SOUTH AFRICA: Exit the Boer Moses

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The most hated man in Africa stepped down from his pedestal last week. At 80, South Africa's Daniel Malan, the grim old Christian preacher who built the word apartheid (apartness) into the symbol of unchristian racial intolerance, summoned his Nationalist Cabinet and announced that he was quitting as Prime Minister. Malan made his decision not because he was sick or senile, but because his wife, Maria, had a serious heart ailment. The couple will retire to the university town of Stellenbosch, where Malan won his degree during the Boer War (1899-1902).

Thanks to Daniel Malan, the Boer War is still going on. By rallying his defeated people, quickening their hatred of the British, Malan kept alive the bitter memories that a fellow student at Stellenbosch, the great Jan Christian Smuts, spent a lifetime trying to erase. Malan, a trained predikant (preacher) in the Dutch Reformed Church, taught his Boers that they are a chosen people, "elected" by God to build in South Africa a "new Jerusalem." He did most of the building himself, as the crusading editor of the anti-Semitic Boer paper, Die Burger; as the founder and leader of the now all-powerful Nationalist Party. He came to be called "the Boer Moses."

In Malan's New Jerusalem, 8,000,000 Negroes mine the gold, herd the cattle, empty the garbage cans and dig the graves for 2,500,000 whites. Though the Negroes work, they may not vote; though they pay taxes, there are few schools for their children. They may live only in carefully, often brutally policed squalor. This is God's will, claimed Daniel Malan, as he quoted (out of context) from the Old Testament: "Let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water ..."

The Nationalists will choose between two principal candidates to succeed Malan: Finance Minister Nicolaas Havenga, 72, and long-necked Johannes Gerhardus Strydom, 61, a onetime ostrich farmer who runs the Nationalist Party machine and who is even more fanatically racialist than Daniel Malan. Last week retiring Dr. Malan gave his nod to Havenga, the more moderate of the two but nonetheless a man who could be trusted to hew to the harsh line laid out by Preacher Malan.