SOUTH AFRICA: Revolution

“A revolution is taking place in South Africa,” warned the Port Elizabeth Saturday Post. “It is not a noisy revolution, and there are no guns or street riots . . . Many thousands of people won’t even know that there has been a revolution—till one day they wake up and find that they can never change their government.”

Prime Minister Daniel Malan’s Nationalist government, founded on the principle of apartheid (racial segregation), hates Great Britain and despises the British liberal tradition. It is a government run by and for the tough Afrikaans-speaking burgers who make up 60% of the Union’s white population. A much-used Nationalist slogan: “One Country, One Flag, One Language” (Afrikaans).

Parties & Outlooks. Almost the first official act of the government last June was to release Sydney Robey Leibbrandt and others convicted of pro-Nazi agitation and anti-war activities during World War II (TIME, June 28). The government then rescinded Field Marshal Smuts’s order forbidding members of two antiSemitic, ultranationalist organizations—Ossewa Brandwag and the Afrikaner Broederbond—to hold civil service positions. The Broederbond, of which Prime Minister Malan is a member and his Minister of the Interior, Dr. Theophilus Dönges, vice chairman, is now the real ruler of the Union of South Africa. The sinister secret society controls a good two-thirds of the government members of Parliament.

The Afrikaner Broederbond, in turn, is run by an executive of twelve who call themselves the Twelve Apostles. One of the apostles, billiard-bald Dr. Nicholaas Diederichs, Nationalist Parliament member for Randfontein, said in his maiden speech in Parliament: “The political position in South Africa is not an ordinary fight between two parties, but between two basic outlooks on life so fundamentally divided that a compromise between them is virtually unthinkable.”

The Malan government has already begun work on restricting immigration and tightening requirements for citizenship. Explained Dönges: “[This] aims at the protection of the State against a world outlook and an outlook on life foreign to that generally current in South Africa.”

Words & Actions. To cut down the number of opposition voters, Malan coolly disfranchised the Natal and Transvaal Indians. Malan has announced that he proposes to eject from Parliament the representatives of the Negroes, and to deprive the “colored” (mixed-blood) voters of Cape Province of their direct franchise. The government already has passed a law compelling the Cape’s colored voters to appear before an electoral officer, magistrate or police officer to prove that they can actually write their names and addresses. Since most colored citizens prefer to steer clear of race-baiting Nationalist police officials, the effect of the new law will be to disfranchise thousands.

Nationalist Party extremists openly favor the establishment of an authoritarian Calvinist republic, separate from the British Commonwealth. At present, Malan prefers to soft-pedal this plank in his party’s platform until he has firmly consolidated his power. Eric Louw, South Africa’s representative to the British Commonwealth Conference (see above), has been less discreet. “[In the Republic],” Louw said not long ago, “only those would have a vote who had shown by word and action undivided loyalty to South Africa and to the Republic. This excludes all Jews, also the jingoes [English-speaking South Africans].”