International Conscience, the Cold War, and Apartheid: The NAACP's Alliance with the Reverend Michael Scott for South West Africa's Liberation, 1946–1951

Abstract

After World War II, South Africa, swimming against the tide of history, attempted to annex the adjacent international mandate of South West Africa (present-day Namibia). Pretoria was confi dent of UN approval for such an unprecedented move—too confident, as it turned out. Into the breach—and into the United Nations—stepped an unlikely duo, the Reverend Michael Scott and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to stop the absorption of 350,000 Africans into a white-supremacist state. This seemingly odd couple—a maverick, communist-leaning Anglican minister and a staid, staunchly anti-communist bureaucratic organization—launched a skillful assault in the UN to strip the veneer of legitimacy away from South Africa's annexationist scheme. Within the span of five years, the NAACP and Scott had carved out the political space and established the right of nongovernmental organizations and individual spokesmen to penetrate the boundaries of national sovereignty, speak before an international audience, and in the process reshape the UN, despite its founders' intentions, into an arena that could incorporate the voices of the stateless and the dispossessed.

As future secretary of state John Foster Dulles would later explain, the plans to create the United Nations "had the defects which usually occur when a few big powers get together to decide how to run the world. They generally, and naturally, conclude that the best of all possible worlds is a world which they will run."¹ Yet, shortly after its founding in 1945, a confluence of forces converged to transform the UN into an arena that could incorporate the voices of the dispossessed, crack venerable precedents even in the face of stiff Western resistance, and allow the political space and authority for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and individual spokesmen to penetrate the boundaries of national sovereignty to speak directly, in spite of their governments' wishes, to an international audience.

Central to this transformation was a communist-tainted Anglican priest, the Reverend Michael Scott, and a staunchly anticommunist civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The UN became their vehicle in the fight for justice. Their target was South Africa. Despite the human rights norms that were emerging after World War II, South Africa had continued to wield the centuries-old concept of national sovereignty to shield white supremacy, inflict human rights violations on its nonwhite population, and intensify colonial rule. Thus, when South Africa attempted to annex the adjacent international mandate of South West Africa (current day Namibia), Scott and the NAACP joined together to stop the absorption of 350, 000 Africans into a white supremacist state.²

From the beginning, South West Africa was a colonized battleground. Early in the twentieth century, mass hangings and a death march through miles and miles of the Kalahari Desert had, just as the Kaiser's Germany intended, nearly exterminated the Hereros, Berg Damaras, and Namas.³ That slaughter had subsequently compelled the League of Nations in 1919 to erect a colonial mandate system "to ensure that never again would the African people be made to suffer from the misrule that they had had to endure under Germany."⁴ Nevertheless, the League had, despite a variety of warning signals, handed the colony over to South Africa, which then mocked the League's requirement to treat South West Africa as a "sacred trust of civilization" and provide for the political, economic, and social betterment of the indigenous people. Instead, South African leader Jan Christian Smuts asserted that "the German colonies in . . . Africa are inhabited by barbarians who not only can not possibly govern themselves, but to whom it would be impracticable to apply any idea of political self-determination in the European sense.'"⁵

Then, after World War II, while the other colonial powers were placing their mandates in the UN's trusteeship system, South Africa announced that "at some future date the Union will ask and demand the annexation of the former German territories in Southwest Africa." Walter White, the NAACP's executive secretary, exploded. This was a "sinister and dangerous . . . device identical to the American pattern of calling Negroes in Mississippi citizens and then denying them all the privileges of citizenship."⁶ Annexation, as White well understood, would have removed hundreds of thousands of indigenous people from the sovereign protection of the international community, placed their lives behind the impregnable wall of South Africa's national sovereignty, and left them with absolutely no place to appeal for redress because, for all of its weaknesses, the mandate system at least provided for the right to petition. Annexation, however, would have eliminated even that thin and permeable protective barrier.

Yet, with the League's official demise, that is exactly what Prime Minister Smuts proposed at the very first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946. For South Africa the quest for annexation involved land, labor, and security. Throughout its years as a mandate power, South Africa had forced hundreds of thousands of Africans off of the land and handed those property rights over to white settlers.⁷ Yet, when Pretoria tried to implement additional regulations restricting the rights and aspirations of Africans, the League of Nations successfully intervened.⁸ But now, in the post–World War II period, South Africa had no intention of brooking any further interference in what it planned to do in South West Africa, which included using that additional African labor to work in the diamond, gold, and uranium mines and, because of the clear rumblings of decolonization stirring throughout the continent, creating a territorial buffer between white South Africa and black Africa.⁹ The South Africans, therefore, relied upon Smuts's inordinate prestige among the Western powers as a great statesman and his ability to "bully and blackmail" his Commonwealth ally, the British, into supporting this annexationist effort.¹⁰ Surprisingly, the plan almost worked.

While the British were handled, the United Nations was not. In fact, South Africa's attempt to allay the UN's concerns backfired miserably.¹¹ The Union's repeated references to the "primordial savagery" of Africans, the challenges this "barbarism" posed to white settler communities, and the depiction of South West Africa as a wasteland just did not sit well. The Liberian delegate certainly made it clear that he was neither persuaded nor duped by South Africa's story. It just "seemed strange," he said, "that while German South-West Africa was said to be barren, depopulated and unproductive, and thousands of pounds sterling had to be spent continuously therein, [that] the Union of South Africa still found this territory suitable and usable for incorporation into the Union."¹²

