South Africa: The Great White Laager

SOUTH AFRICA

(See Cover)

Black headlines last week told South Africans of the troubles elsewhere. RACES IN U.S. ON COLLISION COURSE, announced the Natal Mercury, while the Johannesburg Star gave prominence tO THE TRIBAL WAR IN NIGERIA. In the bright and busy nation at Africa’s southern tip, however, such difficulties seemed far away. Topless nighties were the talk of Cape Town. In Johannesburg, where last month’s antique-car rally had drawn 69 entrants—from a 1907 Diatto-Clement to a 1938 Bugatti—the city was debating whether the miniskirt should be banned, and the ballet season began with performances by South African Stars Gary Burne and Phyllis Spira.

In the Johannesburg dusk, golden with light reflected from the mine dumps surrounding the city, the streets were jammed with well-dressed crowds on their way to the bioscope (movies), restaurants, cafés and espresso bars. Giant construction cranes hovered over the beginnings of three new skyscrapers, the tallest of which will have 51 floors. The Johannesburg stock exchange hit a new high, and the city was in the throes of a water shortage, limiting the hours that home owners could water their lawns.

Chin in Palm. On the farms of the Transvaal, bearded Afrikaner patriarchs, who still rule their Bantu field hands with a Bible in one hand and a rawhide sjambok whip in the other, were talking mostly of wool and cattle prices—and of their trip to Pretoria last

May to see the great military parade and Boer festival celebrating the fifth anniversary of South Africa’s resignation from the Commonwealth. In Cape Town, Parliament droned on in the third week of its new session, as Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd sat, chin in palm, in his green leather seat on the government’s front bench.

To all outward appearances, South Africa was a nation without a serious problem in the world. Less than two months ago, it had won a surprising victory in the World Court’s decision not to interfere with its mandate over South West Africa, and so delirious was the response that special thanksgiving services were held in churches throughout the land. Proclaimed President Charles (“Blackie”) Swart at the opening session of Parliament: “In contrast with most countries of the world, South Africa is blessed with racial peace.”

Symbol of Oppression. Racial trouble is indeed becoming an everyday occurrence in the U.S. It is also a gnawing problem for Great Britain, now flooded with Negro and Indian immigrants. In the past decade, 28 new African nations have gone through the upheaval of change from white to black rule, and many are now beset by shattering tribal conflicts. But nowhere has the violence of one race against another reached the proportions of the apartheid of South Africa. It is not the bloody violence of hurled bricks and broken bones, but it is violence nonetheless—the moral violence of oppression imposed by a dominating minority. To most of the world, South Africa is the very symbol of racial conflict.

The United Nations maintains a special committee to catalogue and denounce the injustices of apartheid, which is under almost constant attack in the General Assembly as well as in the capitals of the free world. Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan flew to Cape Town in 1960 to urge South Africans to bend before “the winds of change.” No black African nation recognizes the Verwoerd regime, and their diplomatic barriers have forced South African Airways to detour 1,000 miles around the western hump of the continent on its European flights. An international seminar on apartheid opens this week in Brazil, with 30 nations participating.

On God’s Side? But it is all to no avail. The charges, pleadings, warnings and denunciations merely bounce off the sturdy Afrikaners, just as the spears and arrows of the Zulu warriors used to bounce off their forefathers’ laagers, the ring of covered wagons drawn up tightly in defense. “Every time someone stands up in the United Nations and points an accusing finger at South Africa,” says a South African journalist, “a few thousand more whites move over to Verwoerd’s side.”

As far as the Dutch-descended Afrikaner is concerned, he is again in the laager, barricaded against a hostile world. Behind him are 300 years of white baasskap (bossdom) in a land he knows is his. His Dutch Reformed Church preaches apartheid, tells him that black men are fit only to be “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” and assures him that God is on his side. He lives in isolation from the rest of the world, which he does not understand and he is sure does not understand him.

