"Them or Us"

Sister Aidan, a 33-year-old Irish Dominican nun, and a physician set off in her tiny English car, to take baskets of food to her Negro patients in the rowdy South African city of East London. At the entrance to the segregated Negro "location" --a maze of tin-can shanties where every other baby dies at birth--she found herself in the midst of a bloody pitched battle between East London's white cops and a mob of tribesmen. The police had broken up an illegal Negro prayer meeting; the result was a race riot which blazed for seven hours. Unafraid, Sister Aidan (real name: Dr. Elsie Quinlan) drove through the police lines and greeted her Negro friends. Some of them tried to shield her, but a howling mob, chanting "Africa!" dragged her, unresisting, from her car, cut her throat, and burned her mutilated corpse.

Next day, the riot over and perhaps scores of Africans killed,* white and black reacted sharply--anger among the whites, distress among the black moderates. James Njongwe, the handsome Negro physician who runs the Cape Province chapter of the African National Congress, sat, head in hands, lamenting the murder of Sister Aidan, who had been his classmate at Witwatersrand University. "I'll never forgive Swart," he said. Swart's ban on Negro gatherings preceded the riot. "If we leaders had been allowed to address our people, there'd have been no rioting," said Njongwe. "The government should issue an ultimatum," said one of East London's whites. "Hand over the murderers or we'll bomb the location to bits."

Combustion. The atmosphere was the same in most of Cape Province's polyglot cities. In the diamond town of Kimberley (pop. 75,000), the Negro location sprawls along the railroad tracks; white engineers sometimes scare off the matchstick-limbed Negro children who climb up on to the coaches begging for bread, by letting off gusts of scalding steam from their locomotives. A mob of Negro hoodlums spewed out of their beer halls, burning and pillaging saloons and municipal offices. Police killed 13. Earlier, in Port Elizabeth, four whites were murdered simply because they were whites. South Africans have often denounced the U.S. press for exaggerating the South African crisis. But Cape Town's Cape Times reported last week: "We are facing something very near a spontaneous combustion of our native people."

Disobedience. Fear made the whites' reaction as volatile and unpredictably savage as the Negroes' wrath. "It's them or us," growled a Port Elizabeth cop. "A white skin now means death." Prime Minister Daniel Malan's Nationalist government sent army tanks and armored cars to patrol the highway between East London and Port Elizabeth; low-flying planes "exercised" over the "disaffected areas." In the cities, Boers and Britons alike queued up to buy guns; on the veld, Boer farmers organized rifle commandos, itched to "teach the Kaffirs a lesson they won't forget." "The time is coming," warned Labor Minister Ben Schoeman, "when our white women also must carry arms."

Malan's Nationalists blame the African National Congress (A.N.C.) for the Negro bloodshed. They liken congress leaders to Kenya's Mau Mau terrorists, and accuse them of Communism. Actually, though there are Communists in A.N.C., such leaders as James Njongwe and Dr. James S. Moroka, the devoutly Christian president of A.N.C., owe far more to Gandhi than they do to Marx. Their policy, such as it is, is to protest apartheid (racial segregation) laws by a peaceful "civil disobedience" campaign, which they hope will catch the eye of the U.N.* Since the campaign started last June, 26,000 "passive resisters," black, half-white and brown, have been jailed for defying Jim Crow laws. Desperately, James Njongwe pleaded for both sides to "get together round a table to find a peaceful solution." It is late for that, and the will seems to be lacking. Communist agitators now preach racial class war in the teeming black locations, and their influence is growing in direct proportion to the harshness of Malan's persecutions. Fortnight ago, Brian Bunting, a white Communist, got 80% of the votes in a Negro election in Western Cape Province.

Levitation. In his eagerness to put down the blacks, South Africa's Godfearing, intolerant Prime Minister Daniel Malan had pushed through a law making Parliament, and not the supreme court, the final arbiter of what is, or is not, constitutional. But in the five black-robed Boer judges of the supreme court, Malan last week met his match.

By unanimous decision, the court decided that "no legislative organ can perform an act of levitation and lift itself above its own powers." This, in effect, voided Prime Minister Malan's attempt to disenfranchise Cape Province's 48,000 half-caste voters by a simple majority in Parliament, and bluntly reaffirmed that the court is still tops.

Six months ago, the South African judges' bold rebuff to Malan's Jim Crow laws might have stopped him cold; now, with most of South Africa's 2,500,000 whites demanding more, not less apartheid, Malan is in position to go to the country for a new election and win the necessary two-thirds constitutional majority to do what he likes with anyone whose skin is not white.

*Officially, police announced 9 dead, 30 wounded, but the actual death roll was considerably higher. Visitors to the location reported several dozen fresh graves dug in the location cemetery. Government officials pressed the cops to soft-pedal reports of Negro casualties. "Think what [Indian Delegate] Madame Pandit would do with the native death toll at the U.N.," Justice Minister Charles Swart explained.

*U.S. Delegate Charles A. Sprague, onetime governor of Oregon, last week gave the U.S. position to the U.N. General Assembly: the question of racial discrimination in South Africa should be left to the "lively conscience" of South Africans.

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