The road to annexation became even more torturous once the Indian government charged South Africa with human rights violations in the treatment of Indian nationals in the Union. As the British watched this debacle unfold, they could only report to the Foreign Office that any hope Smuts had of riding into South West Africa on the wave of his prestige as the grand statesman evaporated the moment the "treatment of Indians in South Africa" came before the General Assembly. The "predominant factors operating against South Africa," the British remarked, "were . . . the antagonism generated by the Indian complaint and the 'rising tide of nationalism amongst the races of Asia' which rallied the 'coloured states' against a government 'avowing a policy of white supremacy.'"¹³

Sensing the depth of UN resistance, particularly after Commonwealth ally New Zealand leveled its own devastating blast at the very idea of annexation, South Africa tried a different tack at the next meeting of the General Assembly in the fall of 1946.¹⁴ Smuts's government, as the mandate required, submitted a report on the conditions in South West Africa and, in an attempt to seal the deal, included a detailed analysis of a referendum held in the territory on the question of annexation. That referendum, the South Africans proudly claimed, showed that the "European community as a whole, which numbers about 31, 000 , is in favour of incorporation" and, even more significant, that "85 per cent of the natives have asked for incorporation."¹⁵ Smuts then asserted that these results, which may have come as a surprise to some of the Union's critics, were to be expected because South Africa had "carried out the provisions of its mandate conscientiously." The Union had ensured that Africans had "the most fertile and richest arable soil in the country." The government had spent "millions . . . in purchasing additional land for the expanding needs of the Native population" and, equally important, had provided quality educational facilities from elementary schools through universities for Africans. Moreover, he beamed with pride, the cost had been borne by the "small European population, who are the main taxpayers," and who "carry willingly a very heavy financial burden in . . . providing for the advance and uplift of the Native population."¹⁶ In short, Africans were safe and prosperous under the benevolent, racialized sovereignty of South Africa. The UN could rest easily in approving the annexation.

An urgent appeal to NAACP board member Channing Tobias strongly suggested otherwise. Douglas Buchanan of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protective Society, housed in Cape Town, called on Tobias "to do anything to help at this late hour." Buchanan laid out that the Union was engaging in subterfuge, legerdemain, and outright lying to annex South West Africa. "The figures given by Field Marshall Smuts," Buchanan insisted, "appear to include not only every male adult native but every woman, boy, girl, and babe in arms—if the issue were not so tragic it would be . . . an instance of political baby snatching and cradle robbing!" Moreover, Buchanan continued, it was highly improbable that the economic, educational, and land conditions for Africans were as pleasant as Smuts suggested. In fact, in all probability they were even worse than imagined because South Africa had flatly refused to allow any independent observers into South West Africa to see for themselves. The UN, Buchanan concluded, must be prodded to stop the annexation and honor its own obligations toward this international mandate.¹⁷

His pleas resonated with an organization that was already primed for action on the issue. Earlier in the year, W. E. B. DuBois, the NAACP's director of special research, had voiced his outrage at the "utterly indefensible position of the Union of South Africa in its treatment of Africans and Indians and its demand for absorption of Southwest Africa."¹⁸ And as Walter White planned to breach the citadel of the UN lobbying for a program for human rights and anti-colonialism, DuBois instructed him to "especially arraign South Africa for the way in which she has treated the mandates; . . . for lack of education or of social uplift; and for [its] deliberate policy to ignore and degrade black people." The UN, DuBois continued, "ought to recognize that no nation with the background of South Africa has any right to control black people."¹⁹

Nevertheless, despite the outrage, it was widely recognized that the United Nations could not and would not move without incontrovertible proof. South Africa's refusal to allow any independent organization to enter the territory, and its successful diplomatic efforts to quash an American recommendation for a UN-sponsored team to investigate, meant that the only real "facts" available were those that the Union had already presented regaling the General Assembly with tales of Pretoria's benevolent actions and good intentions.²⁰

The paramount chief of the Hereros, Frederick Mahareru, who was exiled in Bechuanaland, also demanded proof. He absolutely needed it to free his people. Yet, he was physically isolated in that British protectorate and legally unable to return home. Then he learned about an Anglican priest, an Englishman, who had lived in South Africa for years and whom the Union government disdained for stubbornly refusing to act like "he is a European."²¹ This Anglican minister had openly defied both South Africa's residential segregation laws and his bishop by moving into Tobruk, an African shanty town, just outside the city that gold built, Johannesburg. Tobruk was, for all intents and purposes, a sprawling human landfill.²² The cleric's decision to move into a place that the South African government had deemed absolutely unfit for European life, quickly landed the Anglican priest in jail.

When he emerged from his cell, the Reverend (Guthrie) Michael Scott had earned among Africans a legendary reputation as a fearless freedom fighter who not only firmly believed in but would actually stand up for racial equality. Several of his friends and colleagues, who admired him greatly, however, feared that he was "a quixotic figure battling against hopeless windmills" and "too much absorbed in suffering and the problems of the world, as if he took them on as a personal burden." Yet, for those whom he was fighting to liberate "'Michael Scott was a household word in every African family.'" He was a man who "made no peace with oppression but rather committed himself totally to fight to end it!"²³

After Scott met with Chief Frederick Mahareru and grasped the enormity and significance of the mission—go where the chief could not, discern the truth firsthand, and then tell the world—the Anglican priest "travelled a thousand miles by train and lorry (truck) and on foot, seeking out the Hereros and other peoples of South-West Africa."²⁴ Once he arrived, the stories he heard from Chief Hosea Kutako and the other Hereros, Namas, and Berg-Damaras and the data he uncovered in the library at Windhoek only confirmed the "serious misgivings" Scott already had about the annexation scheme.²⁵

Douglas Buchanan was right, the referendum was rigged. Indeed, Chief Hosea Kutako smelled treachery in the air and refused to sign off or endorse any referendum until the representatives of Great Britain, the United States, and France, the major powers that had crafted the mandate system in the first place, were there to attest to the veracity of the referendum's language and meaning. Not surprisingly, the Hereros were immediately excluded from the process in search of more pliable Africans to include in the tally of support.²⁶

