SOUTH AFRICA: Whose Crime?

Few nations on earth are less color-conscious than Brazil, none more so than the Union of South Africa. Last week, when the Brazilian navy training ship Almirante Saldanha docked in Cape Town harbor, a shipload of sailors and officers ranging in skin tone from pale copper to charcoal black streamed into the city, made havoc of Premier Daniel Malan’s brutally enforced segregation policy.

Heedless of South African law, which states clearly that mingling of white and black persons is a criminal offense, light-skinned sailormen, heavy with pocket money, paraded the streets with Zulu-dark girls, while Cape Town’s white Portuguese chatted happily in their mother tongue with handsome, mahogany-brown Brazilians. Local police tried desperately to figure out which were black, which were white and which in-betweens, finally gave up. Brazilian Captain Pedro Paulo de Aranjo Suzano was no help at all. Said he: “They are all Brazilians.”