SOUTH AFRICA: Unaccepted Challenge

A meek-looking little man, brown of skin and brown of suit, entered the Durban Municipal Free Library, sat down near a dozen startled whites, and with trembling fingers turned the pages of a magazine. An attendant hurried up, whispered that the library was for whites only; he must leave. Replied the man: “I am breaking your apartheid [racial segregation] law, which is based on the false, un-Christian theory of race inequality.”

The man went next to Durban’s main railroad station, sat down on a bench marked in large white letters: “For Europeans Only.” A policeman strode up, and demanded the violator’s name. The man gave it: Manilal Gandhi; age, 58; occupation, editor of the Durban weekly Indian Opinion. The cop told him a summons would be issued. Gandhi went home to his farm outside Durban to wait for it.

The oldest surviving son of the late Mohandas Gandhi thus began a campaign of civil disobedience to the anti-Indian, anti-Negro laws of South Africa. Last month, Gandhi warned Prime Minister Daniel Malan that the government’s apartheid policy “would drive one to Communism, whether one wishes it or not.” His aim: to provoke arrest and go to prison, thus “seek to change the heart of the government by my self-imposed sufferings.”

But somehow, Manilal did not seem to have the Mahatma touch. He cut a lone figure. Durban’s whites, who in this year’s census for the first time in history found themselves outnumbered by Indians, are more anti-Indian than ever. Manilal tried to sell his case to the Natal Indian Congress, founded by his father in 1894. But the Congress ignored their founder’s son, and, led by the Communists, spent their time denouncing “American imperialism in Korea.” Worst of all, Malan’s government also ignored him, and proved that passive resistance might be the best weapon against passive resistance. No summons for his arrest came. Gandhi last week went back to the library and railroad station, this time taking his wife Sushila along. Again there was no arrest. Gandhi and his wife dejectedly drove away in their blue Chevrolet.

He fasted and prayed for a day, then announced that he would intensify his one-man defiance of apartheid, and force authorities to jail him. “I would be happier in any other country,” Gandhi said sadly, “but my duty lies here.”