Yet, those who had come into contact with South African rule had learned, the hard way, the real meaning of white supremacy. Even the Ovambos, who lived in the northernmost region of South West Africa, were not immune. One man, in fact, challenged Scott to ask "any of the Ovambos, in and out of Ovamboland, who have already worked amongst the [white] farmers in South-West Africa . . . if they would like to join the Union and see what they will have to say." The treatment meted out to them was horrific. Like slaves, the "Ovambos are not allowed to leave on their own in search of employment. They are sold to the Public at from Eight to ten pounds each per year . . . and many of them die in some way or another while they are here." The plea to Scott was wrenching. "We don't want to become the fifth-wheel of this donkey wagon of the Union of South Africa. . . . [P]lease do your utmost for South-West Africa to either become a British Protectorate or that we be handed over to America for Protection."²⁷ The Berg Damaras were equally determined to be rid of South Africa and equally aware of what annexation really meant. "We do not want to be under the rule of the Boers. We do not want to join the Union Government." We "'have suffered since the day the Union Government became the Trustee of South West Africa,'" and we are "'still suffering.'"²⁸

That suffering, of course, was tied directly to the issue of land. From his stint in Tobruk, Scott had fully grasped the destructive impact of the Union's policy of expropriating African land, allocating it to white settlers, and then pushing the indigenous people into areas where life could not be sustained. The effect, of course, was a soul-crushing "cheap migratory labour" system that wreaked havoc on Africans' basic human rights.²⁹ The same pattern was emerging, on a smaller but equally vicious scale, in South West Africa. As South Africa drove the Hereros away from the land where their cattle could graze and funneled them into dry, hard, unforgiving terrain, the Hereros knew the fate Pretoria had planned for them. They exclaimed in agony, "we know the best and worst parts of the whole country . . . . We are human beings. And we do not want to be changed into wild beasts. Only wild beasts can live without water."³⁰

Therefore, during the final fact-finding meeting between Scott and the Africans, which took place at the hallowed ground where the Germans began the genocidal campaign that destroyed 80 percent of his people, Chief Hosea prayed "O Lord, help us who roam about. Help us who have been placed in Africa and have no dwelling place of our own. Give us back a dwelling place." At that, Scott recalled, "my soul was sick with shame at the thought of the treatment which this proud people have received at the hands of the white race."³¹ Now was the time to make it right, and he vowed to take their cause all the way to the United Nations. Scott acknowledged, however, "that it was a very serious matter indeed, to go outside one's own nation in an appeal to the nations of the world. But," he continued, "the situation in South Africa was deteriorating . . . . In the past year alone there had been the repercussions from the Indian passive resistance movement in Natal, the Tobruk Shantytown and Bethal [a slave labor farm], and it seemed now as if the only hope for the African people was an appeal to the conscience of the world."³²

The obstacles—and there were many—to reaching that conscience were enormous. First, Scott's open defiance of the Anglican Church over the treatment of Africans had created an irreparable chasm between the bishop and him.³³ As a result, Scott was now a penniless priest without even a parish to call his home. Thus, to travel to New York and stay weeks and maybe months on end for the duration of the UN meeting was a financial impossibility.

Second, although they had asked him to be their voice to the United Nations, the Hereros were not a recognized state, and, by design, only states could have direct access to that international body. DuBois, in fact, had gleaned this glaring defect during the planning stages of the proposed United Nations. The NAACP cofounder was "'depressed' to realize how consistently the Allies had disfranchised the 750 million people who lived in the colonial world . . . [a]ccording to the proposals . . . only states could join the UN, bring a complaint before the Security Council, or appeal to the International Court of Justice. Colonies had no rights." In fact, the UN could only "consider complaints filed by member states."³⁴ So, exactly where did a renegade cleric, carrying a petition to the United Nations from Africans who lived in an area that was not a colony, certainly not a state, definitely not a UN trust territory, and, at best, a hotly contested and disputed international mandate created by an organization and treaty that had ceased to exist, fit in?

Third, US immigration laws were designed to keep someone like Scott from ever setting foot on American soil. During most of the 1930s, the Anglican priest spent many of those years working with the only organized force in South Africa that was as opposed to racial discrimination as he was, the Communist Party. "Exasperated by the complacency and narrowness of the Anglican church, and its inability to face the social problems of the Thirties, he turned for a time to the Communist Party, whose practical solutions he felt offered part of the answer."³⁵ Yet, like so many who had been attracted early on to the party, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact changed everything. Scott quickly became disillusioned and distanced himself.³⁶ Nevertheless, although he was never a card-carrying member, he was close enough. And in Cold War America, close enough was more than enough, particularly if the Departments of Justice or State ever found out.

In short, the lack of funding, the legal limbo of his and the Hereros' status, and the inability to even enter the United States because of a Communist past suggested a definitive and resounding negative response to the quest for South West Africa's freedom. But there had emerged on the international scene a confluence of forces that ripped that definitive answer off its very moorings.

First, the reality of Adolf Hitler's regime still resonated deeply in a war-stricken world. The Nuremberg trials were underway and Nazi Germany's genocidal actions had shoved overt white supremacy into the normative category of morally and politically bankrupt, which then directly challenged the very legitimacy of "the white man's burden."³⁷ White supremacy, in short, was no longer the language of progress, as it had been during the rise of Jim Crow or the advent of the "scramble for Africa." It was now the murderous symbol of atavism, barbarism, and Auschwitz.

