SOUTH AFRICA: Reaping the Whirlwind

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In three years' rule, Prime Minister Malan has dragged South Africa far along the road to fascism. His cabinet, two-thirds of whose members belong to the secret Afrikaner Broederbond, launched an anti-Negro, anti-Jewish campaign. The Natives' Representative Council was summarily abolished. Appropriations for Bantu housing were slashed; native slums proliferated, breeding crime and misery. To cut down the number of opposition voters, Malan coolly disenfranchised the Natal and Transvaal Indians.

Manifest Absurdity. Last year he went too far. In a Jim Crow franchise bill passed by a parliamentary majority of ten, he erased the names of 50,000 Cape Colored (i.e., halfcaste) voters from the white voting lists and assigned their votes to four "white representatives."

The reaction was sharp and strong. Opposition Leader J. G. Strauss, now the leader of Smuts's old United Party, called it "a great act of betrayal." So did a group of enraged South African war veterans, who formed the anti-Malan "Torch Commando" to protect the Constitution. Their leader was a cousin of Malan's and an R.A.F. wing commander in the Battle of Britain: Adolph ("Sailor") Malan. In tampering with the franchise, said the Opposition, Prime Minister Malan had violated the "Entrenched Clauses" in South Africa's Constitution. Torch backed four colored voters who took the case to South Africa's Supreme Court.

The legal arguments were prolix, but the key question was clear: could Parliament by a simple majority override an Entrenched Clause of Britain's 1909 South Africa Act, which is the Union's basic constitutional law? Government lawyers said yes, otherwise the free Dominion of South Africa would still be fettered by Britain.

Last week five black-robed judges (three of them appointed by Prime Minister Malan) unanimously said no. Malan's action was "null and void." Said Chief Justice Albert van de Sandt Centlivres: "To say that the Union of South Africa is not a sovereign state simply because Parliament hasn't the power to amend the Constitution is to state a manifest absurdity . . . It would be surprising . . . to be told that the great and powerful country, the United States, is not sovereign and independent because its Congress cannot pass any law it pleases."

It was the first major setback to all-out apartheid. If Pastor Malan overruled the court, he might easily lose the support of the old-fashioned Boer farmers, who respect their judges. If he accepted the court's decision, his fanatical Nationalist lieutenants might toss him aside.

Malan, Scram! At week's end, looking bitter and tired, old Pastor Malan hearkened to the fanatics, announced in Parliament that he would end the court's "interference" with acts of the legislature. From all over the Union came angry protests; Torch supporters paraded through the streets of Cape Town and Johannesburg, demanding: "Malan, scram!" Ominous too were the stirrings in the great Bantu slums, where Nationalist police confiscated truckloads of "murderous weapons."