I just re-read Stranger in a Strange Land the other day, and came across one of Heinlein’s little “local color” news items, stating that the world govt. had again censured South Africa for oppressing its white minority.
That reminded me of a virtually identical bit from Clarke’s Childhood’s End, where the blacks in South Africa were oppressing the white minority.
From whence comes this? I know Heinlein was (at times) a near-reactionary, and Clarke is pretty clearly a Brit of the old Empire days … but was this a common feeling at the time (1950s-60s)? Did lots of people believe that the white ruling class in South Africa were going to one day find themselves on the other end of the power game? Was there ever a period (I’m only familiar with the whole end-of-apartheid-to-today era) where such a thing actually happened there?
I read both of those as cautionary “shoe’s-on-the-other-foot” type scenarios. Heinlein was, while a creature of his time, very very much aware that power imbalances are bad for both sides of the equation, because there’s no guarantee that the oppressors are always going to be the oppressors and not the oppressed. He knew that if you set up society in such a way to systematically deny any group any real participation in it, the group in that position isn’t always going to be the one there now.
It’s entirely possible that if the dismantling of Apartheid had been handled differently (or if the first post-Apartheid president of South Africa had been someone with less of a moral dimension than Mandela), it very well could have resulted in massive oppression of the white minority (not unlike Zimbabwe right now).
It was simply a given of any future scenerio that (1) Africans wouldn’t be third-world tribal peoples forever, they’d eventually catch up with European-descendents. And (2) Whites were, are, and presumably would be a numerical minority in southern Africa. So in any situation where they were not a ruling elite, they would be at risk of oppression. It hasn’t quite gotten to that point in Zimbabwe yet, and South Africa has so far has been a near-miracle of multi-ethnic tolerence (remember that “blacks” aren’t a homogenous block). Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Heinlein develops this theme at greater length in Farnham’s Freehold. Opinion is split between those who think it’s an interesting exploration of role reversals and those whose skin crawl at the mere mention of the title.
Exactly. This book simultaneously interests me and repels me.
Heinlein explores some very interesting themes of race and general dynamics of power within interpersonal relationships. He raises some interesting issues, and explores them within the framework of a (to me, anyway) pretty fun read.
At the same time, this is - if I remember correctly - around the time Heinlein was beginning to espouse more of his sociological and political theories in his work. Unfortunately, he’d not yet learned to blend the demagoguery and the storytelling effectively, and the prose doesn’t flow nearly as well as
You can also see that he is feeling confident enough to start discussing his somewhat ahem unorthodox views on sexuality, especially within family units.
Still, it’s worth reading, even if just for the ‘shoe on the other foot’ examples of slavery/servitude between blacks and whites, viewed through the lens of 1950’s America.
Yep. That is where I decided that RAH had taken complete leave of his senses in this book. It was an ok read up 'til then. But the cannibalism was completely over the top. It made an interesting examination of race relations into a bigoted screed. Completely pointless. (Sorta like 9/10 of the threads in the Pit!)
Another vote for this, here. It’s the only Heinlein novel I’ve never reread, and have no desire to ever reread.
Other than that, I’ve always felt that the various off hand comments about a black majority oppressing a white minority in Africa were cautionary - not as a caution to keep the blacks down, but rather for the opposite thesis: lift 'em up, or surely the oppressor will reap the whirlwind.
BTW, David Brin’s Earth (1990) has some scenes set in a post Apartheid South Africa that seemed, IIRC, to hint at a dichotomy similar to the way some whites deal with blacks: those in our country are barely human; foreign ones are people.
