SOUTH AFRICA: Reaping the Whirlwind

South Africa was divided between festival and fear. The festival, opened last week by Prime Minister Daniel Malan's government, celebrated the 300th anniversary of the landing at Cape Town from the Dutch ship Goede Hoop of South Africa's first white settlers. They entered a vast, fertile country, empty except for a handful of aborigines. But as their ox-wagons rolled north, they collided with the southward-marching legions of the black Bantu tribes. The blacks now outnumber the whites 8,000,000 to 2,500,000. From that fact grows South Africa's fear.

At festival time Prime Minister Malan's formula for white supremacy—apartheid (racial segregation)—ran afoul of South Africa's highest court. His administration tottered, and considered dangerous alternatives. The restless and politically awakening Negroes scheduled nationwide demonstrations in protests against his policy. The possibility of civil war hovered over South Africa, and a desperate decision faced Daniel François Malan, who had sown the whirlwind.

The Chosen Race. A stodgy Boer with a pale, square face and thick, white hands, Daniel Malan is the self-appointed high priest of the Afrikaners and of apartheid. He was born 78 years ago on a Cape Province farm called Allesverloren ("Everything Is Lost"), and attended the same Sunday school as his lifelong public enemy: Jan Christian Smuts, South Africa's greatest Prime Minister. Smuts, who fought the British in the Boer War, lived to become their best South African friend; Malan, who never heard a shot fired, is a violent Anglophobe.

Trained as a Reformed Church predikant (he got his D.D. in Holland), Pastor Malan has dedicated his life to the proposition that men are created unequal. From the Calvinist doctrine of "election," he drew two startling, if not logical, conclusions: 1) that the Boers are God's chosen race in South Africa, and 2) that the "inferiority" of all other races, especially the Negro, is divinely ordained and therefore unalterable. As editor (of Cape Town's Afrikaans Die Burger), Malan taught Afrikaners that South Africa belonged exclusively to them, that the Negro should know his place as a permanent "hewer of wood and drawer of water." In 1919 he was elected to Parliament as M.P. for the town of Calvinia. His first important achievement: inserting a new phrase in South Africa's Constitution: "The people of the Union acknowledge the sovereignty and guidance of Almighty God."

Road to Fascism. Guided, he said, by God, Malan founded his own Nationalist Afrikaner Party in 1933. Its platform: South Africa for the Afrikaners. During World War II the pastor told his supporters: "If Germany wins, then we are in this . . . fortunate position—that Germany's war aims [i.e., the destruction of the British Empire] and our desire to get a Republic in South Africa are in agreement." Germany lost the war, but in 1948 Pastor Malan won a narrow victory in South Africa's elections. His party warned South Africans that if Smuts won, little white girls would be forced to marry "coons."