Race relations

R.W. Johnson is a brave man, morally and physically. After apartheid ended, he gave up his Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford (with its virtually automatic lifelong tenure) to return to the South Africa he had left as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1960s. For a while he was director of the Helen Suzman Foundation. Then he took the rocky road of the freelance journalist, writing mainly for the British Sunday Times and the London Review of Books. While most South African left-wing whites attached themselves to the ruling African National Congress, Johnson took the less obvious path of backing the Inkatha Freedom Party and its leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Throughout his years back in South Africa, Johnson has written fiercely against what he sees as corruption, mismanagement and foolishness in government. In the process, he has made himself deeply unpopular not just with the ANC but also with the universities that might have otherwise been his natural home in South Africa. His continuing admiration of Helen Suzman – for many years the only white parliamentarian willing to speak out against apartheid – surely deserves acclaim; it is so easy to airbrush individuals like her out of history, because of their class or colour. Often, Johnson sees himself in the role of the boy who wasn’t afraid to say that the emperor’s new clothes were not a masterpiece of tailoring.

Rising to the lectern amid a tightly packed crowd in the Cambridge Union’s debating hall, James Baldwin began quietly and slowly to speak. ‘I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah.’ It was February 1965, and Baldwin was in the United Kingdom to promote his third novel, Another Country (1962). Baldwin’s British publicist had asked the Union if they would host the author. Peter Fullerton, the Union’s president, was quick to seize this opportunity, on one condition: that Baldwin participate in a debate.

‘Fuck Australia, I hope it fucking burns to the ground.’ Sarah Maddison opens this book by quoting Tarneen Onus-Williams, the young Indigenous activist who sparked a brief controversy when her inflammatory comments about ...

When Josephine Baker died in Paris in April 1975, it was almost fifty years since her sensational triumph in that city in 1925 as the star of La Revue Nègre. Her legendary status in France today remains linked to her emblematic role in the extraordinary unleashing of emotion and sensuality that came with the French Jazz Age and its upheaval of tradition. But her image also includes her work in the Resistance during the German Occupation, work which saved lives and assisted vital communication, earning her the Croix de Guerre, the Resistance Medal, and the Legion of Honour. Both culturally and politically she is perceived as a figure of liberation. Her experiment in adopting a large multiracial family – The ‘Rainbow Tribe’ – and raising the children in her Dordogne château, while generally shrugged off as a failed Utopian dream, and the cause of the financial ruin that necessitated her rescue by Princess Grace of Monaco, is also seen as evidence of a laudable anti-racist stance. And her humanitarian activism in the United States and South America are folded into the same positive picture of a woman who, having chosen France as her heartland, has been elected by the French as a national treasure.

On the front of the only postcard my grandfather kept is a picture of the United States Navy’s ‘great white fleet’ off Australian shores. A Pennsylvanian uncle sent it to the nine-year-old boy in 1908, ‘from one white man to another’. After reading Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynolds’s important new book on the transnational assertion of white racial identity in the early twentieth century, I now know that our American relative was merely echoing Rear-Admiral Sperry, who, at a luncheon in Sydney the same year, greeted his Australian hosts as a ‘white man to white men, and I may add, very white men’.

Anyone interested in Aboriginal history or race relations will probably be familiar with the work of Henry Reynolds. His books include The Other Side of the Frontier (1982), Frontier (1987), and The Law of the Land (1987). This latest book is a collection of documents, ones that provided much of the source material for Reynolds’s earlier works. In this book, he tell us in the preface, ‘our forebears speak for themselves and speak in many voices’.