SOUTH AFRICA: The Sphinx Warns

South Africa's Finance Minister Nicolaas Christiaan Havenga, 67, is known as the Old Sphinx of Premier Daniel Malan's cabinet. While Nationalist colleagues have cried the Black Peril and built up racial tension, reticent Havenga has secluded himself in his Pretoria office or at his Free State horse farm. There he has brooded over the country's shortage of dollar exchange. He visited the U.S. last year, tried in vain to drum up a loan, discovered that his government's oppression of its black majority was giving South Africa a bad name abroad.

Dour Daniel Malan growled that the outside world's hostile opinion was "interference mania." Last week Old Sphinx Havenga took issue with the Premier. "With world opinion against us," he warned, "it is not wise or practical at the present stage to take away any of the rights which have been given to non-Europeans." As leader of the Afrikaner Party, a small, less stridently chauvinistic ally of Malan's Nationalists, Havenga holds the balance of power in the government. He used it to force a slowdown in the racial program. Among other things, Malan had planned to deprive 800,000 Cape Coloreds (mixed bloods) of constitutional voting and representation rights. Faced with Havenga's objection, Malan reluctantly dropped the project for 1950.

It was the first check on the Nationalists' white supremacy drive since they took office in 1948. Said the Johannesburg Star: "Havenga appears to be the only member of the government who is prepared to think in terms other than deprivation or restriction of [non-European] rights."