Reaping the Whirlwind

South Africa was divided between festival and fear. The festival, opened last week by Prime Minister Daniel Malan's government, celebrated the 300th anniversary of the landing at Cape Town from the Dutch ship Goede Hoop of South Africa's first white settlers. They entered a vast, fertile country, empty except for a handful of aborigines. But as their ox-wagons rolled north, they collided with the southward-marching legions of the black Bantu tribes. The blacks now outnumber the whites 8,000,000 to 2,500,000. From that fact grows South Africa's fear.

At festival time Prime Minister Malan's formula for white supremacy--apartheid (racial segregation)--ran afoul of South Africa's highest court. His administration tottered, and considered dangerous alternatives. The restless and politically awakening Negroes scheduled nationwide demonstrations in protests against his policy. The possibility of civil war hovered over South Africa, and a desperate decision faced Daniel Franc,ois Malan, who had sown the whirlwind.

The Chosen Race. A stodgy Boer with a pale, square face and thick, white hands, Daniel Malan is the self-appointed high priest of the Afrikaners and of apartheid. He was born 78 years ago on a Cape Province farm called Allesverloren ("Everything Is Lost"), and attended the same Sunday school as his lifelong public enemy: Jan Christian Smuts, South Africa's greatest Prime Minister. Smuts, who fought the British in the Boer War, lived to become their best South African friend; Malan, who never heard a shot fired, is a violent Anglophobe.

Trained as a Reformed Church predikant (he got his D.D. in Holland), Pastor Malan has dedicated his life to the proposition that men are created unequal. From the Calvinist doctrine of "election," he drew two startling, if not logical, conclusions: 1) that the Boers are God's chosen race in South Africa, and 2) that the "inferiority" of all other races, especially the Negro, is divinely ordained and therefore unalterable. As editor (of Cape Town's Afrikaans Die Burger), Malan taught Afrikaners that South Africa belonged exclusively to them, that the Negro should know his place as a permanent "hewer of wood and drawer of water." In 1919 he was elected to Parliament as M.P. for the town of Calvinia. His first important achievement: inserting a new phrase in South Africa's Constitution: "The people of the Union acknowledge the sovereignty and guidance of Almighty God."

Road to Fascism. Guided, he said, by God, Malan founded his own Nationalist Afrikaner Party in 1933. Its platform: South Africa for the Afrikaners. During World War II the pastor told his supporters: "If Germany wins, then we are in this . . . fortunate position--that Germany's war aims [i.e., the destruction of the British Empire] and our desire to get a Republic in South Africa are in agreement." Germany lost the war, but in 1948 Pastor Malan won a narrow victory in South Africa's elections. His party warned South Africans that if Smuts won, little white girls would be forced to marry "coons."

In three years' rule, Prime Minister Malan has dragged South Africa far along the road to fascism. His cabinet, two-thirds of whose members belong to the secret Afrikaner Broederbond, launched an anti-Negro, anti-Jewish campaign. The Natives' Representative Council was summarily abolished. Appropriations for Bantu housing were slashed; native slums proliferated, breeding crime and misery. To cut down the number of opposition voters, Malan coolly disenfranchised the Natal and Transvaal Indians.

Manifest Absurdity. Last year he went too far. In a Jim Crow franchise bill passed by a parliamentary majority of ten, he erased the names of 50,000 Cape Colored (i.e., halfcaste) voters from the white voting lists and assigned their votes to four "white representatives."

The reaction was sharp and strong. Opposition Leader J. G. Strauss, now the leader of Smuts's old United Party, called it "a great act of betrayal." So did a group of enraged South African war veterans, who formed the anti-Malan "Torch Commando" to protect the Constitution. Their leader was a cousin of Malan's and an R.A.F. wing commander in the Battle of Britain: Adolph ("Sailor") Malan. In tampering with the franchise, said the Opposition, Prime Minister Malan had violated the "Entrenched Clauses" in South Africa's Constitution. Torch backed four colored voters who took the case to South Africa's Supreme Court.

The legal arguments were prolix, but the key question was clear: could Parliament by a simple majority override an Entrenched Clause of Britain's 1909 South Africa Act, which is the Union's basic constitutional law? Government lawyers said yes, otherwise the free Dominion of South Africa would still be fettered by Britain.

Last week five black-robed judges (three of them appointed by Prime Minister Malan) unanimously said no. Malan's action was "null and void." Said Chief Justice Albert van de Sandt Centlivres: "To say that the Union of South Africa is not a sovereign state simply because Parliament hasn't the power to amend the Constitution is to state a manifest absurdity . . . It would be surprising . . . to be told that the great and powerful country, the United States, is not sovereign and independent because its Congress cannot pass any law it pleases."

It was the first major setback to all-out apartheid. If Pastor Malan overruled the court, he might easily lose the support of the old-fashioned Boer farmers, who respect their judges. If he accepted the court's decision, his fanatical Nationalist lieutenants might toss him aside.

Malan, Scram! At week's end, looking bitter and tired, old Pastor Malan hearkened to the fanatics, announced in Parliament that he would end the court's "interference" with acts of the legislature. From all over the Union came angry protests; Torch supporters paraded through the streets of Cape Town and Johannesburg, demanding: "Malan, scram!" Ominous too were the stirrings in the great Bantu slums, where Nationalist police confiscated truckloads of "murderous weapons."

Faced with a split in his own party, Malan risked revolution and interracial war if he persisted in defying the court. "Your immoral acts," said Opposition Leader Strauss, "are now also proved illegal. With every month that passes while South Africa is governed by you, the prospects become more fearful. Resign. Resign. Resign!"

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