Gold & Ostriches. South Africa is a land of bright sun and haunting beauty. Fine wine grapes grow in the protected valleys in the southwest, while elephant, rhino and springbok range the high savanna of Kruger National Park in the northeast. Ostrich farms dot the harsh, baked landscape beneath the kopjes (flat-topped hills) of the Great Karroo, where two centuries ago Dutch trekboers lived in small nomadic communi ties. South of the Kalahari Desert is the high veld, a great, green, grassy plateau where cattle and sheep graze in endless herds. On the Indian Ocean’s shore lie the lovely rolling hills of Natal, whose citizens claim the soil is so rich that “if you throw seeds into your garden when you go to bed, you won’t be able to see out of your window in the morning.”

It is an industrious land. The General Motors plant at Port Elizabeth last month turned out its 750,000th car. Diamonds pour out of the big holes of De Beers near Kimberley. The busy gold mines of the Witwatersrand (Ridge of White Waters) and the Orange Free State turn out 73% of the world’s supply. Not far away, in the middle of the great Vaal River coal fields, the government-owned SASOL plant turns coal into oil, the only major product in which South Africa is not self-sufficient; 18 companies are now exploring for oil in Zululand and the Karroo.

Blue & Orange. South Africa has three capitals, one each in three of the four separate states that joined together in 1910. The administrative capital is Pretoria, a city of wide avenues and blue jacaranda blossoms in the onetime Boer Republic of the Transvaal. The Supreme Court is located in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State. Parliament meets in Cape Town, oldest city in the republic and home of most of its 1,747,000 “Coloreds” (mulattoes), who once enjoyed almost the same rights and privileges as the whites.

The true capital of the nation, however, is Johannesburg, the city that was built on gold. In its towering skyscrapers are the offices of most of the nation’s giant banking, commercial and industrial corporations. In its expensive northern suburbs, artistically wrought steel burglar bars cover the windows of elegant homes, where watchdogs growl on the door mats and swimming pools sparkle on the spacious grounds. Surrounding the city, but separated from it by a green band of no man’s land, are African townships where hundreds of thousands of blacks live in government-built mass housing units.

Separate Doors. Under Verwoerd’s apartheid laws, the “non-Europeans” are constantly reminded of a permanent inferior status. They are forbidden to ride in white trains, buses or taxis, to use white public restrooms, attend white churches, send their children to white schools, even to sit on park benches bearing the insulting words Slegs vir blankes (For whites only). They may spend their money in white stores and invest in the stock market, but to mail a letter they must enter the post office through a separate door and buy their stamps at a separate window. “South Africa,” says Laurence Gandar, editor in chief of Johannesburg’s Rand Daily Mail, “is a nation that has lost its way.”

Its troubles began in 1652, when three small ships under the command of Jan van Riebeeck sailed into Table Bay. On board were 200 men, and although some of them were accompanied by their wives and children, they had not come as colonists. Their sole mission was to set up a refreshment station to supply fresh meat, water and vegetables to the spice ships of the Dutch East India Company on their long voyages between Amsterdam and the Far East.

Since apartheid had not yet been invented, they intermingled freely with the primitive Hottentots and Bushmen who were the only native inhabitants of the Cape. “The Colored race started nine months after Jan van Riebeeck landed,” says Colored Educator Dr. Richard van der Ross.

Plentiful Land. Cape Town soon became famous as “the tavern of the seas.” Under a warm sun, crops flourished, cattle fattened and the population of the tiny station multiplied. Dutch settlers began flocking in, to be granted plots of rich farm land by the Dutch East India Company. Land was plentiful, and rather than survey it all, the company often granted a newcomer as much as he could ride around on horse back in a given number of hours.

The settlers’ life was hard, isolated, but rewarding. In the remote areas, they often had to make the clothes they wore, the candles they burned and even the bullets they used to drive off marauding bands of Bushmen. They built their own sturdy homes, used the Bible —the only book they had—to teach their children how to read. When they saw their neighbors, it was usually when they rode to worship at the nearest church, often a two-day journey from their farm. There was no shortage of labor, however. Hottentots and imported East Indian slaves were easy to come by and inexpensive to maintain. Gradually, the Boer farmer became lord of his whole horizon and far beyond.

