From Mourning to Action

Johannesburg seemed strangely deserted in the bright Monday morning sun. Gone were the hordes of African delivery boys on bicycles that normally clog Commissioner Street. Gone were the black gas-station attendants, the elevator operators and the shop sweepers. That morning the boss made his own tea in the office, and the white housewife lugged her own parcels to the car after a round of shopping. For 95% of Johannesburg's Africans sat obstinately at home, mourning for the 68 hapless blacks cut down by the withering hail of police bullets in the Sharpeville massacre a week earlier.

Most just sat and talked of the violent events of the past days, speculated fearfully of violence still to come. But some also drank from jugs of the fiery illicit skokiaan until it was time to meet the evening trains from town. Drunk and angry, they grabbed stones, sticks and jagged pieces of metal to greet the few Africans who had disregarded Mourning Day and had gone in to work for the white man as usual. Forming a human chain across the tracks, one gang stopped a commuter train, dragged off the dozen Africans aboard and kicked and beat them. Others used roadbed ballast stones to smash train windows, dragging one young African messenger off and amputating his hands with a broad-bladed knife.

By nightfall, Orlando and Alexandra townships, where 100,000 Africans live, were dotted with scores of dead and wounded as groups moved from door to door demanding that householders burn their hated passbooks. Wisely, the police kept their distance, for this was black fighting black in black territory.

So far, in Johannesburg as well as in Cape Town, where Mourning Day was also observed, all the violence, demonstrating and pass-burning had been in native areas. No procession had yet violated the main streets of white men's cities. In most areas African passions were ebbing. But in the next days, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's government managed to change that.

Rule by Rifle. Ignoring pleas for moderation, the determined Nationalists introduced legislation to ban both the troublesome Pan-African Congress, which had fomented the recent unrest, and the larger African National Congress--the only two groups that can speak for the nation's 9,750,000 Africans. "They want to bring the white government to its knees," cried Minister of Justice Franc,ois Erasmus before Parliament. "The government has decided to bring a halt to the reign of terror." Next day Verwoerd went a step further, declared a state of emergency in all the major population centers of the nation. It gave the government power to censor the press, close or take over any business, make arrests without warrant, require workers to return to their jobs or go to jail.

"The situation is completely under control," said Verwoerd soothingly, but he acted like a man who feared imminent revolution on a national scale. Before dawn on Wednesday, even before the emergency declaration was fully in effect, his detectives fanned out in simultaneous raids throughout the nation to arrest scores of native leaders and suspected troublemakers. Chief Albert Luthuli, president of the African National Congress and a moderate who had now joined the radicals in advocating pass-burning, was awakened and hauled away at 2 a.m.; soon the police were picking up "dangerous" whites as well, including all the top leaders of Alan (Cry, the Beloved Country) Paton's little Liberal Party, except Paton himself, who commented, "I feel slightly disreputable. I must have slipped up somehow." Into the Cities. The Africans reacted like lightning crackling across the platteland sky. That afternoon a procession of 30,000 headed into Cape Town itself, chanting slogans and singing as a pink police helicopter, fluttering overhead like a nervous butterfly, radioed the throng's progress ahead to headquarters. Hastily, platoons of troops took position outside Parliament, where the legislators were debating. Carrying no weapons, the throng demonstrated peacefully before Caledon Square police station, where a local batch of leaders had been locked up. Then, to the relief of the platoons of police troops standing ready to fire, the mob disappeared. But police radios crackled with news that the same thing was occurring in other towns on the cape--in Somerset West, at the coastal resort of Hermanus.

At Stellenbosch, the university town 31 miles away, 5,000 Africans tried to march on the police station to turn in their passbooks and seek arrest, but were dispersed by a police baton charge.

Third Column. Now thoroughly frightened, the authorities mobilized the 3,000-man air force for standby alert and threw companies of armed soldiers and sailors around the two big African residential locations at Cape Town to prevent another march on the city, a move that also kept thousands of Africans from their jobs in a city already partially paralyzed by lack of labor. In the countryside the entire citizens' defense force of 23,000 civilian reservists was alerted and 40% of its units put on active duty. Truckloads of skietkommandos, mostly young Boer farmers recruited from rifle clubs, sped through the Orange Free State to take up positions in strategic areas.

But it was hundreds of miles away in coastal Natal that the lightning struck next. Out from the tough slums of Cato Manor, the big African location near the lovely port city of Durban, surged three phalanxes of angry blacks waving ax handles and carrying stones. Two groups were turned back by armored cars bristling with fast-firing Bren guns. But the third column headed for Central Prison shouting, "Give us our leaders!" before the police could stop it. It moved swiftly up handsome West Street, busiest of the shopping boulevards. Suddenly the police were firing, and within minutes three Africans were dead and 22 wounded lay writhing in the street.

Closing Ranks. Where would it all end? The Nationalists seemed determined to make no concessions. Finance Minister Theophilus Donges scornfully refused to meet an African delegation to discuss grievances. The Ministry of Bantu Ad--ministration sternly announced that the suspended pass laws would soon be reimposed, although with over a million of the hated passes now burned, attempts to enforce the rule would surely lead to increased rioting.

Verwoerd's men seemed more irritated than impressed when the U.N. Security Council, summoned into special session by Henry Cabot Lodge, passed a resolution calling on South Africa to "abandon its policy of apartheid and racial discrimination" without a dissenting voice and with the full support of the U.S. Even France, which has long resisted U.N. meddling in internal affairs because of its embarrassment over Algeria, contented itself with abstention. So did Britain, which could hardly be expected to vote against a Commonwealth partner. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd declared flatly that his government considers apartheid "wrong and unworkable." In South Africa voices of protest rose, even from within Afrikaner ranks. Nine leaders of the powerful Dutch Reformed Church, whose hierarchy long gave moral aid and comfort to apartheid, called on the government to reduce friction and uphold the human dignity of nonwhites; the influential Afrikaner paper Die Burger urged an end to the petty indignities Africans suffer. Economic pressures were also building up; ships had begun to bypass Cape Town, where the wharves are clogged with goods that cannot be loaded; managers of American firms urged their New York headquarters to hold off on further investment, hotels reported wholesale tourist cancellations, and shops in many cities closed for lack of labor.

Despite all this, the overwhelming majority of frightened South Africans seemed staunchly behind Hendrik Verwoerd's emergency measures, though rumor after rumor suggested a coalition government was in the offing to replace the present Nationalists with a more lenient regime.

No one, however, could conceive of any Afrikaner government giving the Africans what they are demanding: a substantial measure of social and political freedom.

It seemed tragically probable that this would be taken by the blacks, not given by the whites, and that much blood would spill in the process.

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