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...