The Boers’ glorious freedom ended in 1814, when the Dutch ceded the Cape Colony to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. The British brought in property laws, courts, and worst of all, government. Shocked at the treatment of the natives, London ordered all slaves freed, proclaimed Coloreds, Hottentots, and even Bushmen equal to the whites.

New Enemy. Rather than suffer the indignities of equality, thousands of Boers packed their belongings into ox wagons and trekked out of the Cape Colony toward the unknown lands beyond the Drakensberg Mountains. They called themselves voortrekkers, and their journey was long and perilous. To cross the mountain passes, they often had to dismantle the wagons and carry them piece by piece. And in escaping from the British, they ran into a new enemy: the Bantu.

Unlike the Hottentots and Bushmen, the Bantu were a powerful, well-organized society, experienced in the art of warfare. But the whites broke the back of their resistance at the battle of Blood River, and went on to establish their farms in the high veld.

The British were not far behind. Excited by the discovery of diamonds and gold, British prospectors flocked into the new Boer states. Then came Cecil Rhodes and British capital. And, in 1877, the British government revived an old claim to sovereignty over all former residents of the Cape Colony, laid formal claim to the Transvaal. The eventual result was the Boer War, which lasted for three bloody years and put all of South Africa under the Union Jack.

Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was in a very real sense a child of the conflict. He was born at the height of the fighting, in a Dutch village near Amsterdam. His grocer father was a member of a committee to help Boer refugees, and so incensed did he become at their tales of British bestiality that in 1903, the year after the war ended, he moved his family to Cape Town and became a missionary in the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1912, the Verwoerds were assigned to Bulawayo, a new British town in Southern Rhodesia, and young Henk was enrolled in a British boys’ school. It was his first contact with the rooineks (red necks, an Afrikaner term of derision for the British who burned easily in the hot South African sun), and he hated them.

Henk was a brilliant student, and fired with the zeal of mission: the salvation of South Africa for its rightful owners, the Boers. Turning down a fat scholarship in Britain, he entered Stellenbosch University, the fountainhead of Afrikanerdom, and became South Africa’s first Ph.D. in mass psychology. In 1927, he married Elizabeth Schoombee, a petite fellow student at Stellenbosch. In many ways, Betsie Verwoerd is as remarkable as her husband. Holder of an M.A. in education, she has borne him five boys and two girls—and brags that no black ever bathed them or put them to bed.

For a while, Verwoerd was content to stay on at the university, first as a lecturer in applied psychology, then as chairman of the new department of sociology. But gradually he began applying his trade in the politics of the Nationalist Party. In 1933, when Nationalist Prime Minister Barry Hertzog made a pact with the South African Party’s pliable Jan Christian Smuts—whom Verwoerd considered a tool of the British—he was so disgusted that he joined Afrikanerdom’s ultranationalist secret society, the Broederbond (brotherhood). With a young Transvaal lawyer named Johannes Strijdom, he founded Die Transvaler, an Afrikaans-language newspaper, to put across their message. Verwoerd resigned from Stellenbosch to become the editor.

Cheers for Hitler. With Verwoerd at the helm, Die Transvaler was less of a newspaper than a political broadsheet. Violently racist, it demanded laws to protect the unskilled and often illiterate Afrikaner laborers against the “indignity” of working alongside blacks, hammered home the theme that Strijdom was the only man who could save South Africa from the swart gevaar (black peril). So anti-British was the paper that it cheered Hitler and protested South Africa’s participation in World War II. The only mention it made of the visit of King George VI in 1947 was a note warning its readers to avoid certain Johannesburg streets, which would be jammed with traffic because “some foreign visitors” were in town.

Working together, with Strijdom as the leader and Verwoerd the brain and propagandist, the two men slowly rebuilt the Nationalist Party in their own image. In 1948, the Nationalists surged back into power, and Verwoerd became Minister of Native Affairs. It was just the place for him, and he used it to transform South Africa.

