Contents

• Introduction
• South Africa's Present And Future
• The Search For The Just Society
• Where Faith Falls Short

The Search For The Just Society

These words concerning “ The Wolf and the Lamb” are taken from the book of Isaiah, in that famous passage which reads:

  The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
  And the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
  And the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
  And the little child shall lead them.

  The cow and the bear shall feed;
  Their young shall lie down together:
  And the lion shall eatsstraw like the ox.

  The suckling child shall play over the hole of the asp,
  And the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

  They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain:
  For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord,
  As the waters cover the sea.    

The vision of Isaiah is paralleled by the vision of John on Patmos, who sees a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and in the new heaven and the new earth, God shall wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be an end of death, and of mourning and crying and pain; for the old order is passed away.

That these visions are ineffable, no one can gainsay.  They are visions of a world that has never been, and certainly many of us would say, of a world that never will be.  Yet people have never been able to thrust them aside.  In this country the people enshrined some such visions in the Constitution of the United States.  They were enshrined also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  These documents are records of the endless quest for the just order of society.

Our Constitution in South Africa is a strictly legal document, and dates from 1910 when the Union of South Africa came into being.  It was originally an enactment of the British Parliament and gave self-government to the Dominion of South Africa.  It contained two entrenched clauses which could only be amended by a two-thirds majority of both Houses of Parliament sitting together.  One of these entrenched classes guarantees the status of the two official languages of the country, then English and Hollands, later to become English and Afrikaans.

The second entrenched clause protected the franchise of the Cape Colony, which accorded voting rights to African and Cape colored males who achieved certain qualifications of education and property ownership. The all-white Parliament finally abolished the African franchise in 1956 and the Cape colored franchise in 1963.

The Constitution of the Union of South Africa, which became the Republic of South Africa in 1961, contained no Bill of Rights.  Your own Bill of Rights derives from the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and your own struggle for independence.  Yet although it has these British sources, the British did not give us a Bill of Rights.  You will be interested to know that there are people in Britain who advocate a Bill of Rights, on the grounds that the rights of British subjects are unwritten, and could in changed political circumstances be taken away.

Your fourth amendment to the Constitution secures the people against unreasonable searches and seizures.  The fifth forbids the taking of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.  We have no such protection.  Therefore, it happened in 1961 under the General Law Amendment Act that our Parliament authorized the Minister of Justice to detain persons for ninety days without charge or trial, if such persons were alleged to be guilty of or privy to subversive action against the State.

We knew then that this was the beginning of the erosion of the rule of law.  The supreme loyalty of an American is to the Constitution.  Having no Constitution, I have given my supreme loyalty to the Rule of Law.  And to watch its erosion from year to year has been a bitter experience.

I am not a lawyer and cannot discourse learnedly on the Rule of Law.  But to me it is the most noble conception of sinful men and women who, knowing the strength of their greeds and passions, give to society the right to curb such greeds and passions by law.  This power society vests in courts of law and in the presiding officers of such courts, and it is these courts and these officers alone who have the right to touch the person or property or liberty of the citizen.  No President, no Congress, no high officer has this right; it is yielded to the Court of Law.  If I may repeat myself, you Americans should give daily thanks for your Constitution and your Bill of Rights, and for the fact that you live under the Rule of Law.  Quite apart from the fact that the color bar was virtually enshrined in our Constitution, our situation today would not have been so dark and dangerous if the Constitution had also contained a Bill of Rights.  Of all human rights there is none more precious than to have the right to live under the rule of law.  Without it, there can be no just order of society.

You have yet something more for which to be thankful.  Your Constitution is not interpreted by the President or Congress.  It is interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States of America.  When the Court in 1954 struck down school segregation as unconstitutional, a movement of social change was launched, the end of which has not yet been seen.  I know that many of you are impatient with what the Supreme Court called "deliberate speed".  Yet to a person like myself, who was here in 1954, and who joined in celebrating the decision in the house of Walter White of the NAACP, and who has been fortunate enough to visit the United States seven times since, the direction of the change is evident.

The rule of law in South Africa was further eroded by the Sabotage Act and the Terrorism Act, but the final erosion took place in 1976 under the Internal Security Act, which authorized the Minister of Justice to detain, for ever if he found it necessary, any person whom he deemed to be a danger to the security of the State.  This law was first called the State Security Bill, but when the newspapers dubbed it the SS Bill, the Government changed its title.  This is ironic, that the Government should be so sensitive to any suggestion that its regime is in any way related to that of the Nazis, while at the same time its attitude towards the individual is authoritarian in the extreme.  It is doubly ironic, because some of its members actually hoped for a Nazi victory in the Second World War, believing that Hitler would restore to them the freedom that they had lost in the Anglo-Boer War.  They are sensitive about this today, and maintain that their sentiments were not pro-Nazi, but rather anti-British.  I believe this, and I can understand it also, because the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 was an offence against humanity.  But it is an indication of the spiritual confusion of the Afrikaner Nationalist mind that it thought that Hitler knew something about freedom that the British did not.  It is a fact of history that our present Prime Minister, Mr. B. J. Vorster was interned by General Smuts during the Second World War, and he is proud of it.  But never during his internment was he in danger of losing his life, as some of his own detainees have done.

