Go South, Young (White) Man

South Africa might seem like the last place in the Western world where a man would want to risk his future. Denounced by the U.N. for its white-supremacy policies, and boycotted by almost every other African nation, the country is perpetually haunted by the threat of an internal racial explosion. Yet a surprising number of white settlers are ignoring the swart gevaar (as Afrikaners call the "black danger") to seek a new life in the controversial land. For three years, more whites have moved to South Africa than have left, and in 1963 net immigration reached an estimated 26,000--the highest total in the 15-year reign of the pro-apartheid Nationalist regime.

$168 per Head. In part, the influx is the result of a government campaign to lure European skilled craftsmen and professionals, who are in short supply in South Africa. The Verwoerd regime desperately wants to change the population balance, which currently stands at 3,250,000 whites v. 13,815,000 Africans, Coloreds and Asians. In cities across Europe, newspaper ads extol the virtues of South Africa, and recruitment centers offer a $168 grant for each approved man, woman and child immigrant.

And indeed, for a man whose skin is both white and thick, the land of apartheid can, in a sense, be a land of unlimited opportunity. Despite Afro-Asian efforts to cut off its trade, gold-and-diamond-rich South Africa is bursting with prosperity, and jobs abound. Recently a Johannesburg auto firm conducted a monthlong, nationwide advertising campaign for mechanics, did not get a single reply.

A Matter of Time. Almost half the immigrants--11,000 in the past year--come from Britain, many complaining of the cold weather and unemployment at home; others arrive from Holland, West Germany, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Scandinavia. A second trek to South Africa is under way among whites fleeing African territories being taken over by black nationalists; a bearded Afrikaner who had been farming in Kenya, which won its freedom last month, crossed back into his homeland in his ten-year-old Chevrolet, jumped out, and literally knelt down and kissed the red Transvaal dust. So many whites have migrated from the neighboring white-dominated Central African Federation, which was dissolved last New Year's Eve, that hundreds of such "refugees" are living in house trailers in South African cities. During the last three weeks of 1963, 3,000 more of them poured across the Limpopo River through the Southern Rhodesian border township of Beitbridge.

Most of the immigrants shrug off any concern about the future. This is especially true of the newcomers from Europe, who consist mainly of married couples intent on finding their place under South Africa's eternal sun, and on enjoying the easy living in a land where nannies and houseboys can still be hired for $30 a month. Said an engineer from England, Philip Bacchus, who with his wife and two children arrived with 526 fellow immigrants on the liner Empress of Britain: "After all, there is trouble everywhere." But won't the new arrivals be sickened at the sight of apartheid? Predicts one observer: "After the initial revulsion, they will, like their predecessors, avert their eyes."

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