The second major change that created the political space for the challenge to South Africa was the unrelenting pressure coming from Africa and Asia for the dissolution of the European empires. India's independence was especially significant. As the former "jewel in the crown" of the vaunted British Empire, its freedom was a powerful symbol of the promise of a new world order. Moreover, Indian leaders were not content with just their country's independence alone; they viewed themselves as the vanguard of colonial liberation movements throughout the world. Nonetheless, India still needed an arena in which to demonstrate that leadership.³⁸

The United Nations, the third powerful force to create the political room for the challenge to South Africa, became that space. One US diplomat noted that the "impetus which the U.N. gave to African self-government can hardly be exaggerated. . . . It provided a worldwide forum from which the case against colonialism could be vigorously championed."³⁹ It was at the UN where India's uncompromising leadership, which the British bemoaned, the South Africans railed against, and the Americans resented for its lack of anticommunism, moderation, and gradualism, welded the Afro-Asian-Arab delegates in the General Assembly into a powerful voting bloc, attracted the support of the Soviets and Eastern Europeans, and consistently split the Latin Americans between the anticolonial and colonial powers. Thus, while the United States and the Western Europeans had spent an inordinate amount of time carefully managing the structure of the various committees—Human Rights, Trusteeship, and so on—in order to maintain Western control, the challenge from India and its allies pushed the fight and the power out of those committees and directly into the General Assembly, where the anticolonial forces could marshal the votes to change the terms of the debate and international norms.⁴⁰

The UN's centrality to the Hereros' pleas, however, was not only because of Indian leadership but also because the organization, itself, refused to replicate the weakness of the League of Nations. In the mid 1930s, the League proved unwilling and unable to deal with Hitler's annexationist schemes and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's brutal invasion of Ethiopia. Thus, South Africa's insistence, a mere decade later, on unilaterally absorbing international territory into its sovereign boundaries was an early and direct challenge to the UN's authority and went right to the core of the organization's determination to not be the League of Nations part deux. "Most people," Scott therefore admonished, "are making the mistake of discounting the Trusteeship Council as a band of well-meaning talkers."⁴¹ The priest even scolded his bishop for denigrating the UN as a "talk shop" by retorting quite pointedly "what other forum is there for those Africans to have appealed to and what other organised expression of the need for peace is there?"⁴²

The final force that, therefore, galvanized the assault of the voiceless against South African racial oppression was the mobilization of a phalanx of nongovernmental organizations eager and able to take on the fight for South West Africa. And while these progressive NGOs had their own separate emphases—religious, domestic, international—they had a shared core value system that created a natural synergy just waiting for the right opportunity and issue to emerge in this fight for a more just, humane, and democratic world, hence, Scott's inevitable affiliation with the International League for the Rights of Man (ILRM), the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers), the Africa Bureau (which he would come to lead), the India League, the Anti Slavery and Aboriginal Protection Society, the NAACP, and subsequently the American Committee on Africa.

That combination of forces began to move the stumbling blocks out of Scott's way. The initial issue of funding, however, was solved, first and foremost, by the Hereros, who sold their cattle to finance his journey to New York.

Yet, with information pouring in to the State Department from Britain and South Africa about Scott's seemingly unsavory past and equally unsavory mission, the United States denied Scott a visa, and the Hereros' fund-raising efforts now seemed irrelevant. The NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other organizations, including the left-wing Council on African Affairs and the Communist-dominated Civil Rights Congress, immediately peppered the State Department demanding an explanation why Scott's request for a visa had been denied. Any allusion that the "Anglican clergyman" was a security threat, they asserted, seemed beyond absurd. Instead, it appeared that because Scott "believe[d] in democratic rights for the African natives" he had been castigated as "subversive" by "those who are opposed to the extension of political democracy and the civil rights which go with it." Walter White, therefore, insisted that "it is imperative that [the] opinion of natives on proposed annexation of Southwest Africa to Union of South Africa be heard and respected."⁴³

Scott applied additional pressure by writing directly to the secretary general of the United Nations, asking Trygve Lie's office to inquire with the State Department about the status of the priest's visa request.⁴⁴ When word began to circulate that an Anglican minister had been ensnared in the tangle of US anticommunist immigration laws, the press sensed a story, and the State Department smelled a public relations nightmare. Compounding the American government's difficulties was that a nation that the United States was trying desperately to woo into the Western camp, India, had now become involved. Much to the department's chagrin, the Indian embassy had actually requested that the State "Department . . . use its good offices to grant a visa to Scott."⁴⁵ Department officials now scrambled to find some way out of this mess. To continue to deny the man a visa, everyone recognized, would "put the United States in a bad light."⁴⁶ And, although the initial estimates coming out of the American embassy in Johannesburg did not cast Scott as a Communist, the reports added that he was a "troublemaker" and that "through his support of the rise of the Heoroes [sic] in South West Africa, he had, not surprisingly, been associating with Communists. Therefore, under a strict interpretation of the Immigration Laws, he had been barred."⁴⁷ The question now was how to get him unbarred. It was not the State Department's call; that power lay in the hands of the attorney general and the Department of Justice.⁴⁸

Pressed to find a solution, the State Department staff responsible for UN affairs soon recognized that there was a loophole in the law. The Headquarters Agreement that the US government had signed with the United Nations would allow anyone on official UN business into the country. If Scott's status could be changed from Communist sympathizer and troublemaker to, say, a member of the Indian delegation or staff expert for the UN secretariat, the attorney general would have to relent and issue Scott a visa.⁴⁹ With this information in hand, the Indian delegation quickly added Scott to its roster for this session of the UN meeting and the attorney general relented—somewhat. When the visa was finally issued, "it turned out to be the kind . . . granted to communists attending the UN sessions. Scott was confined to Manhattan and Long Island, he was forbidden to make public appearances or even to preach by invitation."⁵⁰

