Other Battlefields

Abstract

‘Having a voice which by God’s grace can be heard beyond the confines of South Africa’, wrote Alan Paton in his widely distributed booklet, The People Wept, ‘I use it to speak for people who have no voice at all, to protest on their behalf and in the name of justice against the law known as the Group Areas Act of 1950.’ His object was to reveal the Act ‘as a callous and cruel piece of legislation, and to bring nearer the day when it will be struck from the statute book of the Union of South Africa’.¹ The object of the Act was, of course, to separate South Africans into racially separate groups as completely as possible.