Planned Disobedience

In June it began. All over the Union of South Africa, Negroes and Indians, some boldly but most of them timidly, were defying Jim Crow, boarding "white" buses, stepping up to counters reserved for whites in the post office, refusing to show their passes when accosted by the cops. As a nonviolent civil disobedience campaign, it owed its inspiration to Gandhi --but, often, in the background, it owed its guidance to Marx. In the minds of 2,500,000 whites, it stirred fears of what might happen if all of South Africa's usually docile 10 million blacks, half-whites and browns came awake.

In the genteel Cape Province town of Grahamstown, 58 Negroes were jailed for walking in the streets after curfew (11 p.m.). In Pretoria, 20 singing Negroes and one Indian were arrested for marching into the "white" section of the railway station. Eight hundred nonwhites were in jail in East London; 800 more in Port Elizabeth. The nonwhites hoped their defiance would moderate Prime Minister Daniel Malan's "unjust laws" (racial segregation) by i) filling the jails to overflowing, 2) catching the eye of the U.N. The African National Congress and the South African Indian Congress recruited 10,000 "volunteers" ready to go to jail when called. They were quite matter-of-fact about it. "I told my boss that I'm scheduled for arrest next week," explained one Negro volunteer. "My cousin will hold my job for me, and when I leave prison, he'll go in."

One morning last week a squad of South African detectives burst into the clinic in the tiny, tin-roofed Orange Free State village of Thaba N'chu and arrested 60-year-old Dr. James S. Moroka, the respected president of the anti-Malan African National Congress. He asked permission to attend his last patient and they agreed. Then Moroka, a devout Christian and moderate who believes that "white and black need each other," was led off to jail, charged with "promoting the objects of Communism," and released on $280 bail. He appealed to black South Africans to "stay calm and behave with dignity."

By arresting Moroka and 16 lesser leaders, some of them Communist-liners, Malan's Nationalists plainly hoped to break the back of the disobedience movement. They were disappointed. The day after Moroka's arrest, 96 more smiling Negroes got themselves jailed in Port Elizabeth, another 20 in nearby Uitenhage. So many nonwhites were volunteering as prisoners that some jails refused to take any more.

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