Sore Spot

South Africa last week came a little closer to unity in support of Britain at war -- just close enough to bring on serious rioting with those of her citizens who do not support Britain at war. To Canada and Australia the war was serious business from the first, but to many dour Afrikaans-speaking Boers of the Rand and the Transvaal in the Union of South Africa it was just another cause for dissatisfaction with the British. Plenty of backveld farmers and Kimberley merchants are unreconstructed. Their long memories reach back to the Great Trek of 1835-38 when stubborn Dutch farmers moved into the wilderness to get away from the British, to the Boer War in 1899 which kept them sullen subjects of the British Crown.

The greatest Boer leaders have been two of that war's generals, now white-bearded ancients, Jan Christiaan Smuts and James Barry Munnik Hertzog. For four decades these two have stood as figureheads for the Union's divergent political ideals: Smuts for a dominion umbilically tied to Britain, Hertzog for "South Africa First." Neither wanted independence, and when in 1933 a vocal minority was yelping for a republic the generals got together. Prime Minister Hertzog joined his Nationalists with Smuts's South Africa Party, made Smuts his Deputy Prime Minister.

The centrifugal force of World War II split them sharply apart. In September 1939 Hertzog's proposal of neutrality was defeated; Smuts became Prime Minister and the South African Parliament declared war on Germany, 80-67. General Hertzog became leader of the Reunited Nationalist Party.

Always at heart a moderate, General Hertzog found himself in uneasy company. The extreme nationalists had gone in for religious racism. They had celebrated the centenary of the Great Trek hysterically for a whole year, touring the backveld from town to town in ox wagons. Anyone who didn't grow a voortreker (pioneer) beard was an "outlander" or a traitor. A synagogue was dynamited, and George VI's message to the final jamboree was read in Afrikaans. A hangover from this emotional bender was the growth of the Ossewa Brandwag (Ox-Wagon Fireguard), an Afrikaans cultural organization specializing in swastika armbands, military training, bombings of buildings and rail ways, beating up British soldiers. Leading "Peace Parades" last spring, General Hertzog found himself a benign and unwilling front man for local fascist extremists.

Last fall General Smuts got to work on the Brandwag, proved in a series of well-publicized trials that its leaders got both ideas and money from a Nazi consul in Portuguese East Africa, only 400-odd miles from Johannesburg. Always a cagey fighter, Smuts did not crack down on the Brandwag rank & file, instead let them quit the organization while the quitting was good. He flew in a loaded bomber to the war zone in the Sudan just to show his people how near it was. This, on top of the smothering of Holland, suggested to Afrikanders that World War II was their war too.

Moving daily further from the fire brands of the Reunited Nationalists, General Hertzog first declared openly against Germany, then in November left the party flat, taking many supporters, mostly oldsters, with him. Last week those supporters formed the Afrikaner Party, to follow Hertzog's anti-German foreign policy.

Before the ink was dry on this announcement, hell began to pop. In Johannesburg, British soldiers and bearded Brandwag men tangled in the street after a meeting. Police stopped the fighting, but next evening soldiers on leave were loaded for Boer. They crowded the town, and the sight of a bearded man in a streetcar was enough to touch off a riot. After attacking the car they went for the Brandwag office. Police kept them outside, but they did their best to wreck it with brickbats. To clear rioters from the streets the Government shipped police reinforcements into the city, called out troops and a volunteer brigade. On Sunday morning Johannesburg looked like any town after a riot, with broken windows, wrecked cars and 140 men (mostly soldiers) in the hospitals. But armored cars patrolling the streets served notice that this was no ordinary riot and that the Union of South Africa was still an aching tooth in the British lion's mouth.

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