Chain of Laws. There were plenty of white-supremacy laws already on the books when the Nationalists took office. Africans had long been denied the right to vote, compete for white jobs, live in white residential areas or buy property from whites. They could still marry whites, but extramarital intercourse between the races “was a criminal offense. But, discriminatory as they were, the laws that Verwoerd and his breeders inherited were nothing compared with the dozens of sweeping new laws they have passed since 1948.

A basic first step was the Population Registration Act, which officially classified every South African by race so that the regime would know whom to discriminate against. In every town where there were dark whites and light Coloreds, government boards met for years trying vainly to categorize them all, in some families decided that one brother was white and the others Colored. (“We may make a few mistakes,” admitted one arbiter of the races.)

Even before registration was completed, the regime started building a chain of race laws with resounding names. There were, for example, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the Immorality Amendment Act, the Separate Representation of Voters Act, the Bantu Authorities Act, the Group Areas Acts, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, the Native Labor Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the Church Clause, the Twelve-Day Detention Clause, the 90-Day Detention Clause, and the 180-Day Detention Clause.

No. 1 & No. 2. Apartheid (pronounced apart-ate) is an Afrikaans word meaning separation. It is a political dogma based on the fear—not entirely unjustified—that South Africa’s 12 million blacks will overwhelm its 3.4 million whites, and it is enforced only through massive and brutal police powers. But to Verwoerd, it is not simply a tool to keep the black man in his place. He sees it as a creative policy intended to allow the Bantu to develop as a true African instead of becoming an imitation white man. “Separation does not envision oppression,” he proclaims.

Keystone of the whole structure is partition of South Africa into white and black states. In Verwoerd’s grand scheme, the African tribal reserves will be turned into eight separate “Bantustans,” which will eventually be granted full independence as nations. “In the homelands the Bantu is No. 1 and the white man No. 2,” explains Bantu Development Minister Michiel Botha. “In the white area the white man is No. 1 and the Bantu is No. 2.”

Trouble is, the reserves are nothing more than a patchwork of 260 vaguely associated tribal areas, most of them tiny and widely separated from each other. They are backward and primitive, with few natural resources, and far from the centers of industry. And together they contain less than 14% of South Africa’s total land. The remaining 86% is for white occupation only, and the millions of Africans now living there are officially classified as “temporary sojourners”—even though many of them are third-generation city dwellers who have never set eyes on their “homelands.”

Both Worlds. Verwoerd accepts the responsibility for helping the Bantustans get on their feet. He has already spent millions of dollars to develop their agriculture and improve their roads. He is also encouraging white industrialists to build factories on their borders. That way, he explains, African workers can work for the whites by day, return to their homelands at night, and have the best of both possible worlds.

His border-industries scheme was doomed before it started. Even though the Bantustans are an obvious source of cheap labor, they are so remote from both market and raw materials that most white capitalists want nothing to do with them. In the 18 years since he first propounded the scheme, only 94 small factories employing 20,000 Africans have been erected on the borders.

So far, the only homeland that has been turned into an official Bantustan is the Transkei, a region of 16,500 square miles and 1.5 million Xhosa tribesmen in the state of Natal. With an elected Parliament of 45 members and Para mount Chief Kaiser Matanzima as Chief, the Transkei was granted semi-autonomy last year, and Verwoerd talks with apparent sincerity of eventual, full independence.

Today the Transkei is anything but independent. The South African government furnishes most of its civil servants and most of its budget. It is virtually without industry, its soil is eroded and impoverished, its roads little more than tracks for the oxcarts that travel them. Its women wear blankets redder than the dusty earth, its old men sit on the ground in front of their huts smoking long-stemmed pipes. And its young men leave as soon as they can to seek work in the white cities.

Passbook Joy. However nobly its theories are portrayed, apartheid is nothing less than mass intimidation. It is, says Novelist Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country), “the finest blend of cruelty and idealism ever devised by man.”

