Complete apartheid reigns at the winery of fictional Jock Silberstein: white wine is bottled by colored girls in white uniforms while red wine is bottled by white girls in brown uniforms. Jock Silberstein is a creation of Etienne Leroux, an Afrikaner novelist who explores sex, evil and decadence, and sometimes treats Afrikaners and apartheid with mocking irony. By doing so, Leroux and André P. Brink, another Afrikaner novelist who is like him, desert the traditional way of the pastoral, patriotic and puritanical Afrikaans novel. The Afrikaner literary set in South Africa likes to describe the new novels of Leroux and Brink as "the renaissance in Afrikaans prose.” That’s overblowing it, but the novels do have significance, for politics as well as art. Afrikaner nationalists have long looked on their language, which comes from 17th-century Dutch, as more than a means of expression; to them, it is an end in itself. Using Afrikaans glorifies nationalism. Extreme nationalist Afrikaners, convinced that Leroux and Brink use it in a way that soils Afrikaner nationalism, now condemn the two writers as traitors to their culture. After the Boer War, Afrikaners, descendants of the early Dutch settlers, tried to avenge the humiliation and indignities of their defeat by intensifying their belief in the worth of their own culture...

Little can be done to save the lives of those bloat-bellied children of Biafra until the civil war in Nigeria is over. That is the heart of the matter; all else is peripheral. The pitiable pictures in the London press, the stricken conscience of the British people, the rush of volunteers to feed and nurse Biafran babies, the American powdered milk piling high on the docks of Lagos, the mad scrambling of relief workers to crack Nigerian inefficiency and push the supplies somewhere, somehow — all mean little as long as the war goes on. Some idealists believe that the world’s indignation, outcry and shamed anger over the thousands dying in Biafra will force the two sides to end their war, in the name of decency and humanity, but that is doubtful. “No group can stop a war because people are dying,” said Alison Ayida, an influential Nigerian civil servant, in a meeting with foreign newsmen in Lagos recently. “It’s never been done in a war before, and it won’t be done in Nigeria — unless you stop the cause of the war. That’s what war is all about.” The federal government feels that it is about to crush the rebellion in Biafra, and it is in no mood to be cheated of this victory by pictures of starving children...

The white Afrikaner administrator swept his hand out to show the poverty of the Transkei in South Africa: the round mud houses with their thatched cone roofs, the green hilly land that produced only a pittance of corn during the year, the bony cattle that the Xhosa people refused to sell. “We have to succeed,” the administrator said with a weak, nervous laugh. “Our existence depends on it.” But so far, he and the other white officials of the Transkei are failing. The Transkei is the most advanced of the Bantustans, the word coined by the white supremacist government to describe those areas of South Africa it has set aside for black Africans. Under the theory of apartheid, the Transkei and seven other Bantustans, created out of 13 percent of the land, will some distant day become independent black nations and absorb the great bulk of South Africa’s black Africans. Whites, who are now outnumbered four to one, would then outnumber blacks in the rest of South Africa. Once in the majority, the whites say, they would have the moral and democratic right to run their own country — white South Africa. To implement the theory and justify it to the rest of the world, the white South African government is trying, though in a desultory way, to develop the economy of the Bantustans. As the Afrikaner administrator pointed out, the government has no other choice. Without vibrant economies, the Bantustans could not absorb more millions of Africans. The so-called white areas of South Africa would still be left with black majorities, and a powerful and rich minority would still have to hold down the black masses by force. This would expose apartheid as an immoral and impossible solution to the dilemma of South Africa...