Always Abolishing

In Durban last week, white South Africans were privileged to view one of the ugliest representations of man man ever wrought--Sculptor Jacob Epstein's primeval Adam. In accordance with the Nationalist government's policy of apartheid (segregation), Indians and Negroes were barred from the exhibit. Roared big-fisted Sculptor Epstein in London: "The Adam was intended to represent the beginnings of all men . . . Under such Nazi principles of racial selectivity the subject of the statue himself would not be allowed to have a look at it!"

Prime Minister Daniel Malan's Nationalists were in no mood to heed Epstein's protests. They were hard at work on their grand design to oust non-Europeans from any participation in South Africa's government (TIME, Oct. 25). The latest target of their campaign was the Natives' Representative Council, which had been set up in 1936 to assist Parliament in making laws affecting Negroes. Its six government-appointed white members and 16 Negroes (twelve of them elected) formed a purely advisory body. "The N.R.C.," one of its members once said, "is like a toy telephone, with the Negroes at one end and the government at the other. We've turned the handle and spoken into it, but there is no reply." Premier Malan's government made a characteristic reply. It took away the telephone.

Last week the council was convened for the first time since 1946--to hear its death sentence. Since Europeans objected to its meeting in Pretoria's City Hall, the council squeezed into a stiflingly hot little backstreet meeting room. Said Secretary for Native Affairs Dr. W.J.G. Mears, explaining the council's dissolution: "It has apparently created a sense of frustration in the councilors ..."

Trim, coal-black Professor Z. K. Matthews (M.A., Yale), gave understatement for understatement. Said he: "This mentality from which we in this country suffer, under which we're always abolishing and not creating, always eliminating and not substituting, has a very bad psychological effect . . ."

Dr. Malan's government did not seem to care unduly about the psychological effects of its actions. It was already working on the next phase of its plan: the abolition of Negro representation in South Africa's Assembly.

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