The intimidation reaches everywhere. African political parties are banned, their leaders in prison or isolation. The regime can hold anyone for 180 days without charge, indefinitely prolong the sentence of any political prisoner. It can also order anyone too critical of its policies confined to his home for years, forbid newspapers to quote him on any subject. Backing up the laws is a tough, efficient police force, plus a military and paramilitary organization specifically trained to put down insurrection. Top cop is Justice Minister Johannes Balthazar Vorster, 50, a devout Nationalist whose background includes two years in a South African internment camp for pro-Nazi activities.

To a non-European, happiness is the rubber-stamp marks in his passbook. He needs one stamp to hold his job, another to maintain “temporary residence” in his African township, still others to allow his wife and children to live with him. If he loses his job, he must apply to the police for a stamped permit to seek work. If he wants to visit relatives in another city, he needs a stamp before he can get on the train. The government can cancel any of his stamps at any time for any reason, move him far away from his home, job and family. Above all, he must carry his passbook at all times, since the penalty for being caught without it is usually jail.

Thanks mostly to the pass laws, South Africa has one of the highest prison populations in the world: one out of every 236 South Africans is behind bars. Every day more than 1,000 Africans are herded through the Bantu Affairs Courts, where it usually takes less than a minute to be tried, found guilty and sentenced.

The effect of the vast complex of apartheid laws is often ridiculous. The Japanese, who trade heavily with South Africa, are officially classified as “whites”; East Indians, who are descended from Caucasian stock, are ‘”Asians.” A Greek immigrant from Cyprus was nearly refused entrance to South Africa recently because he had acquired a deep suntan on the ship. Since white athletes are forbidden to compete against nonwhites, South Africa has had to cancel its longstanding rugby rivalry with New Zealand—which allows Maoris to play on its team.

New Bills. In its inherent madness, apartheid breeds more apartheid. Recent government edicts have ordered professional associations to expel African doctors and lawyers and have imposed segregation on charitable institutions. Before the current session of Parliament is a bill to further restrict the voting rights of the Cape Coloreds by allowing the government to select the candidates for their four white representatives in Parliament.

Despite the Bantustans, the pass laws and the massive police organization, Africans are still flooding into the cities looking for work. The African townships surrounding Johannesburg now have a population of 650,000 (v. the city’s 450,000 whites). And, for all the restrictions, the regime does not seriously try to stop the flood. The whites cannot get along without them.

The reason is economic. South Africa is in the middle of a massive boom. Attracted by cheap labor, a gold-backed currency and high profits, investors from all over the world have plowed money into the country, and the new industries that they have started have sent production, consumption—and the demand for labor—soaring.

Such are the proportions of prosperity that there are not nearly enough white South Africans to keep the factories going. The government advertises for white immigrants in newspapers throughout Europe, attracts more than 3,000 a month. Its propaganda organs beat the drums for “more white babies.” Last month a Cape Town scientist declared that, with proper training, baboons could replace Africans in menial tasks—a suggestion that led the Rand Daily Mail to quip that Verwoerd would soon offer them their own Baboonstan. But so hungry is the nation for manpower that employers everywhere are forced to give non-whites ever more and ever better jobs.

Shortage of Skills. Africans now wait on white customers in Johannesburg department stores, serve as typists, cashiers and bookkeepers for commercial firms, work beside whites at the lathes in auto plants and steel mills. The nation’s gold mines are negotiating with the white miners’ union for permission to put blacks into 2,000 skilled jobs that are now vacant. Africans have already taken over more than 10,000 traditionally white jobs on the government railroads, and are rapidly replacing whites behind the wheels of heavy trucks.

Verwoerd often boasts that the blacks of South Africa are better off than anywhere else on the continent. Economically he is right. What with decent paychecks (minimum daily wage for an unskilled laborer is $2.80) and easy credit, many an urban African can afford to buy imbuia wood furniture for his dining room, neat school uniforms for his children, and in some cases even a car for himself. Every year countless thousands of blacks from nearby countries flood into the republic looking for work—and the bright lights of the city life.

