Race Questions in South Africa

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THE main problems confronting the Union of South Africa in respect of its colored races and peoples, and of their relations with the European population, are peculiarly complex. They call with increasing insistence for the reconsideration and readjustment of our political and industrial policies.

Our non-European peoples fall into three main groups. First and most important, both in regard to existing numbers and future potentialities, comes the native population. Then there are the people known in South Africa as "colored," who include colored people of mixed race and also a small community of Malays settled for the most part in and near Capetown. The Malays were introduced by the Dutch East India Company before the British occupation of the Cape, and have long since lost all connection with their country of origin, but retain their Mohammedan religion; their numbers are insignificant for the purposes with which we are concerned, but they are grouped for administrative and other purposes with the "colored" population. (This term, it must always be remembered, has a peculiar connotation in South Africa, in that it is used to distinguish the South African colored man of mixed race--including the small Malay community just mentioned--from the native.) The third racial element is the Asiatic, consisting for the most part of British Indians, some of whom are traders or the descendants of traders who have come here from India, but the great majority of whom are persons or the descendants of persons who were brought over from India to work as laborers in the tea and sugar plantations of Natal.

The native population at the last census (1921) numbered 4,699,433; the mixed and other colored races numbered 545,548; and the Asiatic 163,896. The total of the European population at the same census was 1,519,488. If we add to these figures the population of the territories adjacent to the Union and now administered directly by the British Government, but which may one day be included in the Union, the effect would be to add approximately 5,500 to the European population and 750,000 (all but a few of whom are natives) to the non-European. We at once see South Africa's peculiar position. She stands somewhere between the two principal types of countries where the white and colored races of the world are clashing...