The Prime Minister's Secretary

"The natives are laughing at us," moaned a member of South Africa's lily-white Nationalist Party last week. Reason for his state of nerves: none other than Gideon Andrew Keyser, 39, private secretary to Johannes Gerhardus Strydom, Prime Minister of South Africa, had just been convicted of making a pass at a 16-year-old African girl.

To the flaming apostles of apartheid in the Nationalist Party, the Keyser case was terribly embarrassing. All concerned did their best to avoid the public eye. The case was shunted to a remote, dark room in Pretoria magistrate's court; the hearings were held in the late afternoon behind closed doors. But the record of the proceedings reached opposition newspapers, and they splashed the story for South Africans (white) and South Africans (nonwhite) to read.

The girl, whose name was withheld, told the court that she first met Keyser in a dairy where she had gone to buy milk. He nodded to her, the girl said, and asked where she lived. The next day they met again at the dairy and, said the girl, Keyser asked to visit her. The girl said that she refused that request and a second one later, but that on Jan. 29 she agreed. "He said he would come about 9 p.m. and would give me -L-I [$2.80]," the girl testified. The girl went to the police. When Keyser arrived on schedule, the watching police waited until his intention became unmistakable, then arrested him.

The 1957 Immorality Act forbids sexual relations between whites and nonwhites. In the dock, Keyser, owner of two dairies and a former tennis champion of Northern Transvaal, pleaded: "I beg to be released with a warning. I was private secretary to the Prime Minister and have a wife and two children. I was held in high esteem by the public, and I do not drink or smoke."

The court found him guilty. Its sentence (suspended pending appeal): four months' imprisonment, plus four strokes with a bamboo cane.

In Parliament, Strydom's Justice Minister Charles Swart declared that the opposition planned to use this "unfortunate instance of a public servant" against the Nationalists in the campaign for the April general elections. On hearing this, the Nationalists glowered at their opponents and burst into shouts of "Shame!"

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