All of those restrictions, however, did not stop him from getting the case of the Hereros, Berg-Damaras, and Namas before the UN in late 1947. In fact, he managed to get their petitions accepted as official UN documents, which gave those statements of betrayal a level of power and cachet that cannot be underestimated. Having the petitions now marked as UN documents A/C.4/95 and A/C.4/96 "transform[ed] the contents of an ordinary piece of paper . . . into something 'real,' something to be taken seriously."⁵¹ Here, at last, was the proof. Here were the data, not extrapolated or assumed from the misery that Africans suffered in the Union, but directly from the inhabitants of South West Africa themselves. This is just what the anticolonialist faction on the Fourth Committee had been trying desperately to get its hands on. In fact, the previous year it had asked the UN secretariat's office for "any information or papers . . . relating to political, social, educational and economic conditions in South West Africa."⁵² Scott's hand-delivered petitions became that "information" and, hence, the basis for the UN's direct questioning of the annual report that South Africa had submitted previously; the very one where Smuts glowed about the conditions in South West Africa and basked in the ringing endorsement of the referendum.

The UN now confidently leveled fifty critical, unflinching questions at the South Africans. Could the government explain why 90 percent of the population in South West Africa only received 10 percent of the budget? Or, for that matter, why 90 percent of the population was crammed into 42 percent of the land, the least arable land? The UN also sought clarification on the vaunted educational system Smuts described, which now actually appeared to be for whites only. The only schools available to Africans were those financed, run, and owned by missionaries. Similar questions took aim at the lack of medical facilities in the mandate, the fact that there were no Africans whatsoever in governmental positions, and that there appeared to be a skewed criminal justice system that turned land-starved vagrancy into a criminal offense punishable by debt slavery on white-owned farms. Just where, exactly, was the Union government and its obligation for social, economic, and political progress in all of this?⁵³

The South African delegation erupted. The submission of the report was a courtesy, not an obligation, the delegates retorted, and the UN's intemperate response was an unacceptable and unwarranted treatment of a valued member of the international community. Clearly, the South Africans continued, the United Nations did not have the maturity, the ability, or the diplomacy to handle this matter appropriately. As a result, there would be no more reports. And, no, South Africa would not place the territory under the UN trusteeship system. At best, the Union would continue to administer it in the "spirit of the mandate." At best.⁵⁴

The standoff left the US State Department greatly concerned about the ever-widening "gulf between world and South African opinion on the issues of trusteeship and domestic native policy." South Africa was clearly headed in one direction and the world in another. This became even more apparent in 1948 as Smuts and his party lost control of South Africa to the Nationalist Party.⁵⁵

Led by a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, Daniel F. Malan, the ascent of the Nationalists to power brought to South Africa the policy of apartheid, in which the "Afrikaner theorists . . . applied the notion of a separate and God-given destiny for . . . every nonwhite group to which it could assign a distinctive ethnic or tribal origin."⁵⁶ Apartheid, as public policy, translated into unvarnished, unapologetic, unrelenting white supremacy, without even the fig leaf that Smuts's regime hung in front of it. One American diplomat's assessment was chilling. South Africa, he wrote, is not a "normal democratic community . . . the Afrikaner (Boer) nationalists have the votes to re-write the constitution at will and have already begun to create a police state. Furthermore, they are not a political party so much as the embodiment of resurgent anti-British Afrikanerdom. More than that, they are inspired by a religious belief in their racial superiority over the Africans. Put nationalism and religion together and add a universal fear of ultimately losing their racial identity in a sea of Africans and you have a party which is well nigh impossible to defeat by peaceful methods."⁵⁷

This lethal fusion of nationalist paranoia and God-ordained white supremacy led to a regime that made the issue of South West Africa even more contentious. Early in 1949, Malan's government defiantly instituted the South West Africa Act, that, as he told the South African parliament, would "knit South West Africa and the Union together in such a manner, knit them constitutionally in such a way that the countries will in the future be inseparably bound together."⁵⁸ Without question, this was an annexation in all but name only. India would come to call it an "Anschluss, an invasion, a conquest."⁵⁹ It had to be done, Malan contended, because, the UN was meddling in affairs in which it had absolutely no business. That meddling, he added, centered on the "improper motives" of "countries like India, Russia, and its satellites" that had used the Trusteeship Council to question why Africans "had no franchise, no eligibility for office and no representation on the Government." This interfering UN, Malan roared in utter disbelief, "openly or by implication demanded full equality in all respects between all races and colours in South West Africa, including equal franchise, the removal of residential separation in urban areas, and the breaking up of Native reserves." Malan then scoffed, "'Could anything more ridiculous ever be imagined?'" Nonetheless, he concluded, this "was an indication to South Africa of what could be expected if South West Africa was put under trusteeship . . . . South West Africa under such a council would be nothing but a festering sore in the body of South Africa."⁶⁰

And that was the problem. For Pretoria, equality was cancerous. Malan's government, a State Department analyst noted, "cannot carry out its promise to administer the territory 'in the spirit of the mandate' because its policies of racial repression and segregation are antithetical to that spirit. The refusal to submit either a trusteeship agreement or an annual report are [therefore] symptoms of the Union's inability to explain its racial policies to an international authority." As a consequence, the report continued, the United States can expect that its ally's actions will "be widely regarded as a provocative repudiation of the principle of international accountability." Moreover, "[a]dverse reaction will intensify when it is realized that the Union government intends to entrust the welfare of the third of a million colored inhabitants to the territory's small white population, which shares the views of the Union's own rural white population regarding white supremacy, . . . the undesirability of Native progress financed from the general revenue," and the importance of applying "constant pressure . . . to keep taxes down and the labor supply up."⁶¹