In the United States the citizen does not owe his supreme loyalty to the State.  He owes it to the Constitution.  The Constitution is the constitution of the State, but in some way it is above the State.  In South Africa the supreme loyalty must, according to our rulers, be given to the State.  I do not wish to enter into any philosophical discussion about the nature of the State, for which discussion I am not fitted.  I merely wish to say categorically that in South Africa the security of the State means the security of the National Party.  Loyalty to the State means loyalty to the doctrines of racial separation.  During the Second World War, Mr. Vorster put his loyalty to Afrikanerdom above his loyalty to the State.  Today loyalty to Afrikanerdom is the same as loyalty to the State.  As the proverb puts it, so pithily and so cynically, circumstances alter cases.  One is reminded of the story of Mr. Samuel Goldwyn, who was trying to persuade some wealthy men to finance one of his projects.  And when he had finished he said, "Gentlemen, those are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others."

I would like to say a word about the probity of the Courts, whose duty in any civilised society is to prevent the wolf from eating the lamb, or to punish the wolf if it does eat the lamb.  It is possible to view the Courts of South Africa as instruments of white oppression.  I do not hold that view.  It is my opinion that an offence against the person of a black man or woman is much more seriously regarded in 1977 than it was in my youth.  The jury system has been abolished, and that is because juries were white, being drawn only from the ranks of parliamentary voters, and were extremely unwilling to find white persons guilty of offences against black persons.  The use of the word "kaffir", so bitterly resented by black people, is now regarded as offensive, and in recent times black people have been awarded damages against those who used this word in addressing them.  There are of course a host of derogatory appellations in use in South Africa, as there are in the United States, but the word "kaffir" has always been regarded as the most offensive.

Recently the International League of Human Rights sent an observer to the trial of Mr. Breyten Bretenbach, an Afrikaans poet who married--not in South Africa, of course--a Vietnamese wife, and became a totally committed opponent of Apartheid.  He had previously been sentenced to nine years imprisonment for plotting the overthrow of the Government and was now being tried for plotting further while in prison.  The observer, a New York lawyer named Mr. Garbus, wrote two opinions, one before the judgement was delivered, and another after the judge had passed a strikingly compassionate sentence on a sensitive man who had suffered intensely during his imprisonment.  It is clear to me that Mr. Garbus was taken aback by the gentleness of the sentence, and it is clear to me that he had gone to South Africa having already formed the opinion that in such cases, judges received instructions from the Government. I do not believe that the Government instructs judges, and I do not believe that judges would accept instructions.  But I shall qualify this praise by saying that if I were accused of any offence of a subversive nature, I would much rather be tried by some judges than by others.

Those of us who are concerned for the just order of society, and also for the just re-ordering of society, and for the rule of law and the maintenance of order, must naturally devote a great deal of thought to the whole question of the policing of a society and, in particular, to the question of security.  Should the security policy be also secret police?  Is there any place in the just society for a secret police?

One accepts readily that a Government must maintain a police force.  One expects that prospective policemen and policewomen will receive a vigorous training.  One expects that part of this training will be the inculcation of a deep respect for the law, and for the rule of law.  The police will be taught that they are not above the law, it is the law that is above them.  They will be taught how to respect the dignity of persons, especially in a country of many races.  They will be taught how best to handle violent situations, how to avoid the use of force until its use has become inevitable.  They should be taught--and I fear they often are not--that if they break the law, they will not be protected but will face the same consequences as any person who breaks the law.

Is it too much to expect that they should be taught the limitations of police action, that it cannot be a substitute for social change, that it cannot control social forces, that it cannot control the just hopes and aspirations of people?  I have already told you of the events of June 16, 1976, when rioting broke out in the great town of Soweto.  Such rioting has persisted to this very day.  When I left South Africa, it was estimated that 200,000 children were no longer going to school.  This, in large measure, is due to the fact that they resent what is called Bantu Education, a separate kind of education introduced by Dr. Verwoerd in 1953, when the education of black children was withdrawn from the existing education authorities, and was concentrated under one central national authority known as the Department of Bantu Education.  It is my belief that black education can never return to normal until the concept of Bantu Education is given up, and black education is restored to the proper education authorities.  Whether it will return to normal then is an open question, for there are other reasons for this continuing unrest.

I shall close this discussion of what might be called the ordinary police by recording the painful fact that in the couple of months before I left South Africa, three black policemen were killed.  Two of them were killed shortly after the funeral of Mr. Steve Biko, while they were waiting for a bus.  It seems beyond doubt that they were killed simply because they were policemen, and were therefore regarded as agents of white authority.  The third man was killed by sophisticated gunfire while he lay in bed; he was a terrorist who had recanted and had joined the security police.  These three deaths may be omens of worse things to follow.

