A. B. Xuma: “Bridging the Gap between White and Black in South Africa”

Questions for Further Study

• 1.: In what ways did the colonization of South Africa, and the racial segregation and discrimination that resulted, parallel the history of slavery in the United States? What role did economics play in these developments?
• 2.: The racial situation Xuma describes was in large part the historical result of a clash between two cultures that differed fundamentally in many ways, particularly in attitudes toward economics, land ownership, industrialization, wealth, social and political organization, and the like. Specify some of these differences in South Africa during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries and explain how they contributed to cultural clash.
• 3.: Xuma spent a considerable portion of his young adulthood in the United States. He first attended Tuskegee Institute in the Deep South (Alabama), where racial discrimination was entrenched. He then attended the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University (near Chicago) in the North, where racial discrimination certainly existed but was perhaps somewhat less overt. To what extent might his experiences in the United States have affected his views on race relations and, more specifically, his views on how to improve race relations?
• 4.: In the years following Xuma's speech, the racial situation in South Africa became worse, not better, culminating in the imposition of apartheid laws in 1948 and the years that followed. What factors in the years 1930–1948 might explain deteriorating race relations in South Africa?
• 5.: In what respects might Alfred Xuma be regarded as the Martin Luther King, Jr., of South Africa? Based on what you know of King's life and activities, what parallels do you see between the two men and their way of confronting racial injustice? A place to start in investigating King is his famous “I Have a Dream” Speech (1963).