z:\ ambedkar\vol 08\vol8 05.indd MK SJ+YS 28 9 2013/YS 13 11 2013 351
PAKISTAN : MUST THERE BE PAKISTAN ?
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“Is there a South African nation today ?
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“There are certain factors in South African life which militate against an affirmative answer.”
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“Among English-speaking South Africans there are found many tendencies inclined to hinder the cause of national unity. With all the great virtues of the race they have its one cardinal defect—a lack of imagination, a difficulty in putting one’s self in the other man’s place. Nowhere does this come out more clearly than in the language question. Until recently comparatively few English-speaking South Africans have studied Afrikans except as a business proposition or (as in the Civil Service) more or less under compulsion; and fewer still have used it conversationally. Many have treated it with open contempt—a contempt in inverse proportion to their knowledge of it—and the majority with mere tolerance, exasperated or amused according to temperament.”
Another witness on the same point may be heard. He is Mr. Manfred Nathan.* This is what he has to say on the relations between the Boers and the British in South Africa :—
“They are also, in the main, both of them Protestant peoples—although this is not of too great importance nowadays, when differences of religion do not count for much. They engage freely in commercial transactions with each other.”
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“Nevertheless it cannot with truth be said that hitherto there has been absolutely free social intercourse between these two great sections of the white population. It has been suggested that this is partly due to the fact that in the large urban centres the population is predominantly English, and that the townsfolk know little of the people in the country and their ways of life. But even in the country towns, though there is, as a rule, much greater friendliness, and much hospitality shown by Boers to visitors, there is not much social intercourse between the two sections apart from necessary business or professional relationship, and such social functions, charitable or public, as require co-operation.”
Obviously India is not the only place where there is communal antagonism. If communal antagonism does not come in the way of the French in Canada living in political unity with the English, if it does not come in the way of the English in South Africa living in political unity with the Dutch, if it does not come in the way of
- The South African Commonwealth, p. 365.