SOUTH AFRICA: True Son

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It had been a commonplace incident in the year 1893. A young Hindu lawyer, riding the train from Durban to Pretoria, would insist on sitting in a first-class compartment. Provincial constables would restore the situation to normal by ejecting 24-year-old Mohandas K. Gandhi at the next stop, a dusty station near the remote Natal-Transvaal frontier.

Last week, 55 years later, provincial authorities at the same frontier faced a similar problem. For the third time in as many weeks, small groups of Indians had stepped across the border in deliberate violation of colonial "ghetto" laws. Sixty people were arrested; but police pointedly failed to arrest the leader. South African authorities had no desire to martyrize anybody with his name.

The leader was pudgy, bespectacled Manilal Gandhi, 53-year-old son of the enshrined Mahatma. A veteran of repeated campaigns of passive resistance, Manilal Gandhi is editor of Durban's weekly newspaper Indian Opinion, founded by his father in 1903.

Back in India, where the news from South Africa was always read with attention, they were calling Manilal the true son of his father.