Party at Groote Schuur

A rare smile lit the stony face of South Africa's Nationalist Prime Minister Johannes Strydom last week. After five years of relentless campaigning, this taut, thin-lipped, back-country lawyer and ostrich farmer had won the parliamentary fight to establish white supremacy in a land of 2,600,000 whites and 10,000,000 nonwhites. Its Upper House now packed with 41 new, Strydom-created Senators to furnish the necessary votes, Parliament bowled heavily through a final joint session to change an "entrenched clause" in the 1909 South African constitution and strike the last 45,000 Colored (mixed blood) voters from the common voting roll. Strydom's-majority: 174 to 68.

Some of the younger Nationalists and their wives thought the occasion called for a gesture of thanks to their leader. They organized a victory march on Groote Schuur (Great Barn), the vast Dutch Colonial pile, once the mansion of Empire Builder Cecil Rhodes, that is now the Cape Town residence of the Prime Minister. Around 9 of the summer's evening, a caravan of 130 cars, filled with 156 Nationalist parliamentarians and wives, drove slowly up to the great house whose grounds overlook two oceans. "We have come to sing," announced a spokesman. Mrs. Strydom invited the crowd inside, ordered the kitchen blacks to prepare coffee and Boerebiskuit (Afrikaans for shortbread) for all. As the Prime Minister came into the hall a moment later, the visitors broke into old Boer war songs--the Volksliederen of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Then the Senate's only woman member, Mrs. M.D.J. Koster, spoke her thanks to the white race's savior: "Every white woman and every white mother thanks you from the depths of her heart." Deeply moved, Strydom wiped a tear from his cheek, then replied: "We must never be swerved from our goals . . . The struggle must continue."

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