THESEGREGATIONERA
enforcing them as rigorously as ever.Smuts never wavered in his belief that
Africans were an inferior people; his was at best a paternalist attitude. Like
most contemporary white people in Europe and North America, as well as
South Africa, he could not imagine that Africans themselves were capable
of improving their own status and living conditions. "Of course," Smuts
confided to a correspondent, "everybody [meaning, everywhite person] in
this country is agreed that European and African should live apart and
preserve their respective cultures."89 Hofmeyr, too, never overcame his
white South African fear of social mixing.P? Even the parliamentary repre-
sentatives of Africans, committed though they were to reform, had vir-
tually no close social contacts with Africans and stopped short of recom-
mending universal suffrage or social equality.
By the end of the war, a new generation of black leaders, faced by the
growing gulf between African realities and African expectations, was seek-
ing more effectivemethods of resistance. In 1943, the annual conference of
the ANC adopted a statement, Africans' ClaimsinSouth Africa, which cited
the Atlantic Charter and set out a bill of rights calling for the abolition of all