put platitudes back to front. In the seventies, all appears to be exactly as it was in the sixties, if not more so, with the Vorster brothers reigning supreme in Church and State—the Prime Minister’s elder brother was elected Moderator of the N.G.K., the biggest of the three Galvinist Afrikaner churches, at their synod last year. And yet there is a change in the smell of things, at least to my nostrils. I will try to illustrate this state of affairs by a miscellany of episodes that have marked the last eighteen months.

We begin with the Msini case. Mr Msini is a crippled African who works, I believe as a night watchman, for a firm in Wellington, about forty miles from Cape Town.