South Africa: Dispensing with Judges

In 1960 chocolate-skinned Robert Sobukwe, 38, head of the black nationalist Pan-African Congress, was sentenced to three years in jail for "incitement to riot." As his release date drew near last week, Sobukwe, a slim onetime university lecturer, was hustled from the maximum-security prison in Pretoria to a bleak detention camp on Robben Island in Table Bay, six miles from Cape Town. There he learned, just the day before he was to receive freedom, that South Africa's Parliament had rammed through a new security act empowering Justice Minister Johannes Vorster to keep political prisoners in custody indefinitely, even after their sentences have expired. Shrugged Sobukwe: "If you believe in freedom, you must suffer for it."

Endless Repetition. The new measure, which was demanded by Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd to meet a "crisis of survival," makes last year's Sabotage Act seem tame by comparison, has already been dubbed the "No Trial" bill. It promises the death penalty for citizens who receive training in subversion abroad or urge intervention by force in South Africa. Postal authorities can open, read and hold suspicious mail. Any political suspect, without trial, can be placed in 90-day detention, which may then be endlessly repeated. Commented Justice Minister Vorster: "This is as much power as I need for existing circumstances. If necessary, I will take even stronger steps."

Only one member of the all-white Parliament voted against the bill. Amid government jeers, the lone Progressive Party representative, brunette Helen Suzman, warned that black nationalism as well as white nationalism feeds "on this type of kragdadigheid [toughness]." Although Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd and Vorster describe the menace facing South Africa as "Communism," the bill is clearly aimed at two African nationalist groups calling themselves Poqo and Spear of the Nation. Poqo (pronounced Paw-kaw and meaning "for ourselves alone" in the Xhosa tongue) patterns itself after the dreaded Mau Mau, which terrorized Kenya in the 1950s. It first rose to prominence last November, when some of its members rioted in the wine-growing Cape community of Paarl, hacking two whites to death with pangas. Later, opposing the total apartheid scheme to move most of South Africa's 11 million blacks into nine tribal reserves, Poqo butchered five whites in the Transkei.

Into the Sea. According to Black Nationalist Potlako Leballo, who fled to the British-ruled enclave of Basutoland, Poqo is a terrorist offshoot of Sobukwe's militant Pan-African Congress and is determined to "murder the whites or chase them into the sea." As it turned out, Leballo's big mouth did Poqo more harm than good. Embarrassed British officials ordered his arrest, and he barely escaped into Basutoland's rugged mountains, leaving behind him a list of 10,000 black rebels in South Africa. Thanks either to coincidence or to Basutoland's connivance, South African police rounded up 2,000 rebels, and Poqo was on the run.