SOUTH AFRICA: Death the Leveler

Nature, in whose eyes all men seem equal, last week tore down—at least for a little while—some of South Africa's walls of prejudice.

All day long, the clouds had billowed above Johannesburg; in the late afternoon lightning split a sky that was the color of an overripe plum, and the city's jagged skyline vanished behind a curtain of steel-bright rain. Eighteen miles away, a tornado struck the mile-square shantytown of Albertynsville, where 5,000 Negroes and half-castes lived in mud huts. For an instant, the growling air was filled with flying tin roofs;...