The first thing that has to be said is that we are not just talking about a single country a long way off. What is sobering and startling in South Africa is the realization that it is a sort of caricature of the whole of our world— ‘like everywhere else, only more so’. The world in focus, perhaps: because here you see the proximity of lavish overconsumption and starvation, freedom and slavery, massive military investment and plain human need. Here you can see the link between our wealth and their poverty. A few of the intermediate stages that usually cushion us from this realization are missing, so that poverty appears in its naked causal connection with the aggressive greed of a minority. It is impossible there not to see poverty as what is created by the violence of the few against the many in a situation of a great natural wealth of resources. In some of the so-called native ‘homelands’ in South Africa, where populations are forcibly shifted from their existing locations, something between one-fifth and one-third of black children die before they are five years old. They do not die by accident, though they die of ‘natural’ causes: they die because decisions have been taken which mean that they are exposed to disease and malnutrition endemic in these areas, far from real medical care. They die because of Dr. Piet Koornhof, the astonishingly titled Minister for Co-operation and Development. That will sound shocking; though the real shock is to grasp that children there and elsewhere in Africa or in Asia or Central America also die because of us, because of the electors of our governments.

I: Defender of the Indians or Satan’s tool?

In his De procuranda indorum salute (1589) the Spanish Jesuit, José de Acosta, a former provincial of his order in Peru, lamented that nowadays the gospel and war were all too closely associated. He was at pains to reject proposals mooted by a fellow Jesuit that Spain should invade China so as to bring that great empire into the fold of the Catholic Church. Not that Acosta was a pacifist, since he defended the right of a Christian Prince to establish forts in heathen territory for the protection of trade and the preaching of the gospel. Moreover, in regions like Amazonia, inhabited by mere savages without any law, king or fixed abode, there was a positive duty to introduce some form of political order so that the natives could be taught the elements of civility and Christianity. Any resistance to this imposition of a protectorate could be justly quelled by force of arms, albeit applied with paternal firmness. As for the justice of the previous conquest of the relatively advanced kingdoms of the Incas and Aztecs, Acosta simply counselled a closure of debate, arguing that with no chance of restitution or restoration, any further discussion of the question merely served to provoke dissension between the spiritual and temporal authorities.