Hoch!

In the dreary beerhalls of Windhoek, capital of South-West Africa, the Hochs! swelled loud and heady last week. The German community, 13,000 strong, was celebrating victory--and revenge--in the first vote of the former German colony as part of the Union of South Africa. The Germans had swung the election--all six House of Assembly seats, 16 of 18 local legislative assembly seats. Their victory in South-West Africa gave a clear majority in South Africa's Parliament to the anti-British, pro-Boer, white-supremacy government of Prime Minister Daniel Malan.

South-West Africa's election (for whites only) had been held in defiance of the U.N., which insists that South-West Africa is still a mandated territory. There now seemed no political bar to a fanatic, explosive Nationalist program of full apartheid (racial separateness).

Aged (80) Jan Christian Smuts, who had fought the British in the Boer War, who had taken South-West Africa from the Germans in World War I, and who favored a moderate racial policy, lay gravely ill last week at his farm near Pretoria. Rabid Nationalists kept him awake with taunting phone calls as the election returns from South-West Africa came in. In the streets of Pretoria, Johannesburg and Capetown, citizens who realized that the Germans now had the balance of power in their Parliament asked each other, "How's your German?"

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