Thursday, May 31, 2018

Quoted without comment, from "The Fortunes of Africa"

Page 581:

With relentless propaganda, the Nationalists played on the electorate's racial anxieties at every opportunity. They paid particular attention to working-class Afrikaners facing competition from cheap black labour. By 1948 about half of the white Afrikaans-speaking population lived in urban areas. A large proportion were miners, railwaymen, transport, factory and steel workers for whom the Nationalist slogan of apartheid, promising protection of white jobs, had a potent appeal....

The National Party won the 1948 election by a narrow margin. In his victory speech, Malan declared: 'Today South Africa belongs to us once more. For the first time since Union, South Africa is ours, and may God grant that it will always remain our own.'

4 comments:

Bryson said...

A somehow familiar story...politics is like fiction: there are just a few basic plot lines, and we're condemned to repeat them, over and over again...

Phil said...

History doesn't repeat.

History rhymes.

EliRabett said...

Idiots are involved

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

And ancient mariners.