THAT SOUTH AFRICA HAS WITHIN ITS STATE AND SOCIETY THE POTENTIAL for revolution is rarely doubted. It is a very strange and wicked country — anachronistic and atavistic, as if left over from the past to trouble the present. Africans are not worse treated today in South Africa than black men and women were in the United States 150 years ago. They are not bought and sold as property. Their survival, too, is assured unlike, say, the American Indians or the Aborigines of Australia at the turn of the century. They are more free, or less 'unfree', than the serfs in Russia before emancipation. But the extraordinary feature of South Africa is that it is still bound to a rigidly divided society which, if it is not slavery, is certainly close to serfdom. To behave in the twentieth century in a modern industrial state as if it were still the nineteenth or eighteenth century is very unusual, so unusual in fact that many people simply refuse to believe that it can be done: the whites deny that the parallel is just, the non-white populations refuse to believe it can last. It is this conflict of belief as well as the opposition of interests which seem to presage tragedy, for, if revolution comes, it will certainly be tragic not only for those who fear its consequences but for many who now want to hasten its arrival. Very often in such terrible situations, it seems to me that there is also an element of fatalism. It comes to be believed that what must be, will be, although whether that point has yet been reached in South Africa I do not know. It is something we have to consider.
Trusting Neighbours or Strangers in a Racially Divided Society: Insights from Survey Data in South Africa