Verwoerd’s regime has spent millions of dollars moving Africans out of Johannesburg’s squalid shantytown “locations” and into new government housing in townships farther from the city. It has also built hundreds of schools, can point to the fact that the African literacy rate has nearly doubled in the past decade. But, points out a Johannesburg professor, “relative to its resources, South Africa does less for the African than any other country.”

Murder in the Heart. On the surface, many Africans seem to be happy enough about apartheid. “We know what we have is ours, even if it is the gift of the white boss,” says Ephraim Tchabalata, who has grown rich on a chain of dry-cleaning establishments and filling stations. The streets of the cities echo with the laughter of Africans, and the townships rock to the Beatle beat of guitars, strummed by young men wearing the cowboy hats that have become the latest rage. But all too often the smiles hide resentment. Says one African: “If I walk in the streets of Johannesburg and a white man kicks me, I will grin and say, ‘Baas, you would have made a great soccer player.’ But there is murder in my heart. I wear different masks for different white people all the time.”

Not all the white people are happy with Verwoerd’s state of affairs. There is a vocal minority of racists even more extremist than he is, who accuse him of doing too much for the “bloody kaffirs.” His regime is widely criticized, moreover, for its refusal to allow television in South Africa—a restriction in tended both to keep out foreign “liberalist” programs (such as I Spy) and to protect the Afrikaans language against the incursions of English (there are no packaged shows in Afrikaans). A recent opinion poll showed that two-thirds of all white South Africans want TV, but Minister of Posts and Telegraphs Albert Hertzog, one of the most powerful men in the Nationalist Party, refuses to budge. “No, not, and never,” he says, adding that TV is “the greatest destroyer of family life in the Western world.”

Many whites, of course, are opposed to apartheid; in 1960 Verwoerd survived an assassination attempt by an anti-apartheid white farmer who shot him in the ear and jowl at a Johannesburg cattle show. But the opposition is generally listless. “If you think about it, the immorality of it grabs you by the throat, and you want to run, to get it out of your system,” says a white not long out of Europe. “But then it’s a new day, and the hibiscus blazes on your stoop, the housemaid is singing a township song as she hangs out the clothes, and your children are tanner than ever and growing like trees. The anguish of South Africa seems a long way away.”

Doughty Helen. Verwoerd has never been stronger, in fact. Swallowing his old hatred of British South Africans, he has ventured into such English-speaking bastions as Durban to woo support for his policies, and his theme that all whites must unite behind him or be dispossessed by the Bantu usually gets a standing ovation and cries of “Hear, hear!” In Parliament, the once powerful United Party has been reduced to 39 seats. As an opposition party, Verwoerd once described it as “nothingness—both topless and bottomless.” He is not far off. Its leader, Sir De Villiers Graaff, offers vague motions against the methods of apartheid, but is a firm believer in racial segregation. Police have all but destroyed Novelist Paton’s once active Liberal Party by arresting or confining its leaders.

The only vocal opposition comes from Helen Suzman, the pert, doughty Johannesburg housewife who is the Progressive Party’s only member in Parliament. Apartheid is still attacked in the English-language press, which has somehow managed to maintain a tradition of obstinate opposition to the racist pattern, but the attacks are losing their sting. Their readers, impressed by Verwoerd’s successful pacification of the country since the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, no longer want to read about the injustices of his methods.

Black Africa’s Image. Basic to Verwoerd’s policies is the argument that black Africans cannot govern themselves, much less the whites. It is an argument that most white South Africans are more than ready to believe. Every time there is a crisis in the Congo or bloodshed in Nigeria, the whites nod knowingly and tell each other that “you can’t expect anything else from the bloody kaffirs.” Kwame Nkrumah’s tyrannical rule over Ghana was hailed as proof that Africans were still too uncivilized to run their own affairs, but when he was overthrown, the military coup was cited as another example of political immaturity.

There has indeed been plenty of instability in the black African nations since they were granted independence. The Congo has been in perpetual chaos, the Sudan has been unable to cope with the rebellion of its anti-Moslem south against its Moslem north. Three East African nations have had to put down military uprisings, and the governments of eight countries have fallen before military coups. In addition, only a handful of Africa’s new countries have maintained any semblance of the multiparty democracy that they inherited from their departing European colonists.

