Demographic representivity and self-determination.

James Myburgh's article on the history of demographic representivity was very interesting and I agree with his description of it as "a morally abhorrent principle". However, it is one of the best things to which present-day Afrikaners could ever have been subjected, because in its completed  form, which will probably be reached within the next ten years, it will be the final stimulus we need to realise that self-determination is our only method of survival in this country.

James did not trace the history of demographic representivity further back than the Nazi period. He could have gone back to the nineteenth century. The man sometimes described as modern Israel's father, Chaim Weizmann, describes what he calls the numerous clausus  in his autobiography, Trial and Error. Weizmann was born and grew up in tsarist Russia where Jews comprised only four per cent of the population. The number of Jewish students in any Russian High school was limited by law to be not more than ten percent of the gentile student body and in universities to only three or four per cent.

Discussing this, Weizmann claimed that at first sight this might not have been seen as an unreasonable  arrangement, but the problem lay in the fact that the Jews in Russia were confined to the Jewish Pale of Settlement, which was only a very small fraction of the Russian Empire. Here also, they were confined to the urban areas which led to a position where they comprised from thirty to eighty per cent of the population in some towns.

Coupled with this, he said, was the fact that "the non-Jewish population had not  the same overwhelming thirst for knowledge as the Jews". So in these towns very small numbers of non-Jewish students entered the schools and it was only ten per cent of this number which was allotted to the Jews. The result, he said, was that  out of a Jewish population numbering in the tens of thousands, only four or five or six children were admitted to the High School.

This same situation is rapidly approaching in South Africa. Russia, after all, is where many of our rulers were trained. And anyway, seeing that we comprise only about five per cent of the population it would not seem to be unreasonable to limit the number of Afrikaans children at Waterkloof, Menlo Park and Affies and other High Schools to five percent!

Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter