South Africa: Forward with Verwoerd

SOUTH AFRICA Forward with Verwoerd

The names may change, but the issue in South African elections is always dismayingly the same—swart gevaar (black danger), wit baaskap (white bossdom), or just plain apartheid. Last week, when South Africa's 1.7 million white voters went to the polls, there was no new term for Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's racism, but both major parties were claiming to be the whitest of the white. So extremist have the nation's politics become, in fact, that Segregationist Verwoerd was even accused of being soft on blacks.

The charges would not stick, for during the past five years Verwoerd's police and a series of suppressive laws have successfully stamped out all organized black resistance. When the results were in, the Nationalists had swept a record-breaking 60% of the vote, won 126 of the 170 seats in Parliament. The once-powerful United Party, campaigning for outright support of Rhodesia's Ian Smith, took most of the rest.

Only hint that a few South African whites were at all disturbed by apartheid came in the narrow victory of the Progressive Party's perky Mrs. Helen Suzman, who in the past five years has been the only voice of dissent in the South African Parliament. Supported by all major English-language papers and by gold-and-diamond Magnate Harry Oppenheimer, Mrs. Suzman carried her wealthy Johannesburg district by a bare 711 votes.