The World, The West And Pretoria By Alexander Steward

The World, The West And Pretoria By Alexander Steward

Hardcover

ISBN 0679507671

Publisher: David McKay Company 1977

Used - Very Good+. This book is in very good condition. The Dust Jacket has some very limited signs of wear and the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover.

Southern Africa is today a world flashpoint. The averting of what could become global conflict may well depend on the relations between Washington and London with Pretoria - capital of the Republic of South Africa. Hostility to Pretoria's policy of apartheid, or separatism, and to the white Afrikaner government that has ruled since 1948 now blocks that co-operation. What is separatism? Who, why and how are the Afrikaners? What is the etiology of the West's hostility? Is the West's condemnation justified? Answering those questions takes Mr. Steward beyond South Africa to an examination of the post-war condition of the world at large. South Africa - standing at the point where East meets West, with its uniquely plural population of developed and underdeveloped communities and its treasure house of essential raw materials - is the world at large in microcosm. Through three centuries its destiny has been shaped by the great movements of history. Today again South Africa has something to communicate to the world concerning the manifold problems that beset it: about race relations, ethnicity and self-determination: beyond that, about the self-realisation of people: beyond that still, about faith in the recovery of Western culture. There is this urgent message to be told, and Mr. Steward tells it. His account is struck from the anvil of his own experience - as a foreign service officer in Kenya during the dawn of the era of decolonisation (and Mau Mau); in North America, as the post-war wave of humanitarian concerns swept that continent; in London, as Britain with her commonwealth and empire fell upon difficult times. Often the anvil is white-hot. The mood of the account ranges from on-the-spot reporting to philosophic speculation, but throughout it is sincere, perceptive, unpretentious and urbane. At the turn of the century Mr. Steward's maternal grandfather, Lynn Lyster, was writing his Ballads of the Veld-land, about South Africa's heroes. His paternal grandfather, Sir William Steward, was a newspaper proprietor and Speaker in the New Zealand Parliament: as an elder statesman of the British Empire he attended the national convention in Bloemfontein, which preceded the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Mr. Steward grew up on a sugar plantation in Zululand. After attending one of South Africa's best-known schools, Hilton College, he joined Johannesburg's Rand Daily Mail as a reporter at the age of seventeen in 1934. During the war he was transferred from the armed forces to an information post in the South African foreign service in Nairobi, Kenya. In 1948 he was a member of the South African delegation to the Third General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris, ad subsequently served in Ottawa and as Director of Information at South Africa House in London. In 1963 he left the foreign service, and since that time he has been a regular commentator on political affairs for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Mr. Steward has published a bi-quarterly political journal, RSA World.