Incident on the Veld

Out of Cape Town last week rattled a troop train bound for Sonderwater Camp, 1,100 miles away. It was packed tight with mulatto soldiers and most of them were full of high spirits soaked up in Cape Town's cheap Jim Crow bars.

Not many miles from Cape Town, their spirits spontaneously combusted. At wayside stations they smashed windows of other trains, broke open fruit trucks, shattered hotel windows, damaged shop fronts, plastered white civilians with whatever their hooch-hot hands could find to throw. Near the Touws River junction, where locomotives are changed, the switch had to be made in the open veld: the crew was afraid to take the train into the station. As a train from the Orange Free State passed by, the mulattoes smashed long rows of its carriage windows with bottles and fruit.

At the dusty Karroo town of Laingsburg, armed police were waiting for the hotheads. The soldiers piled off the train, pushed through the police, began to move in on the town. The police fired a volley over their heads, but they only laughed and went ahead. The next round killed one and wounded two.

The "Laingsburg incident" made inflammable hay for anti-war politicians, who hope to defeat Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts's pro-Allied Government in a forthcoming general election. In Parliament, British-hating, pro-Nazi Dr. Daniel Franc,ois Malan, who leads the opposition to Prime Minister Smuts, solemnly denounced the "Smuts policy" of teaching non-whites to use arms, charged the Prime Minister with allowing "Communist agitators" to stir up the colored population.

Field Marshal Smuts is Prime Minister of a country split into sharp oppositions: pro-war and antiwar, pro-British and anti-British, 8,000,000 underprivileged natives and 2,000,000 privileged whites. Well aware was Jan Smuts that his few fair-minded concessions to South Africa's colored majority could and would be used to make votes against his Government. Last week he gravely admitted: "As Commander in Chief I have been disgraced by some of my soldiers. This is a matter of first-class importance to the country. I will not allow such things to happen again."

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