One must accept--even if with reluctance--that every State will maintain security police.  One must accept--even if with reluctance--that this security work must be done in secret.  What should be totally unacceptable to the just society is that their work should be subject to no scrutiny except that of their superior officers, and nominally, in South Africa, to the scrutiny of the Minister of Justice.  Why are our security police held in such fear and distrust by the overwhelming majority of the population?  No doubt security police are always held in fear and distrust, but this fear and distrust was immeasurably deepened when the right was given to the Minister of Justice to detain without charge or trial, but worst of all, when the right of access to the detained person was denied to any person except a member of the police who were detaining him.  What does one fear then?  What is it natural that one should fear?  One fears torture and death.

The Government of South Africa is the most isolated government on the earth today.  There are two reasons for this.  One is its racial policies, enshrined in statutes.  The other is the law that permits the Minister of Justice to detain without charge or trial, and without access to any person except a member of the Security Police, for ever if the Minister should so decide, any person whom he decides to be a danger to the security of the State.

I tell you that in spite of the depth of our present crisis, a great wave of reassurance would sweep South Africa if it were announced that a Judge of the Supreme Court would visit weekly every person detained. Why cannot that be done?  How would that endanger the security of the State?  Is it because such a visit would interrupt the process of interrogation?  And what kind of interrogation must it be that would be interrupted by a visit from a Judge of the Supreme Court?  You may be sure that these questions are asked every day, and the answers given to them express the fear and distrust that are felt so deeply.

Should the just society use the death penalty?  Can any society be absolved of complicity in crime?  And if it can be absolved, what do we really know of the nature of individual responsibility?  In South Africa we carry out half of the executions of the so-called free world.  I think it is best to give an unashamedly moral and religious answer, and to say that society cannot be absolved, that the nature of individual responsibility is beyond our power to comprehend, and that the just society should not use the death penalty.  The pragmatic and utilitarian answer is much harder to give, and even it has moral and religious elements.  For I have seen Alcatraz, and once seen, it can never be forgotten.  I have seen men who were condemned to life imprisonment, and who would never be released.  Some of them were seized by fits of uncontrollable rage against life and the world and the very Creation maybe, who in their rages were possessed by such superhuman powers that they spent their lives behind solid bronze doors.  And others lived in bronze cages, and I have seen one come to the bars of his cage when he saw me as though he resented this intrusion by a stranger on his tormented privacy, and shake the bars with such a fury that it seemed that he would bring that whole fortress crashing to the ground.  And he would live his life in that cage because others dared not let him leave it.  And I have seen a solitary confinement cell in a boys' reformatory school, where a boy had been possessed of such terrible powers that he had torn the lavatory cistern out of the concrete floor and had torn the lavatory pipes out of the concrete wall.  And he too might well spend the rest of his life behind one of these solid bronze doors.  Such lives are sometimes the alternatives to official death.  That is why I take refuge--with no great assurance of being right--in the moral and religious answer.

When I began to put this lecture together, I did not quite know how it would turn out if one embarked on a search for the just order of society.  It has turned out to be a discussion of the rule of law, of human rights and civil liberties, of the erosion of the rule of law in my own country, of the terrors of secret detention, of the functions of police and security police, and the question of the death penalty. I realize that much has not been dealt with, notably a discussion of free enterprise, socialism, and communism, but that I am sure would have been too vast a subject.  And it is perhaps good that our discussion has centered round the theme of the law, which has given it a certain unity.  I would like to conclude with two further topics, and the first would be the question of censorship in the just society.

Let us first consider the freedom of the Press.  Jefferson said, "If I had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I would choose newspapers without government."  Such a view would be anathema to our government. They do not hold the view that the freedom of the Press is in fact inseparable from the freedom of the individual.  Earlier this year our Prime Minister threatened the Press with severe controls, but on representations agreed not to legislate if the Press behaved itself.  Any person can lay a complaint against a newspaper, and this is heard by the Press Council, which is presided over by a judge.  This is enough to make editors more careful.  But Mr. Percy Qoboza and Mr. Donald Woods were not careful enough.  As a result of his writings, Mr. Qoboza's paper was banned, and he was detained, and as far as I know he still is, in that terrible limbo where no one has access to him except his accusers.  Mr. Woods was himself banned, which means that his work as an editor is ended until his ban is lifted.  Therefore you will see that the threat to the press is a grave one.  I myself hold the view that no editor and no newspaper should be interfered with unless they contravene the law.

Censorship applies also to books, films, plays and records.  This has an inhibiting effect on writers, but still more on publishers.  The things to be avoided are sex and subversion.  One of our Afrikaner novelists has said that he writes always with a policeman in his head, and you can guess what kind of novel that would be.  Nevertheless, I continue to be surprised at the pictures of girls that have become a feature of the back page of many of our newspapers.

What should one do about the public display of sex pictures and sex objects?  I read that the Mayor of New York is determined to have them moved from Times Square to some more out-of-the-way place where they may display freely what are called adult books and pictures, or even more strangely, mature books and pictures.  I have the greatest sympathy with the aims of the Mayor of New York.  When I first saw Times Square it was for me a place of magic splendor.  I am convinced that it is dangerous to ban sex pictures and sex objects, but I think it is reasonable to confine their display to areas other than Times Square, of which it was once said that if you stood there long enough, you would see everyone of any consequence in the world.