That realization stiffened the determination of the NAACP and Michael Scott to get South West Africa out of the clutches of Pretoria. Scott, they all agreed, needed to get back into the United States for the 1949 UN meeting. The British and the Americans, however, thought they had stopped him by putting pressure on the Indian government to not reappoint the priest to its delegation. But then the NGOs stepped in. The International League for the Rights of Man had official Class B consultative status with the United Nations and, thus, accredited Scott as the ILRM's representative, which allowed the minister to secure another visa, albeit one with continuing restrictions. Then a local seminary provided housing in New York. The NAACP, like before, gave Scott invaluable office space. And, although the organization was stretched to the limit in handling a myriad of civil rights issues in the United States, the Association also met the Anglican minister's insatiable need for secretarial support, as well.⁶² That insatiability was the direct result of the way the United Nations operated. The debates circled around the reams and reams of data, memoranda, analyses, petitions, minutes, and reports that flowed through UN headquarters on a daily basis. The logistical support that the NAACP provided, in an era of manual typewriters and mimeograph machines, allowed Scott to participate in ways that would have been physically and practically impossible without it.

The NAACP not only provided tangible support, but also offered up and delivered the intangibles of its good name, its reputation, and its clout to help the Hereros' emissary get access to key people who, because of his visa restrictions, would have otherwise been well beyond the minister's reach. With public speaking engagements off-limits, articles written by him banned in the United States, and his travel severely restricted to several blocks in midtown Manhattan, Scott was tethered to and, for all intents and purposes, silenced beyond the walls of the UN. Incensed, Walter White insisted that the NAACP had to step in and rectify the situation. It "would be exceedingly useful," the executive secretary told his board of directors, "for the Association to arrange for Rev. Scott to tell his story to influential Americans."⁶³ White, therefore, under the auspices of the NAACP, hosted a series of teas and cocktail parties at his Manhattan apartment with an A-list of invited guests—senators, mayors, clergy, media representatives, and labor leaders—with, of course, Scott as the featured guest. Those teas and gatherings quickly evolved into fund-raising activities, generating thousands of dollars to support Scott's work and, because he suffered from a "creeping intestinal disease," to cover his medical expenses, as well. Channing Tobias and Walter White even agreed that although the association "[couldn't] afford" it, the NAACP would make a sizable contribution to offset Scott's living expenses because "Michael Scott has done so much to focus attention on the evil and dangerous situation in South Africa."⁶⁴

The association then joined with Scott and the International League's regular UN representative, Max Beer, in "an intensive lobbying effort among delegates aimed at disseminating information on the South West African issue and at allowing Scott to appear before the Fourth Committee."⁶⁵ In asking for the NAACP's help in this area, the priest had explained that it "is not only in the sphere of trusteeship but also in that of human rights that South Africa has seriously challenged the civilised standards which the peoples of the world through the United Nations are striving to establish. And it is therefore doubly important for . . . the voices of the African people to be given a hearing."⁶⁶

In 1949, the anticolonialist delegates on the Fourth Committee had begun to come to the same conclusion. To compensate for South Africa's dogmatic refusal to submit annual reports on the conditions in South West Africa, the committee began toying with the idea of allowing Scott to provide direct testimony on those very conditions. This was beyond precedent setting; it also carried major implications for decolonization. The British were aghast. Every country had a disgruntled minority group, they argued, and if Scott was allowed to testify, "representatives of all those minorities would take advantage of that precedent and the UN would be flooded with requests for a hearing." Yet, as one scholar noted, "it is illuminating that [the British] seem to place the Africans," who live in Africa, "in the category of minorities."⁶⁷ In short, the colonial powers were greatly resistant to and decidedly concerned about allowing essentially a private citizen with complaints from the colonized to be heard before the United Nations.⁶⁸

To help overcome this resistance and because he recognized that in southern Africa he was dealing with a full-fledged human rights crisis, Scott sought an appointment with the revered Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady, NAACP board member, and, most importantly, chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights. Initially, however, she wanted nothing to do with him. She knew who he was. The briefings from the State Department, via South Africa, had made that clear. Roosevelt, therefore, maligned him to her staff as a "troublemaker" and "a Commie" who had been "besieging" and "bothering everyone at the U.N." Roosevelt's secretary noticed, however, that Scott had called from the NAACP's office in New York and she decided to "check . . . through them" to see what this man was all about.⁶⁹

The NAACP was unequivocal. The charge of Scott "being a 'Communist'" was "ridiculous." Scott was "doing an extremely courageous and self-sacrificing job on about the worst sector on white interracial justice in the entire world." And, it was because he had "the courage to fight for the rights of the native population" that this smear campaign began in the first place.⁷⁰ South Africa and its allies, the NAACP explained, were trying to "still Scott's small voice" and in doing so, silence the cries of the oppressed in South West Africa. The association leadership was, therefore, determined to give the Anglican priest "every assistance" in waging this battle against a regime that was "not fit to hold South West Africa as either a mandate or a trust area."⁷¹ Barely persuaded, Roosevelt eventually agreed to meet with Scott. After their meeting, her impression of the Anglican minister had not altered drastically. In Roosevelt's view, Scott was "too intense" to make an effective, "dispassionate presentation" before the UN's Fourth Committee. She was wrong.⁷²

