Speakers Discuss Defense, Apartheid Problems

"Apartheid, as a solution to the race problem, is impossible," Lewis Nkosi, Nieman Fellow from South Africa, declared last night as part of the "Apartheid Today" program sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe World Cultural society.

Nkosi went on to charge that white South Africans have never accepted the fact that "for better or for worse, we are stuck with each other." For this reason, he claimed, the apartheid program calls for measures that would wreck the economy of the country.

As described by the verwoerd government, Nkosi continued, apartheid calls for the eventual complete separation of the races. The present industrial areas would be inhabited only by whites, and all of the Negroes would be moved to reservations in rural locations.

The average white South African, according to Nkosi, does not understand apartheid to mean complete separation, but only a program of discrimination, because "he will not give up his black servant." Since South African industry needs the labor of the Negroes, some of them will have, Nkosi explained, to remain in the cities.

Segregation Causes suffering

Still, he went on, the government's attempts to put programs of residential segregation into effect have caused a great deal of suffering. Negroes who have always lived in the cities are being sent to rural areas, where they do not want to live, and where they are not prepared or equipped to make a living.

Nkosi also condemned the detailed police regulations which the Negro South Africans are required to obey.