SOUTH AFRICA: The Black Sashes

From all over the Union white women, most of them middle-aged housewives, all wearing over-the-shoulder black sashes, converged on Cape Town last week and paraded silently down Cape Town’s main street. Then they took stations at five-yard intervals in front of Parliament and began a 48-hour vigil of silent protest, ignoring rotten vegetables hurled by young hoodlums. As leather-lunged Prime Minister Johannes Strydom convened Parliament in joint session in the final act of his long campaign to write white supremacy into the law of his tragically divided land, the silent ladies, lined up in mute and mourning protest, seemed to be the only opponents he could not shout down.

In the past, Nationalists had called the unnerving ladies rude names (“foolish virgins,” “weeping Winnies”) to no avail. This time Strydom ordered his Cabinet ministers to ignore them. A dozen women entered Parliament itself, and at a signal put on their black sashes, in mourning for South Africa’s constitution. An usher demanded that they remove the sashes. They complied, then calmly took black artificial roses from their handbags and pinned them to their dresses. The usher demanded that these be removed too, but the sergeant at arms nervously ruled that the black flowers could be worn. The women knew their cause was hopeless, but their presence was a visible reminder that a large segment in the country deplores the direction South Africa is heading.

Having packed the Senate by appointing only loyal Nationalists to 41 newly created seats (TIME, Dec. 5), Prime Minister Strydom was in a hurry to get on with his designs. His bill proclaiming the supremacy of a Parliament not answerable even to the courts, and striking the last 50,000 Colored (mixed blood) voters from the common roll, rode through first and second readings and was ready for final enactment as a constitutional amendment this week. The last constitutional safe guards enacted in South Africa’s founding charter of 1909 to protect the rights of non-whites would thus be repealed. For the dispirited remnants of the once-powerful United Party, Opposition Leader J. G. N. Strauss rose to promise an appeal to the supreme court. This was not likely to come to much. Precisely in anticipation of such a move, Strydom last year added five new members to the court—all Nationalists.