And yet if black Africa has not proved the model of democracy that its well-wishers had hoped, it has certainly done better than anyone had a right to expect. Since 1957, when the great surge toward independence got under way, there have been fewer coups in Africa than in Latin America.

In most cases, the reasons for African instability lie less with the inability of the blacks to govern themselves than with the conditions under which they have been forced to govern. The nations that they took over were artificial, their boundaries carved out arbitrarily in the days when the European powers were grabbing colonies as fast as they could, paying no attention to the hundreds of tribal lines that make up the true political map of Africa.

No less a barrier to stable government is the economic impoverishment of most African nations. With economies still based on agriculture, they have been unable to meet the wild expectations of their peoples that independence would automatically bring prosperity.

There are several notable examples of good government. In the Ivory Coast, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny—who before independence served as French Minister of Overseas Territories —is building a booming economy that has raised the living standards of his people enormously. Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere has managed to absorb Communist-minded Zanzibar without falling prey to the Reds, last year promoted a unique experiment in one-party elections: his Tanzania Africa National Union put up two candidates for each post, with the result that several of his own Cabinet ministers were defeated. Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta has overridden the intense tribal rival ries of the Luo and his own Kikuyu and made a national fetish out of harambee (togetherness), winning the good will of most white settlers in the bargain. Even the disappointments have not been total. The personal tyranny of Ghana’s Nkrumah has been succeeded by a military regime that is miraculously popular despite the fact that its firm austerity measures have caused some unemployment. Nigeria has suffered two military coups in seven months, and is so close to explosion that some 300,000 Nigerians who have been living outside their tribal areas are pulling up stakes and heading for home. Yet through it all, Nigeria’s able civil service has kept the government running, and the nation’s expanding production lines have hardly missed a beat.

There are men in Hendrik Verwoerd’s government who lack the statesmanship of Houphouet-Boigny, Nyerere, or Kenyatta. But had these African leaders grown up in South Africa, their abilities would never have been known. They would have been bank clerks, messengers—or in jail.

For all his professed shock at what he calls “the disastrous results elsewhere in Africa,” Verwoerd carefully avoids unnecessary irritation at the black governments to the north. He shrewdly plays down his support of the white rebel regime of Rhodesia’s Ian Smith, plays up his desire to soften the hostility of black Africa. “We leave the door of friendship open to all other African states,” he said last month, “in the hope that more and more of them will in the course of time make use of it.”

Doubts of Others. It is an offer that many African leaders cannot ignore. Although they condemn apartheid, they find that they can buy many goods more cheaply from South Africa than from any place else in the world; during the first four months of this year, South African exports to Africa totaled $78 million, up 30% from the year before.

Verwoerd sends technical assistance to the British protectorates of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland, and when they gain their independence, all three territories will be dependent on the South African economy for survival. Eventually he hopes to create a southern African Common Market, composed of the protectorates, Rhodesia, Portuguese Mozambique and Angola, and perhaps even black-ruled Malawi, where Prime Minister H. Kamuzu Banda has little choice but to be nice to the white lands that surround him. Dominating such a market, of course, would be South Africa.

Verwoerd is one of the ablest white leaders that Africa has ever produced. He has a photographic memory, an analytical mind and an endless capacity for work. He is a brilliant diplomat and an inventive politician. He is the inspired defender of the Afrikaner faith, the unquestioned captain of the Afrikaner laager. But his fortress is vulnerable and his enemy within. So taut are the nerves of South Africa’s blacks that twice in recent months crashes of African commuter trains have set the passengers off in bloody rioting against their white engineers. Outside his confident country, there are those who fear that the slick suppression he has made a science will one day explode in a wrathful orgy, endangering the peace of lands beyond his own frontiers.

Verwoerd does not think so. “I do not have the nagging doubt of ever wondering whether, perhaps, I am wrong,” he proclaims.