Scott's precedent-setting performance was riveting. In unwavering, understated tones, the priest told "a story of endless treachery and tyranny imposed on the shattered tribes who have sent him" to the UN.⁷³ He laid out the Ministry of Justice's success in "manufacturing criminals" through a series of "Pass Laws and Masters and Servants Acts" that created a captive, cheap labor pool ready for exploitation. By criminalizing the sheer act of being black, the Union government was able to "contract . . . for three thousand labourers per year from South West Africa to work in the gold mines of Johannesburg." The South Africans also arrested "thousands of landless and homeless Africans . . . every week" and forced them to work "in near slavery conditions" on the white-owned farms in the Transvaal.⁷⁴ One historian noted that when Scott finished, the "impact was overwhelming, even on the most hardened of the many hardened politicians in the room."⁷⁵

The scene was set. Scott's powerful testimony had compelled the General Assembly to finally do what it had been contemplating for years; it asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion to establish, precisely, South West Africa's status and South Africa's responsibilities. In 1950, the World Court ruled that although the Union could not be forced to place South West Africa under the UN trusteeship system, the ICJ also insisted that Pretoria did not have the right or the power to change the international status of a mandate without the assent of the international community. As a result, the court concluded, the mandate was still in existence and South Africa still had to adhere to the rules, including annual reports to the only recognized international body designed to handle this work, the United Nations.⁷⁶

Buoyed by the court's opinion, the NAACP made plans to continue the push for South West Africa's freedom. Yet, given the prevailing McCarthyist winds howling through the American political landscape, this was a risk—a risk the NAACP was willing to take. That is to say, that even with the Korean War, the first "hot war" of the Cold War, tearing up and down the Korean peninsula; even with the second Red Scare taking its toll on advocates for social justice and anticolonialism by identifying their struggles with communism; even with ex-NAACP official W. E. B. DuBois facing federal charges for aiding and abetting the Soviet Union by advocating a "Peace Movement"; even with "guilt by association" being used as the litmus test in an array of "loyalty" hearings to stamp the scarlet letter "C" on organizations and activists; even with all of that, the staunchly anticommunist NAACP refused to back away from the clearly tainted Scott.

Instead, the association helped organize another round of fundraising for the priest, worked closely with the International League to distribute Scott's message to the black press and more than 643 targeted names on one of the NAACP's mailing lists, and arranged for a series of viewings of a documentary the Anglican priest had made in southern Africa, Civilisation on Trial, which provided visual proof of the horrific conditions under South African rule. Even more importantly, the NAACP's headquarters became the site for the formation of a broad-based coalition focused on South West Africa's freedom. This new Committee on South West Africa was to follow closely the developments at the UN in terms of implementing the court's decision and making sure that the Africans' voices remained an integral part of the discussion. The point, as Walter White summed it up, was "to make the issue so strong that neither the US, UK nor France could avoid it."⁷⁷

While the NAACP and Scott were pushing forward, Malan's government dug in. ICJ opinion or not, the United Nations would never see another report on South West Africa, the prime minister insisted. As a "compromise," however, South Africa offered that it would be willing to send reports to Britain, the United States, and France. In Pretoria's eyes, this was still a major concession because "some Western nations" have this "obsession with human rights" and "regard social colour distinction [as] devilish."⁷⁸ US representatives, however, tried to explain that the UN was being "very reasonable" and that there really was no harm in adhering to the ICJ's ruling. South Africa disagreed. Minister of the interior T. E. Donges bitterly recalled that the one annual report that South Africa had sent to the UN had "led to some forty questions. The Union was not going to expose itself to this again." South Africa simply "refused to be the whipping boy" for the UN. If there was going to be an annual report, only the trusted, Western allies were going to be the ones to receive it.⁷⁹

The first UN meeting after the ICJ's decision, therefore, promised to be a diplomatic showdown. The presence of NAACP board chairman Channing Tobias, who was chair of the US delegation in the Fourth Committee ensured it. "[E]arly in the Assembly" he had informed his State Department handlers that although he "was essentially a team-worker" and "could be relied upon to play the team game," there were some issues where he had "strong convictions" and planned on acting upon those convictions. True to his word, when the issue of the Hereros surfaced, Tobias came into his own. "We must," he told Walter White, "do everything we can to see to it that [Scott's] . . . 'small voice' is not drowned out by the noisy denunciations of him for which the representatives of the Union of South Africa are responsible."⁸⁰

Domestically, this was a bold stance because Tobias had run into major difficulties in the Senate confirmation hearings concerning his appointment to the US delegation. In typical Red Scare fashion, Tobias was assailed for his past membership in several organizations, such as the leftist Council on African Affairs, that had now landed on the infamous attorney general's list. Tobias was a fellow traveler, journalist Westbrook Pegler asserted. Tobias curried favor with Communists. Tobias was red. The assault was so intense that it took intervention from the White House to push the confirmation through.⁸¹ Yet, now, here stood this black man, in 1951 Jim Crow America, proud of the stature and privilege associated with achieving the rank of US delegate to the United Nations, risking it all so that the red-tainted Scott could give voice to the Hereros, Namas, and Berg-Damaras.

To be sure, internationally, Tobias's commitment was made that much easier by South Africa's derisive treatment of the ICJ advisory opinion, its refusal to submit an annual report even as required by the mandate, and its disdainful counterproposal that treated every other nation, particularly those in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America, contemptuously. South Africa had only a few allies left, and that small number would never be able to carry the day in the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly.

Thus, when the issue of South West Africa arose in November 1951, the Fourth Committee truly broke with precedent this time and considered inviting not just Scott, but the traditional leaders of the Hereros, Namas, and Berg-Damaras to speak for themselves before the UN.⁸² The South Africans and British immediately protested. There was no right to petition for individuals who are not even in a trust territory. The UN charter does not provide for this. The Fourth Committee's action, the South Africans charged, was a "violation of the Union's sovereignty." Then came the unmistakable threat. Pretoria's representative warned that all those nations that were so smug now will one day get "hanged on the gallows designed for South Africa."⁸³ In the heat of the battle, the British turned to the American delegation for support. But then it hit them. The cavalry was not coming. Channing Tobias saw to that.

