out
of office for seven years, and there are certainly no signs at the
moment of its getting back in. As things are counted in South Africa,
the Oppenheimers are dangerous radicals. They believe in the
advancement of what politicians there always refer to as the "native."
They treat the native too well, for according to the Nationalists
their rate of pay boosts the wage scale of everybody else who uses
native labor, and their welfare policy is equally difficult to compete
with. They've got to be watched, moreover, lest they import dangerous
ideas from Rhodesia, where the native (who suffers a land change at
the border and in Rhodesia suddenly becomes, politically speaking, the
African instead) is as a matter of policy due for advancement. There is
the Copper Belt of Northern Rhodesia, where the Anglo American
Corporation of Rhodesia is developing a group of mines. Sir Ernest has
done something on a grand scale there in building whole townships of
comfortable houses for the African workers, where they live with their
families and send their children to school. He proposed doing the same
thing in the gold fields of the Orange Free State. He thought, and he
still thinks, that workers who are contented will do better work, and
they are more likely to be contented if they live with their families
near their jobs than if they are pent up in barracklike compounds as
they are at Johannesburg. But the South African Government didn't like
the idea at all. This would never do, the Ministers concerned
explained, because such action would create new, permanent "black
spots" in the middle of white country. Sir Ernest wasn't permitted to
put up his buildings, and the Nationalists were more than ever
convinced that you must be very, very careful with Anglo American.
There is also the suspicious fact that Sir Ernest is interested in the
University
