"Well, Here I Am"

Prime Minister Daniel Malan waddled to a platform in Pretoria last week and delivered a two-hour campaign speech. Although he is rheumatic and turning 79 next month, the old man had plenty of stamina. A few days earlier a London paper had mistakenly reported him dying. Said Malan: "My opponents wish me dead. [The opposition] says I am too old to address a meeting standing on my feet. Well, here I am." Amid the frenzied cheers of his Boer supporters, he added: "I promise to retire before I am 100."

Next week in South Africa, 1,635,000 white men & women and 46,000 colored men (persons of mixed blood, whom Malan tried vainly to remove from the voting rolls) will choose between Malan's Nationalists, who won power from the late Jan Smuts in 1948, and the opposition United Party of Jacobus Strauss. "Every vote cast against the Nationalists," trumpets Malan in his perorations, "is a vote for Russians, Indians, the United Nations, the British Labor Party . . ."

Actually, the United Party also favors white supremacy, but argues that the Malanites are too fanatical, and that their harsh segregation laws cost the country nearly $50 million a year. Strauss, the well-meaning United Party leader who has a bad habit of always sounding on the defensive, assured everyone that if his party wins, "the deliberate Communists will be dealt with by the courts. We will make Communism high treason. In extreme cases, Communists will be hanged."

The campaigning is rough. Johannesburg's Afrikaans Nationalist newspaper Die Transvaler published a cartoon of a panga knife labeled "Mau Mau" piercing a black cloud and hanging over a white family, with a caption: "Vote Nationalist to avert this." Brigadier C. I. Rademeyer, head of South Africa's Criminal Investigation Department, quietly made it known that up to ten plainclothesmen were attending all political rallies, mixing with the crowds. Since the cops were assumed to be progovernment, United Party members were alarmed. Asked the Rand Daily Mail: "Are they spies?" Nationalist hoodlums tried to break up United Party rallies by throwing stones, tomatoes and eggs, by cutting off electric power, by wielding sjamboks (rhinoceros-hide whips). No Nationalist meetings were molested.

For the moment, the country's 9,000,000 voteless, restless Negroes are lying quiet. Most hope that the United Party will win as the lesser of evils, but a smaller more militant group believes that a Malan victory will sting the blacks into closing their ranks completely. Said one of these: "Malan has advanced Negro unity by 50 years." Political experts think that Malan will probably win, helped by the emotion-charged cries of "Mau-Mauism."

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