South Africa: The Thorn Tree

Under the harsh illogic of apartheid, South Africa's 11 million blacks are restricted chiefly to unskilled labor, but at least some of them have been permitted to seek out their own humble jobs. Last week Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd's regime prepared to erase even that right. Gaveled through Parliament was an amendment to the Bantu Laws designed to give the government total control over the employment, place of residence and movements of every African worker.

Aliens at Home. Under the bill, natives stand to be converted into virtual aliens outside their tribal reservations and shuttled between "white areas" like a mobile labor pool. An expanded network of government labor bureaus and "aid centers" is to decide where all 7,000,000 African laborers will work, and at what tasks. If an African doesn't take a job offered him, he will be immediately "endorsed out"—the term under which the regime banishes undesirable natives back to their villages.

In practice, many blacks will be kept on in their present chores, but for those who are fired or wish to change jobs, the future will be difficult. For example, up to now any native born in a city has enjoyed permanent legal residence there and could not normally be "endorsed out." The new bill abolishes that right, and a man who has spent his life as a clerk in a Cape Town chemist's shop could end up swinging a pick in a Transvaal gold mine. Moreover, African wives and children may follow their breadwinner only if the government finds it expedient, and many native men will be forced to live alone.

Revolution Unlikely. Plucky Helen Suzman, sole parliamentary voice of South Africa's small, anti-apartheid Progressive Party, accurately called it "slave labor." Said she: "The government imagines the African as a disembodied pair of black hands to work for the whites."

Since Mrs. Suzman and many other Verwoerd opponents are Jews, Nationalist backbenchers shifted from white supremacy to antiSemitism, shouting: "Go to Israel!" One Nationalist M.P. was more poetic. He told Mrs. Suzman, "You are a finch chirping on a thorn tree."

The new law was too much even for the sizable United Party, which basically backs apartheid but differs with the government on how it should be carried out. United Party Leader Sir de Villiers Graaff warned that the bill would alienate middle-class Africans living in the cities, who form an important buffer against the angry black underground. Verwoerd's Nationalists were unimpressed. Revolution, they figure, is unlikely in a country that spends 27% of its budget on security.