After the smoke had cleared and the Fourth Committee voted (37–7–7) to invite the "representatives of the indigenous peoples of South-West Africa" to the UN, the British complained bitterly that the United States did not use any of its considerable power and prestige to stop the Fourth Committee in its tracks. Rather, the "United States took no part in the debate" whatsoever. Even worse, the Cubans, who had led the charge for the invitation, "were aware" well before the meeting began that the Americans were going to sit stony faced throughout the whole ordeal. It was a setup, that was obvious. The British soon traced the Americans' deafening silence back to what they considered a most unlikely and inappropriate source: a black man. US delegate Benjamin Gerig, the British learned, was "restrained from speaking in support of the United Kingdom by his coloured Adviser Dr. Channing Tobias." In fact, the report continued, although Gerig had worked out a carefully prepared speech to support the British position, at "the last moment, while actually in the Committee Room, Tobias . . . vetoed the American speech." "It is apparent," the report concluded, "that Anglo American co-operation in the Fourth Committee will only operate, if at all, by grace and favour of Dr. Tobias."⁸⁴

The British delegation not only told this tale of woe to the Foreign Office but believed that the State Department had a right to know what was going on. Furious that their Commonwealth ally had been treated so shabbily, the British railed that NAACP chairman "Channing Tobias . . . the chief United States Delegate, [had] prevent[ed] his Delegation from giving us the support we had been led to expect." They thought that any Anglo-American differences on colonial issues had been cleared up during a round of meetings held earlier in the year. At that time and others, they made their position perfectly clear. The "United Nations ha[d] no business dealing" with the "Southwest Africa question" because it was an "internal matter." Thus, in a "frank exchange" with State Department representatives, the British asserted that Tobias had "gotten [the UN meeting] off to an extremely bad start." Instead of honoring the Anglo-American agreement and calming the "excitable atmosphere" in the Fourth Committee, the chairman of the NAACP had actually "paid tribute to the work" of the UN's anti-colonial forces, "hoped that the time was past when non-self-governing territories were regarded as merely catering to the needs of peoples in other parts of the world," and "was glad to note from his own observations . . . that the old colonialism was dead." The British warned their State Department colleagues that Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was certainly going to take this up with the secretary of state and let him know about this "cypher" whose "lamentable" performance meant that "the precedent has now been set for the free-for-all discussion of political affairs of colonies."⁸⁵

The British, however, were not the only ones virtually apoplectic about what had just transpired at the UN. The South African delegation went after Scott with all of the top secret MI-5 ammunition it had stockpiled and tried to discredit him with the other UN members. Pretoria also banned the priest from ever returning to South Africa.⁸⁶ Simultaneously, Malan's government let Chief Hosea Kutako and his delegation get all the way to the city of Windhoek, where Scott had secured the funding, in part from the NAACP, to pay for their passage to the UN meeting in Paris. But at Windhoek their progress stopped. Days passed before Malan's government finally announced that it had decided to refuse the African leadership passports to leave the country, ever.⁸⁷

The Canadians, who had, up to this point, been trying to play a moderating role, could not understand why South Africa was so intent on "burning bridges." The Union had set itself up as a "villain." It had continued to defy the UN and the World Court, it had refused to acknowledge the rock solid foundation in law of international accountability, and then it had tried to revert to legalisms by picking and choosing which sections of the ICJ's ruling best suited its case. At that point, the Canadians conceded, the Fourth Committee was so exasperated that "there seemed to be some substance in the contention that since South Africa had shown no inclination to accept that part of the International Court's opinion dealing with petitions and annual reports, the Assembly was morally justified in consulting representatives from that territory as a means of obtaining fuller information on local conditions."⁸⁸

In the Fourth Committee's estimation, the denial of passports to Chief Hosea and his colleagues was part and parcel of the same strategy to undermine international accountability and reify white supremacy. Tobias was certainly furious, particularly after he saw the smug, self-congratulatory air among the colonial powers when the African leadership was denied direct access to the UN. Or, as he put it to Walter White, "I witnessed the brush-off." The others on the Fourth Committee saw it, too. Scott, however, was still on the scene and Tobias signaled the other delegates that the United States would not be opposed to learning further about the plight of Chief Hosea and others stranded at Windhoek.⁸⁹ With that, the chair of the Fourth Committee "asked his reverence" to come to the head of the table and testify.⁹⁰ Scott said simply and powerfully that his was a poor substitute for the voice that the United Nations really needed to hear, that of the Africans themselves who have endured the sufferings attendant with white supremacist rule.⁹¹

Yet, it was in those voices for liberation, those of a marauding, maverick priest named Michael Scott and a "conservative, bureaucratic organization" in the NAACP, who risked the wrath of powerful governments, risked the destruction and ostracism that came with the epithets "Communist" and "Communist sympathizer," and risked their "respectable" status in society, to ensure that the atrocities in Southern Africa would not go unnoticed.⁹² In a letter to Walter White, Scott understood how South West Africa had "now become the symbol, on the one hand, of African people dispossessed of their lands and rights and, on the other, of the great efforts that have been made throughout a century of colonial history to establish the principle of international accountability."⁹³

The mobilization had begun. Shortly after the December 1951 meeting, the UN created a series of committees to investigate the conditions in South West Africa as well as the racial conditions (apartheid) in South Africa itself. It was the beginning of the transformation of the Union into a pariah nation, it raised the very real possibility of penetrating national sovereignty in the face of systematic human rights violations, and it was a major step on the long, hard road to Namibian independence.