The end of a Chapter Long Walk Original Manuscript (Image #400)

brotherhood of man and peace on earth. Their entire lives and aspirations are warped in all the evils of greed and monopoly, selfishness and hate. Rather than listen to the voice of reason and to start on a new road, they chose to withdraw from the Commonwealth and retreat behind the laager and continue to live as their forefathers did on the backs of the black man, without interference from foreign ideologies like democracy for blacks, liberalism and equal opportunities for all citizens. That completed the end of a chapter as far as white South Africa was concerned. Speaking for myself I had no fundamental objections to a republican form of government. After all, we were also fighting for the same of government. With the exception that ours would be a democratic and non racial republic. Our real objection was the fact that it was a decision taken by the white minority without consultation and participation by us. Three issues have kept the Afrikaners together throughout their history; the republican ideal, the maintenance of white supremacy and, since the 60s, the threat of armed intervention from our freedom forces enjoying the support of almost the entire world. I had hoped that the coming of a republic would loosen the rivets that held the Afrikaner together and encouraged the emergence of progressive trends of thought which would lead him away from behind the laager and put him in the current of enlightened ideas that are aweeping the whole world today. I expected not only the appearance of progressives who were nearly so only in relation to the prevailing feudalistic outlook of the Nats but of a bold and forward looking segment of thinkers determined to shatter all the fetters of bigotry and boorishness that dominates the thinking of white South Africans on racial