Ons Verantwoordelikheid – H.A. Fagan (Signed by the author)

Description

‘n Bespreking Van Suid-Afrika Se Rassevraagstukke

Signed and inscribed by the author

Price: 750.00

Edition: First edition

Date published: 1960

Publishers: Die Universiteits-Uitgewers en -Boekhandelaars Edms Bpk

Condition: Green hardcover with black lettering in very good condition. Scuff marks and small tears on the edges of the dust jacket. Minor foxing to first pages. Book is internally very clean and tightly bound.

Extract from article in Time Magazine – 29 February 1960:

“Everybody knows that doughty but ineffectual little bands, such as novelist Alan (Cry, the Beloved Country) Paton’s Liberal Party, have long opposed the South African government’s all-out segregation policy. Now, for the first time since apartheid was officially proclaimed South Africa’s “way of life” twelve years ago, members of the ruling Boer Afrikaner National Party are beginning to speak and fight against it.

It was one of the country’s most respected old Boers who broke the façade of Nationalist unity. Henry Allan Fagan, 70, until last year chief justice of the Union’s Supreme Court, is both the country’s most eminent jurist and its best-loved Afrikaans author; his novels and verse are found in practically every veld farmhouse. In a book published early this month, called Our Responsibility, Fagan pronounced Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s rigid apartheid “hopelessly impractical”, and pointed out that the government has found it “impossible” to carry through “the mass withdrawal of [black] labor from European industries”. Just as “Karoo farmers do not waste their time arguing whether the low rainfall of the area they farm in is something they should like or dislike … and adapt themselves to it,” wrote Fagan, “we have to accept the fact of interdependence of the races in South Africa.”

Fagan’s measured pronouncements, serialized in the largest Afrikaner newspaper, Die Landstem, brought in a flood of approving letters, including some from unknown farmers pleading with Fagan to lead a political movement. In his airy house outside Cape Town, Old Boer Fagan referred all callers to Jacobus Basson, 41, the fiery, redheaded Nationalist MP who was expelled from the party last fall. He had protested Prime Minister Verwoerd’s decision to end the last semblance of black representation in Parliament: whites voting in the Africans’ name. Last week, after meeting with some 50 other Nationalists who think that Verwoerd has gone too far in separating the country’s 3,000,000 whites and 11 million blacks and coloreds, ‘Japie’ Basson announced the formation of a new National Union party. Far from integrationist, the new party hopes to rally those Afrikaners who before World War II used to support the relatively moderate race policies of the late Prime Minister JBM Hertzog.”