No Law on Earth

The latest hit record blaring from every loudspeaker in the Negro music shops of Johannesburg is Azikwela! (We will not ride!). There is a meaning to the music. For the past six weeks Johannesburg's Negroes have chosen to walk to work (often as far as ten miles) rather than ride the buses which carried them to their jobs each day. The issue is not, as in Montgomery, Ala., one of mixed seating: white riders are not even allowed on these work buses. Originally azikwela was a simple protest against a one-penny rise in the bus fare. In the weeks since then, however, what began as a purely economic demonstration on the part of 15,000 Johannesburg bus riders has burgeoned into a full-scale political battle between South Africa's African National Congress and Premier Strydom's racist government.

Conducted, like its Montgomery counterpart, in a scrupulous spirit of nonviolence, the boycott was taken up on other Johannesburg bus lines, spread to Pretoria and to Port Elizabeth. If Bloemfontein joins in as expected, the number of won't-riders will soon be more than 100,000.

As the buses rolled passengerless along streets clogged with trudging Negroes, sympathetic white motorists of Johannesburg began more and more to stop and offer lifts. Strydom's police set up roadblocks to harass the drivers, checking and rechecking licenses and registrations, whipping out tape measures to see if the law providing a 15-in. space for each passenger was being observed, citing every letter of the law to delay the car-lift. In the cities themselves, police searched Negro hotels and the servant quarters of white homes to smoke out workers staying overnight without police passes. Railroads refused to let the workers ride, on the grounds that tickets for all available seats had already been sold, and hundreds of walking Negroes were arrested on the roads and herded into jails on cooked-up charges. The Negroes still refused to ride the buses. "We must smash this boycott," said Transport Minister Ben Schoeman. "It's only a test by the African National Congress of its power. If they want a showdown, they'll get it." But when one big Johannesburg chain store, accepting the government's get-tough advice, threatened to fire three Negroes for coming late to work, a strong hint of boycott by its customers changed its mind.

"We have no vote. We have no rights," said an African Congress spokesman. "The boycott is our political weapon, and no law on earth can make us ride if we want to walk."

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