Queen of the Blacks

In the Union of South Africa, home of 2,000,000 dominant whites and 8,000,000 submerged blacks, a remarkable thing had come to pass. Through their elected white representatives in Parliament (seven out of 153 M.P.s), the blacks had chosen as their spokesman a plump, greying, social crusader, Mrs. Violet Margaret Livingstone Ballinger.

Not since the days of Victoria--"the great white queen across the seas"--had any white woman won comparable confidence among South Africa's natives. Their world is still a man's world, where a bride may be bought with cattle, where a wife labors as a beast of burden while her lord & master drinks Kaffir beer, hunts and squats on his haunches. Mrs. Ballinger had overcome the prejudice. More than that, as their Parliamentary spokesman, she was in a position to weld South Africa's tribesmen, now divided, into a single whole. For the Union, such a move could have far-reaching consequences.

The Uplifter. Mrs. Ballinger is no champion of racial equality, an unthinkable proposition among the Union's whites. But she fights ardently for better economic, educational and social opportunities for the blacks. She has had an uphill struggle.

Born in Scotland 50 years ago, she came to South Africa with her father shortly before the Boer War. A burgher of the Orange Free State, her father rode in a commando against the British. When union came, Margaret, a homely girl with an intelligent face, began a schooling that carried her through South Africa's colleges and England's Oxford.

Back in South Africa, she taught history at Rhodes University College and the University of the Witwatersrand, got interested in the native cause. In South Africa's Negro elections in 1938 she had four male opponents, all cocksure that she could not crack native prejudice. But she stumped the kraals (village stockades), talked through an interpreter to primitive, skin-clad audiences.

Once a friendly headman introduced her: "This woman thinks like a man. In the days of Queen Victoria we were free. Perhaps if we elect a woman we shall get some of our freedom back again."

An old chief objected: "that's all very well. But Victoria was a queen. This woman is only a woman. What has a woman ever done to save a nation?"

Mrs. Ballinger thought hard, remembered Joan of Arc, told the story, turned the election in her favor.

In 1943 Mrs. Ballinger was re-elected without opposition. Now, as a party leader, she ranks as a speaker after Prime Minister Jan Smuts and his heir apparent, Finance Minister Jan Hofmeyr. Parliament, hostile at first, listens to her with real respect.

The Prospect. As practically as it can in a white man's country, the Government of Jan Smuts supports a better deal for the blacks. Among other reasons for this attitude, Smuts knows that the Union's rigid color bar is also a bar to one of his fondest dreams--a Greater South Africa, built around the Union and embracing British territories below the Congo. The blacks in Britain's crown colonies and protectorates do not have equality. But under the British Colonial Office they get a better break than they do in the Union. This fact is a potent argument in Britain against Union expansion, a humane reason for preserving the Empire in Africa.

The Union's Commonwealth neighbor, Southern Rhodesia, also wants to expand and take in the Crown Colony of Northern Rhodesia. After the war is won, both the Union and Southern Rhodesia will undoubtedly press their claims. If they win and a Greater South Africa emerges, Mrs. Margaret Ballinger may well be the white hope of some 24,000,000 blacks.

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