SOUTH AFRICA: Roundup

Like the vague charge of "vagrancy" in the hands of a determined U.S. cop, South Africa's Suppression of Communism Act provides Premier Johannes Strydom with a handy gimmick for arresting anybody he deems undesirable. The difference is that a hoodlum pulled in by a U.S. cop can usually get free in the morning.

One day last week, using the Suppression of Communism Act as their excuse, the special security police charged with imposing Strydom's will on his country swooped down on scores of homes throughout the cities of South Africa and arrested 140 people: clergymen, trade unionists, doctors, lawyers and private citizens. The one "crime" they had in common was bitter opposition to the apartheid racist policies of the Strydom regime.

The secretary of the Federation of South African Women was dragged away from the bedside of her sick child. A British-born Methodist minister was arrested in his rectory at 4 a.m. Professor Zachariah Matthews, onetime Henry W. Luce Professor of World Christianity at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, was another of those rounded up, packed into police vans and jailed in Johannesburg in the dark of the night.

What was the precise charge levied against them? "As far as I can see," said a judge denying bail, "it is one that involves many ramifications ... It is not unreasonable to accept the probability that it is both difficult and inadvisable for the Attorney General to take the court more fully into his confidence."