A Cry for Humanity

Dr. Michael Scott is a tall, gaunt-faced Anglican minister who has labored a good part of his 43 years among South Africa's underdog black men. "My religion," he says, "knows no color bar." He likes to quote Paul's Epistle to the Colossians: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all, and in all."

Lepers, slumdwellers and downtrodden tribesmen look upon Scott as a saint. Those white men in South Africa who believe that blacks are subhuman hewers of wood and drawers of water call him a crackpot.

On the Veldt. Three years ago a message came to Scott in Johannesburg from black friends on the veldt: in South West Africa, a former German colony mandated by the League of Nations to the Union of South Africa, the white men were plotting to defraud the black men of their heritage. It was the "sacred trust" of a mandatory power to prepare native peoples for self-government. Instead, the Union of South Africa was preparing to annex South West Africa and force its black men (300,000 v. 30,000 whites) into a degrading system of racial discrimination (TIME, Nov. 14).

Scott journeyed to native encampments on the wild thornbush plains. He bumped over rough motor tracks, got lost in deserts, sat with chiefs and councillors and took down their words. The tribesmen deputized him to speak for them to the outside world, sold some of their cattle to pay for his trips to sessions of the U.N.

From the Jukeboxes. In 1947, Scott flew to Lake Success. He heard the jukeboxes of America blaring the hit of the day, Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don't Want to Leave the Congo. Unlike the missionaries in the jukebox hymn, the Rev. Scott was not so sure that "civilization is fine."

Civilization, white South African style, did everything it could to thwart Scott's mission. Though denied official standing, he managed to tell U.N. members of the black man's plight. Three times the General Assembly asked the Union of South Africa to place the onetime German colony under international control. Three times the Union refused. As of today, the Union government of Premier Daniel Malan has all but annexed South West Africa.

Before the World. Last week, Michael Scott called again on the U.N.; this time he won a public hearing before the Assembly's Trusteeship Committee. The South African delegation refused to attend. But others among the 59 delegations listened carefully, read with deep concern a bulky document, In Face of Fear, which the speaker had compiled.

It was a plea for basic human rights which must belong to black as well as white, lest all Africa be driven in time toward a racial holocaust. He quoted Herero tribesmen who dreaded annexation by South Africa: "We shall be destroyed if we are incorporated." The natives preferred "the shadow of the British Crown" to the shades of South African apartheid. Respectfully, they begged for further U.N. hearings or a U.N. inquiry, and for the transfer of South West Africa to U.N. trusteeship.

Scott closed with the prayer of a Herero chief: "O Lord, help us who roam about . . . Give us back a dwelling place."

U.N.'s collective conscience was stirred: chances were that the case would be referred to the International Court of Justice. But the real problem was how to rouse the conscience of South Africa.

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