D.C.S. Oosthuizen Memorial Lecture 1983

"Our time" is the last years of the colonial era in Africa. We are at once the most advanced country on the continent, and a relic of the past. It’s inevitable that 19th century colonialism should finally come to its end here, because here it surely reached its ultimate expression, open in the legalised land- and mineral-grabbing, open in the constitutionalized, institutionalized racism that was concealed by the British under the sly notion of uplift, the French and Portuguese under the sly notion of selective assimilation. Our extraordinarily obdurate crossbreed of Dutch, German, British, French as the South African white population produced a bluntness that unveiled everyone’s refined white racism: • the flags of European civilization dropped, and there it was, unashamedly, the ugliest creation of man, and they baptized the thing in the Dutch Reformed Church, called it apartheid, coining, to outlast Nazi terminology, the ultimate term for every manifestation, over the ages, in many countries, of race prejudice. Every country on earth could see its semblances here: and most peoples. The sun that never set over one or other of the 19th century colonial empires of the world is going down finally in South Africa